Fifteen Boston-area towns set big goals to build out of the region’s housing shortage by

2030 is just four years away now. And the communities are nowhere close.

Despite growing political momentum to address the region’s housing crisis and efforts to make it easier to build, the 15 cities and towns of the Metro Mayors Coalition — including Boston and many of its near neighbors — had only permitted around 76,600 new homes through 2024, according to recent data from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. That’s just 60 percent of what was supposed to be in the works by now.

“There’s no way of looking at this other than we as a coalition are not building enough right now,” said Lizzi Weyant, executive director of MAPC. “We’re behind, and we’re going to have to do more if we want to fix our housing shortage.”

The data crystalize recent warnings from builders and housing advocates: Even as its population has grown, Greater Boston has long built fewer homes than most other major urban areas in the US, largely due to strict local rules governing development and frequent opposition from neighbors. Lately though, housing construction has slowed to a crawl, digging the region’s housing shortage even deeper and driving prices ever skyward.

Since 2018, the median-price of a single-family home in Greater Boston has climbed 36 percent, to nearly $950,000. The typical two-bedroom apartment last year rented for $2,300 a month, up from $1,850.

The goal of 185,000 was not an arbitrary number: MAPC recommended it based on population trends and the scale of the housing shortage at the time. The region was, and still is, growing. And if the coalition communities wanted workers to be able to live in their cities and towns, and to loosen the tight rental market, they would need to build 185,000 homes.

From the start, there was a sense that the pledge was a tall task. Building that many homes over 12 years would require the coalition’s 15 communities — now 17, after Lynn and Watertown joined recently — to collectively permit over 12,300 units a year, tripling the pace of their building between 2010 and 2018. In other words, they’d need more shovels in the ground very quickly.

But not long after, the COVID-19 pandemic upended the economics of construction, with interest rates and materials costs both spiking. And while permits surged to just under 12,000 amid a brief post-pandemic rush in 2022, they have plummeted since.

In 2024, the communities that make up the coalition only allowed 4,755 new homes, a 60 percent drop from two years before and the fewest since MAPC began tracking the data in 2015.

Development has slowed too, both statewide and in Boston.

Massachusetts issued permits for just 12,096 units last year, the fewest since 2012. The state fell short of former Governor Charlie Baker’s goal of adding 135,000 homes across Massachusetts between 2018 and 2025. And it is already far behind the pace of permitting needed to hit Governor Maura Healey’s goal of allowing 222,000 homes between 2025 and 2035.

The city of Boston, meanwhile, saw the slowest period for new housing development since the Great Recession in 2023 and 2024.

Josh Zakim, a former Boston city councilor who now runs advocacy group Housing Forward MA, said broad economic headwinds facing developers are a leading cause of the slowdown. But, he said, local and state leaders should take the anemic rate of permitting as a sign that they need to do much more to stimulate construction.

“These goals were always a bit of a stretch, but the reasoning behind them was sound: This is how much we need to build to help alleviate pressure on housing prices,” said Zakim. ”If we’re not building enough, we need to take a hard look and figure out what we can do about this. We should be treating this like an emergency.”

While the recent lag in construction is alarming, said Jeff Byrnes, a steering committee member of the local pro-housing group Somerville YIMBY, perhaps more concerning is how much the state and the region were underbuilding even before the economy shifted.

He pointed to Somerville, which permitted around 3,900 housing units between 2015 and 2024. That’s more than most other communities in the state, in what’s already one of the most densely-populated cities in Massachusetts. But with its high level of services and access to transit, he said, Somerville should be building even more and pushing through projects such as a proposed 26-story tower in Davis Square that has drawn community outrage from residents who worry it is too tall and will temporarily displace a popular neighborhood bar.

“Frankly, we’re talking about building another Boston worth of new homes, or several more Somervilles,” said Byrnes. “That’s the scale of the problem that we have. We need places like Somerville to be building a lot more, a lot faster.”

To be sure, some places have built a lot lately. Everett — which has seen an influx of new development on old industrial parcels — has increased its housing stock by more than 36 percent since 2010. And Revere, where thousands of new units have risen along Revere Beach, increased its housing supply by 28 percent over that same period.

There’s more momentum at the local level for building than there has been in a long time. Several Metro Mayors cities and towns were among the first to pass new zoning rules under the MBTA Communities Act, which mandates cities and towns with access to the T make room for more housing, and some of those communities are now allowing more housing than they have in decades. New projects in those zones are beginning to work their way through the pipeline, even if they’ve yet to show up in the permitting data.

And some places are doing significantly more than others. Braintree, a community of around 39,100, permitted 100 new homes between 2015 and 2024. Arlington, home to more than 46,000 people, allowed 367 units in that span.

Often, these projects need to overcome varying levels of resistance from their future neighbors.

In Medford, which allowed 1,460 new homes between 2015 and 2024, Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn said the city is working hard to build homes, but also needs to balance development with community feedback. The city’s MBTA Communities plan represents progress, she said, though a broader rezoning of the city’s neighborhoods has hit roadblocks recently as residents have pushed back over concerns about overdevelopment and changes to their streets.

“There are cities and towns that have taken quite a bit of time to get [MBTA Communities] passed,” said Lungo-Koehn. “We did it right away. We’ve found a good balance between building more and making sure projects fit within the context of our community.”

Part of the reason the region is behind on its goals, said Salim Furth, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, is because it can be difficult for everyday residents to wrap their heads around just how much new housing the region needs. To actually bring housing prices down would likely require even more building than the goals that have been laid out — perhaps hundreds of thousands of additional units — which would inevitably mean real changes to cities and towns that have been around for hundreds of years.

That could look like more dense, tall buildings — from three-deckers to towers — all over the place, particularly in public transit hubs but also in quiet neighborhoods where there aren’t those sorts of buildings. And of course, more housing growth can also mean other changes, such as more students and traffic and demand for services.

That can be a difficult message for elected officials to convey to their constituents, Furth said.

“Your town can’t be a little town of 20,000 people, as its always been, if you also want it to be much more affordable,” said Furth, who grew up in Milton. “You’re going to have to build a significant number of new homes if you want your kids to be able to afford to live where they grew up.”

Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.