In the Media

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.

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.

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.

Bigger homes also are scarce because empty nesters are still in them, says Jennifer Molinsky of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Baby-boomer households without children living at home own an estimated 28 percent of the nation’s large houses with three or more bedrooms compared with just 14 percent of millennial households with children, despite this generation outnumbering its boomer counterparts.

High rents have also begun to affect those at middle-income levels as well. "Households earning $30,000 to $45,000 per year, the rates of cost burden have been rising faster than for lower-income or higher-income households," says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. "We've seen more and more moderate- and middle-income households feeling the burden."

“It’s pretty much an impossible market, even for middle-income households,” said Alexander Hermann, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. From April 2019 to April 2024 in counties where data is available, the median list price rose 55% to $102,850, according to an NBC News analysis of Redfin data.

As for renting, that is unaffordable for half of renters, according to a study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Which creates fertile ground for the phenomenon known as ... the Boomerang Kid. Many young adults are living with their parents because it makes so much financial sense, according to a new survey by financial services firm Thrivent. In fact, 46% of parents say their adult children have "boomeranged" back home at some point – and 50% of them say sky-high housing costs are to blame.