Is Lexington, MA Building Too Much Housing?

What happens when a historic suburb actually follows through on building more housing

Over the next few years, Lexington could add around 1,600 new apartments and condos.

For a town that built almost no housing like this for decades, that's a massive change.

And it happened very quickly after Lexington passed new zoning rules under the state's MBTA Communities law.

Now some residents are starting to wonder if the town moved too fast. People are asking questions about traffic, schools, neighborhood character, and whether these new buildings will actually make housing more affordable.

But what's happening in Lexington also shows something bigger.

Most people in Massachusetts say they support building more housing. The tension starts when that housing actually begins getting built in their town.

Lexington may be one of the first places where we're seeing what that looks like in real life.

I work with a lot of buyers moving to Greater Boston, and Lexington comes up in those conversations all the time. It's one of the most desirable suburbs in the region, which is exactly why this debate is so interesting.

In this guide I want to walk through what's actually happening in Lexington, why so much housing suddenly got approved, and why this one town might influence how other suburbs approach housing in the future.

Why Lexington Matters

To understand why this story matters, you first have to understand what Lexington actually is.

Lexington is one of the most desirable suburbs in the Boston area. It has strong public schools, easy access to Cambridge, and sits close to the Route 128 corridor where a lot of the region's tech and biotech jobs are concentrated. Last year, the median sale price for a single-family home here was $1.8 million.

It's also a town with a very strong sense of identity. Lexington is where the first battles of the Revolutionary War were fought. The old wooden tower on Belfry Hill, one of the tallest points in the historic center, rang its bells at the start of those battles in 1775. Historic preservation isn't just a preference here. It's part of how the town sees itself.

And for most of its recent history, Lexington built very little housing. In the decade before 2023, the town approved just two multifamily housing units. Two. For the entire decade.

So when we talk about 1,600 units proposed or approved in just a couple of years, that's not just a lot of housing in absolute terms. It's a complete reversal of how this town has operated for a long time.

That contrast, a historic, slow-growth suburb suddenly becoming what one Boston Globe article called "the state's new housing boomtown," is exactly why Lexington's situation is worth paying attention to.

The Massachusetts Housing Shortage Context

To understand why all of this is happening now, you need a little context on the broader housing situation in Massachusetts.

Greater Boston has one of the tightest housing markets in the country. There simply aren't enough homes, whether rentals or for sale, to meet the demand from people who want to live here. And because so much of the region's housing stock is concentrated in a few places, prices have climbed dramatically over the past decade.

This isn't just a Boston problem. It's a Greater Boston problem. The suburbs around the city have historically added very little multifamily housing. Most suburban communities are zoned primarily for single-family homes on larger lots, which puts a hard ceiling on how much new housing can actually get built. That works out fine for people who already own homes, your property values go up when supply is limited. But for everyone else, it's made it harder and harder to find a place to live anywhere near the jobs and schools and communities they want to be part of.

The Generational Impact

And this hits younger people especially hard. If you grew up in a town like Lexington, went to college, got a job nearby, the odds of you being able to afford to move back to your hometown are pretty low. The starter homes aren't there. The apartments aren't there. The only path in is a $1.8 million single-family house, and most people in their 20s and 30s aren't in a position to do that.

So the state decided to act.

The MBTA Communities Act

Massachusetts passed a law called the MBTA Communities Act. The basic idea is this: the 177 communities served by the MBTA are each required to create a district where multifamily housing is allowed by right. You don't have to build anything. But you have to allow it, meaning if a developer wants to build apartments in that district, the zoning can't stand in the way. The districts are meant to be near transit, town centers, or existing development, depending on the community.

The thinking behind the law is pretty straightforward. Most of the jobs in Greater Boston are clustered around transit lines and the Route 128 corridor. If you can get people living closer to those job centers, in multifamily buildings instead of single-family homes, you can add meaningful housing supply without sprawling out into undeveloped land.

The state set a deadline and made clear there were consequences for towns that didn't comply, including losing eligibility for certain state grants.

How Most Towns Responded

And here's where it got interesting. A lot of towns pushed back. Some hired lawyers. Some passed token zoning changes that technically met the letter of the law while doing as little as possible in practice. Some towns became genuinely combative about it, framing the law as state overreach into local zoning decisions.

