In the Media

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.

High insurance rates are now raising the cost of a home even more, creating yet another barrier to ownership. “Insurance functions like a glue that helps the housing finance system stick together,” wrote Steve Koller, postdoctoral fellow in climate and housing at the Joint Center for Housing at Harvard University. “In short, insurance helps make homeownership possible and preserves hard-earned home equity when hazards strike.”

Estimates of the national housing shortage vary widely, from 1.5 million houses and apartments to 20.1 million. Most experts estimate a shortage of 1.5 million to 5.5 million, according to Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

A rising number of seniors are “cost burdened” when it comes to housing, according to a 2023 study by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. About 11 million older adult households spend at least 30 percent of their income on housing and utilities, up from 8.8 million in 2011. Older women feel this economic stress more keenly, because they have less saved for retirement then men.

"[Point Access Blocks] are well suited to small- and medium-scale parcels, and with one less stair, and way less hallway, can achieve much higher floor plan efficiencies than their double-loaded counterparts," a 2024 report on Boston's market from Utile, Inc. and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies states bluntly.