With support from our Center, 28 Harvard students will spend this summer researching and working on a host of issues related to housing and community development.
What are the policymaking implications of record-high mortgage origination profits during the pandemic, and what changes could make future policymaking more effective?
How does our research team make use of experimental estimates the Census Bureau released for the 2020 American Community Survey (ACS), which was affected significantly by pandemic disruptions?
Joint Center for Housing Studies
of Harvard University
The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies helps leaders in government, business, and the civic sectors make decisions that effectively address the needs of cities and communities.
Although still fragmented, the homebuilding industry has undergone changes in recent years that have increased the share of production by larger builders. The top 100 builders nationally now account for about half of all new single-family home sales, up from just over a third two decades ago. However, most of these gains reflect the growing market share of just two home construction companies – D.R. Horton and Lennar.
A poor fit between the physical design of the home and a resident’s functional ability can endanger the resident’s health and housing stability. This research used the Accessibility Module of the 2019 American Housing Survey (AHS) to understand national trends in housing fit, or the alignment between a resident’s needs and the home.
The United States is in a housing affordability crisis, with nearly half of all renter households spending more than 30% of their incomes on rent and utilities each month. Whereas housing policy has relied on percentage-of-income measures to indicate whether housing is affordable, researchers over the last three decades have called for a residual income approach that uses spending estimates to calculate what a household can actually afford. This article examines the extent of the affordability crisis by comparing standard cost burden rates for working-age renter households with residual-income cost burdens.