Lexington's Different Approach

Lexington went in the opposite direction.

In spring 2023, Lexington became one of the first places in Massachusetts to pass zoning changes under the MBTA Communities Act. And they didn't just do the minimum. They passed an ambitious plan that rezoned 227 acres, including the town center and office parks near Route 128, and allowed buildings up to six stories with much higher density limits than typical suburban zoning. Town Meeting approved it with more than 60 percent in favor.

The governor sent her personal congratulations. A prominent Lexington resident wrote a piece in The New Yorker headlined: "A Massachusetts Town Leads a Way Out of the Housing Crisis." Lexington was being held up as the model, the example of what it looks like when a suburb actually steps up.

That was 2023. What happened next is what we're here to talk about.

The Zoning Change That Opened the Door

Here's what Lexington actually passed in 2023.

The town rezoned 227 acres, including parts of Lexington Center and old office buildings near Route 128, to allow tall, dense buildings with much higher density limits than typical suburban zoning. Heights up to six stories. And critically, projects that met the new zoning standards could be approved by right rather than through special permits, meaning the process was faster and offered fewer opportunities to block a project.

The Original Expectations

When officials and residents pushed this plan forward, they estimated it would generate somewhere between 400 and 800 new units over a decade. That felt ambitious but manageable. Spread out over ten years, that's 40 to 80 units a year. For context, that's not a dramatic number for a town of 35,000 people.

What nobody fully anticipated was how fast the market would respond.

As Lexington's own planning director acknowledged: "We did not necessarily expect the market to react so quickly."

Why Developers Moved So Fast

But think about it from a developer's perspective. Lexington is one of the wealthiest suburbs in Massachusetts. Demand is intense. Home prices are extremely high. It sits right next to Cambridge and the Route 128 tech and biotech corridor. And now, for the first time, the zoning actually allows you to build there without jumping through a long list of special permit hoops.

Before this zoning change, if you wanted to build an apartment building in Lexington, you were swimming upstream. The town wasn't set up for it. You'd need variances, special permits, years of hearings. Most developers didn't bother. After the zoning change, the door was open. Developers quickly began filing projects.

They came with proposals for underused parking lots. Office parks that were half-empty after the pandemic shifted work patterns. Small commercial buildings on corners that hadn't been renovated in decades. All of a sudden these parcels had real development potential, and projects that met the zoning could be approved by right rather than through special permits.

The Actual Result

The result: instead of 400 to 800 units over ten years, more than 1,600 units are now under construction, approved, or in the approval process. In roughly two years. That's not 40 to 80 units a year. That's the high end of the ten-year projection happening before the decade even got started.

The Projects Changing Lexington

So what does 1,600 units actually look like on the ground in a town of 35,000 people?

The Major Projects

The single biggest project is a 312-unit development on Hartwell Avenue. Hartwell is the office park corridor that runs near Route 128, a stretch of low-slung commercial buildings that, for a long time, was mostly just where people drove to work. Wood framing for the new building is already up. That's one project, and it alone represents nearly 20 percent of the total new units coming to town.

A few minutes away from there, near Lexington Center, you can see the change playing out block by block. Two small commercial buildings on Bedford Street, the kind of squat, one-story buildings you'd barely notice, are being converted into 25 apartments. Around the corner, an old single-family home surrounded by a surface parking lot is being redeveloped into seven condos. Another office park not far from the center is being demolished entirely to make way for nearly 300 apartments.

The Most Controversial Project

And then there's the project that's probably generated the most conversation in town: a four-story, mixed-use development with more than 50 homes planned right next to Belfry Hill. That's the historic hill in the center of town, the one with the old wooden tower whose bell rang at the start of the Revolutionary War battles in 1775. The new building still needs approval from the town's historic districts commission. But if it gets built as proposed, you'll be able to see a four-story modern building from one of the most historically significant corners in all of New England.

The Visible Change

Long-time residents describe driving through town and being able to point out parcel after parcel that's been approved or is under construction. One resident who's lived in Lexington since the 1980s told the Globe he can now identify every corner that's slated for redevelopment just from driving around. His reaction: "Lexington is changing. It's all happening very quickly."

