In the Media

Almost nine out of 10 Americans 65 and older lived in their own home in 2021, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said it is also possible that mortgage rates will fall just enough to lure more buyers into the market, but not more sellers. “A lot of the mortgage holders are still holding mortgages that are pretty far below market,” he said. “Almost 75% of them have an interest rate below five, and one out of every five mortgage holders has an interest rate below three.”

What can an annual outlay of $100 million (the PRO budget for next year) do to solve a problem as big as a deficit of 3 million homes? “State and local governments look at each other all the time, so those little examples can bear a lot of fruit,” said Chris Herbert, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard and a fan of the program. “There’s not a lot of money out there, but these grants can become an example for other places.”

Severely cost-burdened tenant households (those putting 50 percent or more of their paycheck toward rent) are also at record numbers, increasing in rank by 1.5 million since 2019 and now surpassing 12 million households. This should hardly be a surprise, because while median rents have risen 21 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2001, median renter household incomes have risen just 2 percent.

Outsourcing development to the private market leaves affordable housing subject to the boom-and-bust cycle of private investment. What’s more, the federal government relinquishes the oversight needed to protect tenants from abusive landlords and racial discrimination. The result is a housing market where corporate landlords make record profits while half of America’s 44 million renters struggle to pay rent.

In the Minneapolis metro area, the median home once cost about 2.4 times the median income. Now that ratio has risen to nearly 4.

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.