In the Media

When it comes to insulating the two enterprises and borrowers from climate-related catastrophe, the Federal Housing Finance Agency — which regulates Fannie and Freddie — has issued only vague guidance. “It came out and I thought, where’s the rest of it?” said Carlos Martín, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

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 biggest bump in housing unaffordability last year was among homeowners who are dealing with a triple whammy: elevated interest rates, extremely high housing costs, and insurance rates that have increased, says Harvard research analyst Peyton Whitney.

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.

In Texas, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia, immigrants make up more than half of construction trade workers, according to Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Spending more than 30% of your income on rent, also known as being cost-burdened, is becoming more common for workers across income levels, according to a 2024 report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.