In the Media

Homeowner remodeling spending has declined since 2022, however, a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University expects it to pick up in 2025. Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies associate director of the remodeling futures program Abbe Will joins Wealth! to discuss the projection and how homeowners are managing the housing market.

The median price of a single-family house in the Boston metropolitan area soared 40 percent over the past five years, according to March 2024 data from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. (The median is the price at which half the homes are more expensive and half are less.)

About 45 million Americans rent homes with a record high 22.4 million households spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities in 2022, according to a study by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Nationwide, rent prices have risen by 21% since January 2021, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. Home prices are on the rise, too.
In early 2024, home prices hit an all-time record, rising 6.4% from February 2023 to 2024, according to a new report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Higher rents mean that even temporary income losses can be too much for tenants to ride out: About a quarter of renter households in America spend 50% or more of their income on housing, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Asking prices for rentals jumped in the aftermath of the pandemic and have since cooled, but the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies found in its most recent report that half of renters were “cost burdened” because they spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities.

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."