About Us

N4MN Boston is a new citywide grassroots group founded by Isaac Baker. It activates residents who want more homes of every kind built faster and closer to transit, along with expanded affordable housing and by-right density zoning. In doing so, N4MN creates the organized pro-housing constituency that Boston currently lacks.

Boston's housing shortage is the affordability crisis. Massachusetts needs at least 222,000 new homes by 2035 — roughly 40,000 of them income-restricted — and we are badly behind pace. That gap sets the price of everything: rents climbing faster than raises, bidding wars over ordinary houses, the friends who give up and move to Worcester, the teachers and nurses who commute for hours into the neighborhoods they serve. Every year we underbuild, the shortfall compounds and the city gets less possible for the people who make it work.

The biggest obstacle isn't demand or money — it's our own process. Boston's zoning is decades out of date. Height limits, setbacks, and parking minimums mean almost nothing we need can be built by right, so nearly every new home must survive a discretionary review stretching across years of hearings, redesigns, appeals, and sometimes litigation. That's where a small but highly organized group of neighbors can stop housing on grounds of scale, traffic, or parking — and often win. The delay gets priced into every unit that does get built, so the process itself makes housing more expensive. And because the neighborhoods best equipped to run that gauntlet are the most affluent, the burden of growth shifts to the Bostonians with the least power to refuse it.

— Isaac Baker / Founder / N4MN Boston