In the Media

US seniors living with non-relatives have now topped 1mn, roughly doubling since 2006, according to Samara Scheckler at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “Housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable for older adults and more are carrying mortgages into later life, so putting somebody into the house can be a way to manage that,” she tells me.

Forty-nine percent of all improvement spending is now for necessary replacements like HVAC that owners can’t delay, said Rachel Drew, director of Harvard’s Remodeling Futures Program.

"Older adults are more likely to be housing-cost burdened than working-age adults, and that gets more severe with age," said Jennifer Molinsky, who researches aging and housing at the center. "It's climbed up the income scale. So more and more middle-income people are struggling with housing costs than ever before."

Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, zoomed out to numbers that show slowing growth across the country. That national fall is also driven by immigration. And Frost said the Census Bureau is projecting an even bigger drop. The new estimates, he pointed out, stop tracking any changes nine months ago.

Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me that “the promise of the Sun Belt has often been more affordability and economic opportunity. But as that wanes, that could discourage people.”

In Greater Boston, large numbers of working- and middle-class residents have become “forever renters.” For couples and families of all races and backgrounds, immigrant and native-born, the price of homes, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, is many times what they can pay. For them, the American dream of homeownership is only a dream.

Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, senior researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies who testified as a neutral expert, said studies have found regulations on rental prices are associated with a drop in rental supply. She also said evidence suggests the policy has little effect on new construction and, in Massachusetts, the end of rent control in 1994 didn’t have a significant impact on building trends.

Austin is one beneficiary of a boom in development over the past few years. In 2024, 608,000 multifamily units were constructed, the highest annual volume since 1986, researchers at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies explained in their report, America's Rental Housing 2026.

Demand for rental housing is driven primarily by U.S. citizens, but immigrants have long been a key subset of renters: They headed 9.6 million renter households (21%) in 2024, according to the recently published America’s Rental Housing report by the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. Researchers also note that immigrants contribute to the economy and pay taxes, supporting the communities they live and work in.

As retirees struggle with affordability – more than a third are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, Harvard’s housing studies team found – poor financial decisions about their mortgage can have a significant impact on their month-to-month finances.