News

Proposed changes to rulemaking and grantmaking will boost accountability and state policy innovation

Pioneer Institute is debuting The House Call, a monthly newsletter covering housing-related news and market trends in Massachusetts. The first issue explores reform options for Boston's arcane development approvals process and major reform items from the state's November 2024 economic development bill. Read our December issue today!

Boston, Mass. – A Pioneer Institute review of reforms enacted in metropolitan areas across the country finds that to achieve more affordable housing in the coming decades, Greater Boston should focus on policies such as making it easier to build small multi-family projects, retrofit commercial areas with new housing, and loosen parking and minimum lot size requirements.

Advocates seek to require that admission to vocational-technical high schools be done strictly via lottery, but this would only rearrange who gets excluded. Thanks to their strong performance, voc-tech schools in Massachusetts have roughly 8,000 students on waiting lists. There are good...

The next major event on the legislative calendar is the FY2026 Consensus Revenue Hearing on December 2.  At this forum, several experts make projections about how much money will be available for the fiscal year that begins on July 1, 2025.  Making...

Net loss accelerated in recent years; main reasons include high taxes, housing and healthcare 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent national jobs report made headlines because it indicated the US economy added just 12,000 jobs in October, falling far short of the expected 112,500-job gain. While the number is preliminary and could be revised, it...

Project labor agreements (PLAs) essentially prevent non-union firms from participating in construction projects. They generally do so by including the following language: Union recognition and employment The Contractor recognizes the union as the sole and exclusive bargaining representative of all craft employees working...

Yesterday was a bad day for public school students in Massachusetts because the last pillar of the most effective state education reform in modern American history fell. Since 2008, the Commonwealth has been witness to the systematic dismantling of the 1993 Education...

Recommends Sustainable Policy Responses to Pandemic Learning Loss