In the Media

Share of renter households spending more than half of their income on housing costs, by income level. Source: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Nearly one third of all households now spend more than a third of their income on housing - the standard cut-off for affordability - the highest level since 2015, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“I think it’s been a widespread issue that’s not just the high-cost areas,” said Daniel McCue, senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “It’s very much across the nation.” McCue pointed to Columbus, Ohio, as an example of a place where a historically stable market suddenly began to surge during the Covid pandemic, noting that Columbus had “somewhere around 40% growth in prices between 2021 and 2023 — something that hadn’t been seen in decades.”

“We just don’t have sufficient options that are affordable and accessible and well-connected to services for older adults,” said Jennifer Molinsky, who directs research on housing and ageing at Harvard’s joint center for housing studies.

Abbe Will, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies' Senior Research Associate & Associate Director of Remodeling Futures, joins Brad Smith on Wealth! to talk the interplay between the state of the US housing market and Americans' willingness to spend on home projects.

We’re talking more about multigenerational communities,” noted Jennifer Molinsky at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “And I think that there are a lot of people who want to be surrounded by people of all ages and have those daily interactions, and I do think we are seeing different organizations respond to that.”

Growing social isolation and skyrocketing housing costs are driving people across the country to look for new ways of living and “mutual support,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of Harvard’s Housing an Aging Society Program.

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies’ latest leading indicator of remodeling activity, or LIRA, suggests homeowner spending on renovations and repairs will fall to $449 billion this year. That would represent a roughly 7% drop from 2023.

Over half of renters were cost-burdened as of 2022, meaning they’re spending more than 30% of their income on rent, according to a report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Amid a historic housing supply shortage, a new working paper by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies posits that continuing to build more homes in the suburbs in the hope this will bring down hosing costs in cities may not be effective.