In the Media

The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University estimates that spending on home remodeling and maintenance will shrink throughout 2024 and into early 2025 — including a decrease of about 7% in each of the last two quarters of this year.

According to the latest annual report on the state of rental housing from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, half of the 22.4 million renting households in the U.S. were cost burdened, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent in 2022. Evictions also increased, along with homelessness.

Despite the relatively high homeownership rates in some states, the US is experiencing a historically difficult home affordability crisis. Home prices have jumped 47% since early 2020, growing faster than household income, according to a June report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

"Housing costs have been outpacing incomes since the 1960s," Chris Herbert, the managing editor for Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies told CBS News. "Why is that? Partly because of the fact that land, on which all homes sit, has been growing faster than incomes."

Despite lumber being relatively cheap, building material costs are up 30% compared to 2019, which means homes remain expensive, according to Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. A lot goes into building or remodeling a home, said Carlos Martín at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. “There are a wide range of other materials whose prices have gone up,” Martin said. “A lot of plastics, plastic-related products. There’s been some variability with steel.”

Still, it feeds into what is now one of the least affordable housing markets in U.S. history for both homeownership and renting. The housing cost burden has hit a record, according to a new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Home prices are now 47% higher than they were in early 2020, with the median sale price now five times the median household income, according to the study.

In past decades, it was common to find a house that cost roughly three times a buyer's annual income. But that ratio has skewed sharply since the COVID-19 pandemic, with home prices up a whopping 47% since early 2020. Median home sales prices last year were about five times the median household income, according to tabulations in a newly released report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, and there are signs it could get worse.

Millions of Americans are being priced out of home ownership, according to a new study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Chris Herbert, managing editor with the center, joins CBS News with more details on the research.

All of that has produced a rental affordability crisis that keeps growing worse. A record share of renters are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found recently, and more than 12 million households are spending more than half their income on rent. Affordability is no longer just a problem for the poor: The Harvard report found that rent is becoming a burden even among many households earning more than $75,000 a year.

It’s basic economics that when demand and prices rise — like, say, for rental housing — supply should go up too and bring prices back down. And yet, “rents are high,” said Daniel McCue, who researches housing at Harvard. He co-authored the new report, which found there is “very little relief in sight.” Particularly for lower-income renters, who have fewer and fewer options. “We saw the number of units with inflation-adjusted rents of $1,000 or less has gone down by 6 million [in the last decade]. So we’re losing the low-end rental stock,” he said.