In the Media

According to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, construction material costs have skyrocketed in recent years, adding to a wide range of conditions that are slowing the production of rental housing.

"When households are spending more on rent, it means they have less left over for everything else,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, senior research associate for the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies. The report found low-income renters have just $210 left after paying rent and utilities each month.

Less attention has been given to the full-blown crisis facing renters. A new report out Thursday from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies shows exactly how bad it’s gotten. Almost half of all renters were burdened by high costs in 2024, meaning they spent more than a third of their incomes on rent, a sign of financial distress.

Home prices have ⁠risen 60% since 2019, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, and the median price of a single-family home in 2024 reached five times the median household income, well above the ratio widely considered to be affordable.

Americans are on track to spend a record $522 billion on home renovations in 2026, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

According to a 2025 report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, over a third of older households paid “more than 30 percent of their income for housing.”

“Housing is the largest building sector in the U.S.,” wrote the authors of a report in 2023 by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard. “Yet it might well be the one that imposes the greatest constraints on design and innovation.”

In 2024, families needed an income of $126,700 to qualify for a median-price home, up from $79,600 in 2021, Chris Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. “That priced 8 million renters out of the market,” he said, noting that most renters make $50,000 to $60,000 a year.

Rent control has been banned in Massachusetts for more than three decades. But a proposed 2026 ballot question could change that, if voters decide to cap annual rent increases at 5% — at most — across the state. Alexander von Hoffman, lecturer in urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design, joined GBH’s All Things Considered guest host Saraya Wintersmith to break down what it all means.

Some 9 million people in the U.S. get federal housing assistance, and the cost of rent is unaffordable for large numbers of Americans.