Massachusetts at a Crossroads:
Biggest Opportunities & Obstacles
The Commonwealth Innovation Promise highlights each candidate's vision in their own words. Before diving into six important policy areas, we asked candidates to step back and name the single biggest opportunity ahead for Massachusetts, and the biggest obstacle standing in the way. Their answers set the frame for everything that follows: six issue pages where each candidate's opportunity or obstacle gets tested against specifics, their outlooks for 2040, and their final word on Massachusetts' future.
At a Glance
All four candidates point to Massachusetts' research, talent, and innovation base as the state's core asset. Where they differ is what they see as the greatest risk to that asset: Azeem and Uyterhoeven both name housing supply as the central bottleneck; McLaughlin frames the risk in terms of an unaffordable state losing working-class families; Barber frames it as cost broadly (housing, health care, transit) eroding the talent pipeline that sustains the innovation economy.
What is the single biggest opportunity Massachusetts must seize over the next decade?
Burhan Azeem: We have to stay ahead of the curve and advances in biosciences. We've always been a knowledge economy and we're going through a pretty deep recession right now, so we need to ensure growth is happening and that we are attracting people who will continue to invest in our community and contribute.
Christine P. Barber: We have the research universities, the hospitals, the labs, and the talent. That advantage is real and it is not permanent. It is being eroded by cost. A postdoc researcher, a nurse, a bus mechanic, a teacher, and a line cook now all face the same math. And if they leave, the innovation economy loses its base and every other sector loses its workforce.
The opportunity is to build enough housing near transit, at prices working families can actually pay, that Massachusetts keeps the people it educates. That means the state does housing production and tenant protection at the same time. It means transit that connects housing to jobs, which is why the Green Line Extension mattered. It means child care treated as infrastructure and health costs that do not take up a raise.
We need to continue to stand up to federal disruption and this is possible when people are still able to afford to live here. Climate investment creates jobs held by residents. Workers can stay and continue to build our communities.
Matthew McLaughlin: The biggest opportunity we have in the next decade is also our biggest risk. We are becoming a state that is completely unaffordable for working class people and as a result we are losing more and more working class families. We have extraordinary wealth and innovation in this state, and yet we still struggle to provide for the essential needs of our poor and middle class. The opportunity we have is to grow our middle class and our social safety net in a way that not only is cognizant of investment opportunities in the innovation economy, but bolsters the results and the benefits of that innovation economy.
Erika Uyterhoeven: The biggest opportunity is that Massachusetts can invest in our public goods so that our residents can afford to live here and thrive, but only if we treat the transitions underway in energy, technology, and health care as one project and make sure the people who live and work here are its primary beneficiaries. We have a life sciences sector that leads the world, free community college expanding access statewide, and housing capacity growing near transit for the first time in a generation. No other state holds all of these assets at once, and the next decade will decide whether they serve residents or investors. Connecting them is what I will fight for: clean energy that lowers bills while it cuts emissions, single-payer health care, housing with the affordable units our communities need, workforce pathways into real careers, and a legislature transparent and accountable enough to be trusted with the job. As an economist who has spent a career organizing to move power from insiders to residents, I will make sure Massachusetts builds these systems first and builds them for everyone.
What is the biggest obstacle preventing
us from getting there?
Burhan Azeem: The biggest obstacle we're facing is housing. Massachusetts is dead last in terms of housing production, which increases the cost of living because we are also a very desirable place to live. There just aren't enough homes for the people who want to live here. We need to really prioritize this if we want to manage the cost of living crisis. Displacement has multiple ripple effects throughout communities and it is absolutely crucial to ensure that people have stable places to live without worrying about things like rent gouging or not being able to afford a home.
Christine P. Barber: Time. Not opposition, delay. Housing that takes years to permit, transit projects measured in decades, and a legislative process where good bills die by expiring rather than by losing a vote. We know how to build — infrastructure and also coalitions to get the work done. We need to do that.
Matthew McLaughlin: The largest obstacle preventing us from tackling the affordability crisis is a slow-moving government that loses sight of the needs of working class people. We need to ensure that this government, which says all the right words and often does many of the right things, can work efficiently, effectively, and deliberately to deliver for working class families. We need to be bold with investment and unafraid to tie that investment to support for workers. We need to dare as a government to expand the social safety net and social welfare so that no one is left behind in this economy.
Erika Uyterhoeven: The biggest obstacle is concentrated power in the institutions that should be connecting Massachusetts's assets to residents' lives but are not. Forty-two percent of health care spending goes to administrative waste and monopoly pricing, the affordable housing capital stack is broken while market-rate construction moves forward, data center costs threaten residential electric bills, and legislative leadership can still kill bills without a recorded vote. Massachusetts does not lack the ideas or the public will: it lacks the structural reforms I have spent my career fighting to build.