News last week that House Speaker Robert DeLeo wasn’t sure Beacon Hill could pass a desperately needed housing production bill by the end of the year should send shivers down everyone’s spine.

It appears that a small but vocal minority opposed to Gov. Charlie Baker’s could be holding a crucial tool for fixing Massachusetts’ housing crisis at risk.

Many Massachusetts communities have drifted – or intentionally sailed – into a place where most new developments are put to high-stakes votes as they seek special permits, zoning variants or other special allowances. With two-thirds support from a town meeting or a city council required for approval, countless worthy projects have been strangled in their cribs by NIMBY minorities and trumped-up concerns over “quality of life” and “property values.”

This “paper wall,” as researcher Amy Dain termed it, means the state has added 245,000 new jobs since 2010 but only 71,600 new units of housing despite once building over 30,000 units of new housing a year – roughly what would be needed to keep up with economic growth like that.

This shortfall has driven housing costs to absurd heights – the median single-family home sale price is $400,000 this year to date, with the median condominium sale price close behind – and about 160,000 families across Massachusetts are now on a waitlist to get into state-aided public housing.

Simply put, the two-thirds standard has become unworkable. Lowering it to one-half for housing-related votes is a necessary first step to restoring sanity to the situation. Indeed, even progressive critics of Baker’s bill support the move; they merely think more needs to be done to help low- and middle-income renters and buyers and know a compromise on this bill offers their best shot at doing this.

DeLeo understandably and characteristically appears to be trying to avoid a messy floor fight on the measure. He said last week he is making the rounds of Massachusetts’ mayors to see what objections still exist. Despite rhetoric that any bill which NAIOP and the Mass. Municipal Association can enthusiastically support must be uncontroversial, clearly the measure has its foes.

Any watering down of Baker’s bill in response to NIMBYism – say, exempting communities that have achieved “safe harbor” under Chapter 40B – will only continue to allow communities to declare themselves “off limits” to new construction, and cannot be allowed.

So, what now? Pro-housing Bay Staters need to show legislators how important this issue is by lobbying their local and state elected officials and make clear that a failure to fix the housing crisis will incur penalties at the polls next fall.

DeLeo and the real estate industry, too, should make a serious effort to lock in progressive support for the bill. This is a battle over whether the current system should change not how much it should change, putting the left on the same side as the development community. While it is possible this crucial reform could pass without them, being able to get them on-side with some moderate concessions would make it far easier.