As housing rise, lower-income renters have less left over after paying for housing than ever before, and the number of cost-burdened renters has reached a record high of 22.4 million households.
Fewer new immigrant workers and difficulty attracting young people, women, and people of color has slowed the recovery of the construction trades workforce after a decline.
Joint Center for Housing Studies
of Harvard University
Our Center strives to improve equitable access to decent, affordable homes in thriving communities and conducts rigorous research to advance policy and practice.
Home prices rose at an unprecedented pace in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as interest rates fell to record lows, the large cohort of millennials aged increasingly into prime homebuying years, and the supply of housing available for purchase remained limited. Using county-level data from Zillow and the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, this paper shows that home price growth was widespread across market types from March 2020 to March 2023, but increased most rapidly—rising by more than one-third—in rural counties, smaller metro areas, and the lower-density suburbs of large metro areas.
This paper shows how different housing submarkets are linked by residential vacancy chains – the series of moves across housing units initiated by the construction of new housing. Using administrative data on the residential histories of the U.S. population, we compare the characteristics of vacancies created by new suburban single-family homes to those created by new urban multifamily housing. Our results imply that new suburban housing supply has little effect on urban housing affordability or on the welfare of low-income urban households.
Manufactured housing holds promise as an affordable form of housing that could expand homeownership opportunities for low- and moderate-income households at a time when house value growth is outpacing income gains in markets across the country. This study features case studies of five organizations from the for-profit, nonprofit and public sectors that are leading efforts to expand the use of manufactured housing in markets where these homes have not been widely used.