And here's the thing that made all of this possible so fast: projects that met the new zoning requirements could be allowed as of right instead of requiring a special permit, which generally makes approval more predictable. If a developer filed a project that hit the right location, height, and density thresholds, the town had limited ability to block it. That was intentional. The whole point of the zoning reform was to remove the barriers that had historically made it so hard to build here. But it also meant that once projects started coming in, there wasn't a lot residents could do to slow them down.

Why Some Residents Are Concerned

Here's where the tension comes in, and I think this part of the story is worth spending some time on, because it's not really unique to Lexington.

If you ask most Lexington residents whether Massachusetts needs more housing, most will say yes. And they mean it. The housing shortage is real. Rents are high. Home prices are astronomical. Everyone knows someone, a kid who grew up here, a teacher, a nurse, a young couple, who can't find anything affordable anywhere near the job centers of Greater Boston. That awareness is genuine.

But there's a difference between supporting housing in the abstract and watching a 312-unit apartment complex go up in the neighborhood you've lived in for thirty years. When it's a specific building on a specific street, the feelings get more complicated.

The Main Concerns

Let's go through the main concerns residents have raised.

Traffic

Traffic. Lexington's road network wasn't designed for this level of density. The streets around Hartwell Avenue and Lexington Center are already congested during peak hours. Adding 1,600 units means thousands of additional residents, and a significant share of them will have cars. Residents have been asking pointed questions about whether road infrastructure can handle the load, and the honest answer is: nobody knows for certain yet.

Schools

Schools. This one became especially charged because it intersected with a separate, very expensive debate. Lexington was already working through a proposal to build a new high school, a project that ended up with a price tag of $660 million. During that debate, some residents started raising the question: if we're about to add 1,600 housing units, are we planning the school large enough? Will it have the capacity? The school vote passed in December, but the anxiety about whether the town's institutions can keep up with the growth hasn't gone away.

Historic Preservation and Neighborhood Character

Historic preservation and neighborhood character. Lexington's identity is deeply tied to its history. The town isn't just proud of the Revolutionary War connection, it's built its entire brand around it. The historic district in the town center is carefully maintained. So when a four-story building gets proposed next to Belfry Hill, it's not just a zoning question. It feels, to some people, like a statement about what kind of town Lexington is going to be going forward.

And this concern isn't limited to the most historically sensitive sites. Residents in neighborhoods that are seeing new development have raised worries about flooding, about the feel of their streets changing, about small commercial buildings that were part of the fabric of the neighborhood disappearing and being replaced by things that look and feel very different.

Affordability, Or the Lack of It

Affordability, or the lack of it. This might be the sharpest question of all. The whole justification for the MBTA Communities Act is that Massachusetts needs more housing to address an affordability crisis. More supply, in theory, should help moderate prices over time. But the new buildings going up in Lexington aren't affordable by any conventional definition. Some projects include affordable set-asides, but most of what's being built is still market rate. The cheapest condo at 89 Bedford Street, a 30-unit project that's on track to be one of the first developments under the new zoning to finish construction, is listed at $1.2 million. These are luxury units in a wealthy suburb. They may help at the high end of the market, and over a very long time horizon adding supply anywhere could have some downward pressure on prices broadly. But for the person who is struggling to pay rent right now, a $1.2 million condo in Lexington isn't the answer.

One Planning Board member who helped lead the rollback effort put it plainly: "I am all for us playing our part in solving the state's housing issue. Things and places are always going to change, and that can be a good thing. But there is such a thing as too much growth."

The Rollback

Last year, Lexington took a significant step back.

Town Meeting voted to roll back the MBTA Communities zoning, reducing the rezoned area from 227 acres down to 90 acres and tightening both density and height limits. The vote wasn't close: 164 to 9, with five abstentions.

The reason, according to residents who pushed for the rollback, is that the town simply underestimated what it had signed up for. The original estimate was 400 to 800 units over ten years. The reality was 1,600 units in two years. Some residents said they'd been misled about the scale of what the plan would allow. Others said the pace was faster than the town's infrastructure and planning capacity could absorb.

One newly elected Planning Board member said: "The growth we're seeing now is unplanned. We didn't have any say in what got approved."

The Political Complexity

It's also worth noting what happened politically around this. The state official who was Lexington's most prominent advocate for the original zoning, who stood at Town Meeting and said "This is a chance for Lexington to lead, isn't that what we want to do?", has since become a Republican candidate for governor. He is now on the campaign trail criticizing the enforcement of the very law he helped write while working in the prior administration. That's a pretty remarkable reversal, and it tells you something about how politically charged this issue has become.

