In the media

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Our research is regularly cited in national and local news outlets; below is some of our recent press coverage.

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USA Today

The housing crisis threatens the American dream. What's next?

As of earlier this year, the median “all-in” cost of a mortgage payment, property taxes, and insurance was $2,201, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. That’s up a whopping $852 in just the past three years, and JCHS estimates it’s the highest since data first started to be collected over three decades ago.

The New York Times

Seniors Need Our Help to Stay in the Homes They Love

Nearly a third of households headed by seniors are cost burdened, meaning more than 30 percent of their income is eaten up by housing costs. That number is growing fast. So is the number of seniors falling into homelessness — a trend expected to continue for decades.

Marketplace

The wealth gap between homeowners and renters is huge, a new report says

If you can buy a house in your 20s or early 30s, “and pay off that 30-year mortgage over time, you’re going to build wealth much earlier and accumulate more over your lifetime,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The New Yorker

The Pain Creating a New Coalition for Trump

One measure of the brokenness of the housing market is the dramatic growth of homelessness in the U.S. Between 2015 and 2022, “unsheltered homelessness” rose by forty-eight per cent in the U.S., and it is on the rise again. According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, a record number of 653,100 people experienced homelessness on a single night in January, 2023.

Marketplace

Work-from-home migration has changed the real estate market

Working from home has allowed some families to move to less expensive regions to buy real estate. But it’s also had another effect. Harvard housing researcher Alex Hermann said, in the years following the pandemic, home prices rose a lot everywhere. “But they rose especially rapidly in more rural areas, in smaller markets and in lower density counties of large metro areas,” Hermann said.

Pew Charitable Trusts

Additional Manufactured Housing Could Benefit Millions of U.S. Homebuyers

To better understand how much of a savings manufactured housing could provide to homebuyers, as well as to assess the current barriers to its broader use and opportunities to expand supply, The Pew Charitable Trusts funded three research papers produced by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS). The work, published in 2023 and 2024, also provides examples of how builders and developers are starting to use these homes to build new neighborhoods, fill in vacant lots, or install accessory dwelling units on single-family lots.

CNN

Here’s how mass deportations could change the housing market

Immigrants’ impact on the housing market has taken on new urgency as homebuying has become much more expensive, said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “It is important to acknowledge that immigrants play a role in household growth, and often a substantial role,” Frost said. “But what’s really defined the affordability crisis that we have had since the late 2010s and the pandemic has been native-born household growth.”