ALL ROADS lead to home, or perhaps the nearest T station.

Housing and transportation are both issues that roiled policymakers on and off Beacon Hill, as state officials sought to navigate crises on both fronts by passing a multibillion housing bond bill and debating ways to fund transportation as the MBTA faces a yawning budget gap. And the two are linked, as US Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it in a talk to the business-backed New England Council a year ago: Transportation is housing and housing is transportation.

“If we’ve got a transit system that works, it gets people to their jobs, it actually helps reduce pressure, if we can build up supply, reduces the pressure on housing and helps us bring down cost,” she said. “The problem we’ve got in Massachusetts is we’re broken in both directions. We don’t have enough housing and we have a 1955 transit system – and I’m not just talking about Eastern Mass. I’m talking about all across the state – that doesn’t work even at 1955 standards.”

So it’s not a surprise when we pulled together a list of this year’s top CommonWealth Beacon articles – stories that caught the eye of our readers and ones that we’re proud to have published – transportation and housing prominently figured in several of them. At the nexus is the MBTA Communities Act, which requires that a community within the MBTA service area have at least one zoning district where multi-family housing is permitted.

The state’s highest court has raised questions about whether the law is a toothless one, and Jennifer Smith looked into how the fight between Attorney General Andrea Campbell and the resistant town of Milton had a showdown inside the Adams Courthouse.

Another city had its own fight with Beacon Hill over whether the state’s use of a Days Inn motel as an emergency shelter for homeless families could be used as a reason to stop a proposal to build 300 units elsewhere in Methuen, Gintautas Dumcius reported.

Bruce Mohl, the CommonWealth Beacon editor who retired in November, broke the story earlier this year of a talk delivered by Gov. Maura Healey’s transportation chief, Monica Tibbits-Nutt, who offered an “unfiltered” take on her job. She raised the idea of border tolls, but amid the blowback, Healey swiftly issued her own statement saying she is not proposing tolls at any border.

Meanwhile, Michael Jonas reviewed a record-setting period for Boston as it saw the fewest homicides and shootings in the first quarter of the year, well before the city’s extraordinary stretch of low violence drew headlines in The Economist, the Christian Science Monitor and The New York Times.

Bhaamati Borkhetaria, who has been covering the Massachusetts marijuana sector, dug into whether the state’s pledge to give a hand to people hit hard by the war on drugs was working out the way it was meant to.

There are also stories about the last of Somerville’s old guard, what it means to be an artist competing to lobby Beacon Hill, the effect of tutoring on pandemic learning loss, and the controversy of end-of-life legislation through the eyes of someone living in pain.

If you aren’t already a subscriber to our weekday Download email newsletter, where we’ve featured some of these stories, or our Sunday CommonWealth Voices newsletter of top opinion pieces, please consider doing so here. We also have a weekend roundup of the week’s stories that you might have missed, called “The Saturday Send.” Feel free to share the link with others who you think want to be in the know on Massachusetts-focused reporting and commentary. If you’d like to become a CommonWealth Beacon supporter, you can do that here.

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