What the Rollback Does and Doesn't Do

What the rollback doesn't do is undo anything already in motion. The 1,600 units that are already approved, permitted, or under construction are still moving forward. Those projects are happening. What the rollback does is slow the pipeline going forward, making it harder for new projects to get approved under the same permissive rules.

The Bigger Question

So what does all of this mean?

Lexington might be the first real example of what happens when a suburb actually follows through on building more housing, and then has to reckon with what that looks like in practice.

The original plan worked exactly as intended in one narrow sense: it created new housing. Developers showed up. Buildings are going up. But it moved faster than most residents expected, in places they weren't prepared for, and the units that materialized aren't cheap. New condos are starting at $1.2 million. The affordability problem that justified the whole push for more housing hasn't been solved, at least not yet, and maybe not here.

The Gap Every Suburb Will Face

The gap between "we support housing in theory" and "we didn't expect it to look like this" is a gap that every suburb in Massachusetts is going to have to cross eventually. Some towns are still in the early stages, arguing about whether to comply with the MBTA Communities Act at all. Lexington already crossed that bridge, and now it's on the other side trying to figure out what it actually signed up for.

The Generational Divide

There's also a younger generation watching all of this. The 20-year-old Town Meeting member who voted against the rollback said he sees the new housing as an opportunity, a chance for people like him to actually stay in the town where they grew up, maybe rent a studio apartment in that big Hartwell Avenue complex, and build a life here. His view is that Lexington's previous approach, building almost nothing, is what drove prices out of reach in the first place.

Both perspectives are real. And Lexington is going to be working through that tension for a long time.

What This Means for Other Towns

Lexington's experience is instructive for every other suburb facing the same question.

The lesson isn't that building housing is wrong. The lesson is that the gap between what a zoning change looks like on paper and what it produces in reality can be much larger than anyone expects.

Lexington estimated 400 to 800 units over a decade. They got 1,600 units in two years. That's not developer greed. That's not bad faith. That's just what happens when you unlock valuable land in a high-demand market. Developers respond to incentives. And when the incentive structure changes dramatically, the response can be dramatic too.

The other lesson is that "affordable housing" and "new housing" are not the same thing. Building more supply in expensive suburbs produces expensive housing. That might help at the margins over a long time horizon. But it's not a solution to the immediate affordability crisis for people struggling with rent today.

The Questions Towns Should Ask

If other towns are watching Lexington and trying to learn from it, here are the questions they should be asking:

How much housing do we actually want, not just what number sounds reasonable on paper? Because the market will respond to the zoning you pass, not the aspirations you have.

Where do we want that housing to go? General rules about height and density will get applied to every parcel that qualifies. If there are specific sites you want to protect, you need to say so explicitly.

What infrastructure needs to be in place before this housing arrives? Traffic, schools, utilities, these don't appear magically. If the housing arrives faster than expected, do you have a plan?

Who is this housing actually for? If the goal is affordability, market-rate luxury units in wealthy suburbs aren't the solution. They might be part of a broader strategy, but they're not going to house teachers and nurses and young families on their own.

The Bottom Line

Lexington isn't building too much housing in some absolute sense. But it is building housing much faster than it expected, in places residents didn't anticipate, at price points that don't solve the affordability problem the state's policy was designed to address.

That's not a failure of the law. It's a reality check on what housing production actually looks like when you remove the barriers.

Most suburbs in Massachusetts are still fighting about whether to comply with the MBTA Communities Act at all. Lexington complied enthusiastically, and now it's dealing with the consequences of that choice. Some residents see opportunity. Others see loss of control. Both are responding to the same reality: the town they thought they were voting for isn't quite the town they're getting.

And that tension, between housing in theory and housing in practice, is something every community that tries to add supply is going to have to navigate.

Lexington got there first. What they do next, and how they balance growth with character, infrastructure with ambition, and younger residents with longtime homeowners, will matter for every other suburb watching and wondering if they should follow the same path.

The answer probably isn't "build nothing." But it also isn't "rezone everything and see what happens."

Lexington is learning that lesson in real time. And the rest of Massachusetts is taking notes.