Newton capped off Women’s History Month with a visit from Gov. Maura Healey, the first woman elected to lead the commonwealth.

Healey and U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, D-Newton, spoke to local business leaders, elected officials and others at a Charles River Chamber breakfast event Monday morning at the Boston Marriott Newton, and they sat with Chamber President Greg Reibman to talk about economic development in uncertain times.

The topic that got the most focus wasn’t President Donald Trump. It was housing.

“We should have been building housing for years,” Healey said. “For whatever reason, we weren’t.”

Healey has set a goal to get hundreds of thousands of housing units built in Massachusetts over the next few years.

And Auchincloss recently co-launched a new “YIMBY caucus” in the U.S. House to address challenges to housing creation nationwide, including in the Bay State.

“Your employees cannot afford to live in this state,” Auchincloss told the crowded banquet room. “And regrettably, fewer and fewer people—particularly younger people—in the commonwealth can.”

The answer, Auchincloss said, it to build more housing. And he said the government needs to consider “more muscular action” to foster more housing creation with things like low-interest affordable housing development loans and the recommissioning of old prisons and other government properties for housing.

“We’re very good, as a government, at subsidizing demand for housing,” he said. “We’re less good at subsidizing supply of housing.”

U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss talks with Chamber President Greg Reibman about ways he and other Democrats are dealing with the new Trump administration. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

And the governor could pursue changing the state’s Chapter 40B to raise the threshold for Safe Harbor, which would allow more 40B projects to get around local zoning obstacles. Currently a community reaches Safe Harbor status when it has 10 percent of its housing stock set at “affordable” rates. Newton reached that designation last year.

Auchincloss acknowledged that would be an unpopular move for the governor.

“That would be a nuclear option, to be clear, but it would the kind of stick that could galvanize more local action,” he said.

Healey—who signed the most expansive housing bill in state history last year at the Golda Meir House—did not mention that nuclear option as a consideration. But she said the congressman was right about the need to speed things up in the housing development sector.

Healey pointed to the Austin, Texas, area, which was able to see 50,000 housing units built in the span of two years. And Texas outpaced every other state in the nation in housing growth in 2024.

“We need to move, and we need to move on this now,” she said. “And what they did in Texas was they were able to get their vacancy rate back to a healthy level. And by the way, if you’re looking for statistics, average rents dropped by 22 percent. Basic supply and demand. That’s what we need to do.”

The two discussed a range of other issues, too, from healthcare legislation to the massive funding cuts for the National Institutes of Health.

You can watch the entire Government Affairs forum with Healey and Auchincloss on NewTV’s YouTube channel.