In the Media

Existing-home prices are nearly five times the median income, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, well above what it was in the 1990s. Sales of existing homes have been mired in their worst slump in decades.

Existing home prices are up 54 percent since 2020, and homes cost nearly five times the median income, well above historic norms, according to the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A new study shows high costs and short supply are hurting the U.S. housing market. Harvard University's State of the Nation's Housing 2026 report found that household growth, the net change in the total number of occupied housing units or households from year to year, slowed for the third straight year in 2025. Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, joins "The Daily Report" to discuss.

“Household growth follows job growth, and I think the trend in job growth of the last few years … has been slowing,” said Daniel McCue, senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Housing is fundamental. We all need a roof over our heads. We all need someplace to raise our families, cook our meals, escape from the world. So it’s a cruel state of affairs that we seem to be getting it so wrong. That’s the idea at the heart of the "State of the Nation’s Housing," a report produced every year by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The 2026 edition, out June 17, is sobering.

According to data released earlier this year, nearly half of all renters paid more than that in 2024, as did 24 percent of homeowners. (A quarter of all rental households spent more than half of their income on housing.)

Median upfront costs, including a security deposit, total about $3,700, said Alexander Hermann, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, but they can be far higher in some areas. In New York City, for example, before the rules were changed recently to curb broker fees for tenants, upfront costs averaged about $13,000.

“Insurance helps make homeownership possible and preserves hard-earned home equity when hazards strike,” Steve Koller, a postdoctoral fellow in climate and housing at the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, wrote in a 2024 blog post.

Public housing was started by the federal government in the 1930s as a way to get people out of overcrowded slums. The buildings were situated on “super blocks” closed off from the street grid to keep cars from driving through, and to keep children safe, said Alexander von Hoffman, a senior research fellow at Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

In 2024, the most recent year with reliable data from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half of all renter households in America — 22.7 million — were rent-burdened. That’s the highest number on record, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, up nearly 9 percentage points since 2001.