Map: Where state-funded public housing units are vacant in Mass.

A WBUR and ProPublica investigation found that no one was living in nearly 2,300 state-funded apartments in Massachusetts, as of the end of July. Most had been sitting empty for months or years.

In a state with some of the country’s most expensive real estate, there is a waitlist of 184,000 applicants for these subsidized units. Local housing authorities are paid by the state to operate these units whether someone lives there or not.

Many of these local housing officials pointed to the state's flawed centralized waitlist system as a key cause of prolonged vacancies, saying that since its rollout in 2019, it's been harder for them to match qualified applicants with available units.

See the vacancy rate in your community, and the size of the waitlist, here: