MA Housing Report Card
An interactive public tool grading every Massachusetts municipality on housing policy — zoning permissiveness, MBTA Communities Act compliance, housing production, affordability, and state legislator voting records.
I built this in the middle of a relentlessly negative news cycle about AI. I wanted to make something actually useful. mahousingreportcard.org↗ grades all 351 Massachusetts municipalities across six policy dimensions, drawing on public data from the MA Zoning Atlas, the Census Bureau, EOHLC, and the Massachusetts Legislature.
The site runs on a weekly automated pipeline. The legislator scoring dimension — the most technically involved — tracks roll call votes and co-sponsorships across both chambers of the Massachusetts Legislature, mapping House and Senate districts to municipalities via Census TIGER shapefiles and computing per-representative scores that roll up to a town-level grade.
highlights
- →351 municipalities graded across 6 dimensions: zoning permissiveness, MBTA Communities Act compliance, housing production, affordability, town meeting voting record, and state legislator record
- →Legislative scoring covers both chambers — 9 House roll calls and 2 co-sponsorship checks; 2 Senate roll calls — each curated editorially, not scraped automatically
- →Spatial mapping assigns every municipality to its state House and Senate representatives via Census TIGER shapefiles, handling cities that span multiple districts
- →Built through AI-assisted development; targeting increased visibility during the 2026 Massachusetts election season
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