Citywide Land Audit

In June 2022, Mayor Wu announced the release of the Public Land for Public Good: Citywide Land Audit. The audit is the City's effort to identify opportunities to use its property to improve the lives of Bostonians.

This Citywide Land Audit is an annually updated inventory of all property owned by the City of Boston and quasi-City agencies. It also identifies all vacant or underutilized City-owned property. The 2022 audit initially identified 9.5 million square feet of land in the vacant/underutilized category. This represents 5.4% of the 176.9 million square feet under City ownership. The City continues to update the data and uses it to decide how best to deploy public land to serve Boston's most urgent needs:

• Ensuring safe, healthy affordable housing for Boston residents. The City will identify locations to develop into new affordable units.
• Identifying transformative community development opportunities. Developing these sites can help knit together the fabric of our city.
• Addressing homelessness through a public health lens. The City will devote public land for recovery services and transitional housing.

The Citywide Land Audit identified City-owned land that was vacant or underutilized and presented a high opportunity for redevelopment.  One of the outcomes of the 2022 audit was the Welcome Home Boston Initiative, to fast track the production of affordable new homes by making City-owned land parcels available for affordable homeownership opportunities. We are proud to have made significant progress since 2023, moving many of these underutilized parcels forward to serve the needs of the city.