In the Media

Allowing single-stairway four-to-six-unit buildings could stimulate the construction of badly needed new housing, especially in already-developed neighborhoods near public transportation and commercial areas. A study of the Boston area estimated that such a building code change had the potential to create 130,000 new homes simply by developing the vacant parcels within walking distance of transit.

Alexander Hermann is a housing researcher at Harvard and he says it boils down to supply and demand. "If you look back at the Great Recession and the housing boom and then the bust of the mid-2000s, a number of single-family home builders and a number of multi-family developers left the center all together, and one result of that is low levels of housing construction for a period of 15 years."

18% of Americans 65 and older were living in multigenerational homes as of 2021. Part of this could be from a lack of affordable alternatives; 13% of Americans over 75 could afford a median-priced nursing home, and 14% could afford daily home health visits, according to a 2023 study from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Even without an affordability provision in the law, towns and cities in Massachusetts are still able to include affordable housing in development plans because of inclusionary zoning (IZ). IZ programs can be mandatory or voluntary, and aim to help spur the construction of affordable housing. Nearly 75% of the IZ programs in Massachusetts are mandatory, according to a 2021 study by The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Compared with other cities nationwide, rising home prices in the Miami area have outpaced household income, said Alexander Hermann, a senior research associate at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Miami’s median sale price is roughly eight times higher than its median household income—up from six before the pandemic and higher than the typical ratio of five in other parts of the country.

"One big trend in housing for older adults in particular is the integration of services that support health, whether that means service coordination, or care coordination, or just understanding that isolation can be very unhealthy,” said Jennifer H. Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Ideally, communities would have a post-disaster recovery plan in place before disaster strikes, says Carlos Martín, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. But for many communities that have taken centuries to establish, including big cities like Los Angeles, “the vision is to stay the course,” Martín says.

Rising rents are a problem for many families. From 2021 to 2023, the median U.S. rent increased 25%, adjusted for inflation, according to research from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. During the same period, renters’ median household incomes rose only 5%, the study found. Rising costs are especially hard on active-duty service members’ families.

Approximately 6.7 million Americans lived in homes with "moderately or severely inadequate housing with multiple physical deficiencies" as of 2021—from mold to pests to cooling and heating system failures—according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. Per the legislation's press release, these issues disproportionately affect low-income households and communities of color, in turn magnifying health, safety economic disparities.

According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 22.4 million renter households, representing about half of renter households, are rent-burdened — meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent. And some 12.1 million households were “severely” rent burdened, meaning they spent more than half of their incomes on rent.