In the Media

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Immigrants’ impact on the housing market has taken on new urgency as homebuying has become much more expensive, said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “It is important to acknowledge that immigrants play a role in household growth, and often a substantial role,” Frost said. “But what’s really defined the affordability crisis that we have had since the late 2010s and the pandemic has been native-born household growth.”

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.

The dwindling supply of low-rent units is only worsening cost burdens, according to a report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 2022, just 7.2 million units had contract rents under $600 — the maximum amount affordable to the 26 percent of renters with annual incomes under $24,000. This marks a loss of 2.1 million units since 2012 when adjusting for inflation.

Millions of people across the U.S. live in places that are falling into disrepair, even becoming uninhabitable, making a massive shortage of affordable housing worse. They are disproportionately lower-income and Black or Hispanic, and many are seniors on fixed incomes. But a patchwork of repair programs — federal, state, local and nonprofit — are largely underfunded, with years-long waitlists.

Here, at the housing court, is where the numbers that define that crisis — inflation, rising rents and property values, the scarcity of affordable housing units — become a painful reality. To buy a single-family home in Boston, you need a household income of $217,000, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.