In the Media

According to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, rent growth has slowed in recent months, but is still up 26% since early 2020. Recent data from the Census Bureau also shows that 21 million households — nearly half of all renters — were cost-burdened last year, meaning they spent more than a third of their income on rent.

Home prices have increased by 47% nationwide just since 2020, according to a June report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. A major factor is that there aren’t many homes for sale: Many current homeowners are reluctant to sell because they’re locked into historically low interest rates. Meanwhile, investors have gobbled up single-family starter homes, reducing the supply.

There’s not much incentive for homeowners who buy affordable units to invest in repairs since future sale prices are capped to keep these homes affordable from one owner to the next. Most affordable housing nonprofits or programs don’t have the resources to tackle these repairs, said Todd Swanstrom, a professor at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis who co-wrote a recent report on nationwide housing deterioration.

A report this summer by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found that despite a cooling rental market, the cost burdens for renters is at an all-time high nationwide.

The recent decrease in rates is equivalent to a 2 percent reduction in the price of the home, according to Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Middle-income renters have seen their rental burdens grow rapidly over the past two decades, according to a recent analysis of census data by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. Of course, poor people face more-severe rent burdens than middle-income renters, and their lives are more precarious...

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimates that almost a million people over the age of 65 now live with unrelated housemates. Roommate finder sites have seen an influx of older users, with SpareRoom experiencing its fastest growth among that cohort. And one-in-four roommates in the US is aged 45 or above, according to the site, a figure that’s more than doubled in the past decade.

The Harvard research estimates that a single-family home in the Boston metropolitan area in March 2024 was on average $705,000. The researchers used an affordability formula to estimate that homebuyers therefore need an annual income of $217,000 to buy a median-priced single-family home in Boston.

Housing has for several years been the most common reason for moving, and housing in America’s biggest and richest blue cities is consistently the least affordable. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, among the cities with the highest median price-to-income ratios in 2023, nine of the top 10 were in California or Hawaii. The five cities with the most cost-burdened renters and owners were Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, Honolulu, and Oxnard, followed by Riverside, Bakersfield, the New York metro area, and Fresno.

High housing costs are pushing more Americans to find roommates, including baby boomers and empty nesters. Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing and Aging Society Program at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, discusses this trend on the radio program, On Point.