In the Media

Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies — which forecasts spending on home remodeling and repairs, including in outdoor spaces — anticipates this downward trend will endure for the rest of 2024. Still, says Abbe Will, associate director of the center’s Remodeling Futures Program, it’s important to keep in mind that everything is relative.

The early years of the pandemic were a bonanza for home renovations, said Carlos Martín at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Since then? “Well, it’s been a wild ride,” he said. Mortgage rates were at record lows, and people were stuck at home with a lot of extra time and extra money to tinker around the house. He said spending on home renovations spiked in 2021 and 2022. “Now what we’re going through is a correction and a stabilizing,” Martín said.

Researchers at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reported millennials are leaving urban areas at a rate similar to previous generations, even though they’re living in the city at a greater rate than Baby Boomers and Gen Xers did at their age.

In 2022, the median sale price for a single-family home was 5.6 times higher than the median household income, higher than any point on record dating back to the 1970s, according to a 2024 report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The bill’s reintroduction comes as the nation faces an unprecedented shortage of affordable housing. In 2022, a record half of all Americans spent more than 50% of their income on rent, a January report from Harvard University found.

A new report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that in 2022, a record half of U.S. renters were “cost burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. About 27% of renter households spent more than half of their income on housing.

A record 22.4 million renter households are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities as evictions and homelessness surge, according to a recent report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

It’s easy to feel defeated by the American housing system’s dysfunction. But The State of Housing Design, a book that the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard (JCHS) published in October last year, shows how new architecture is grappling with these realities.

Rent reached historic highs in 2021 and 2022, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University report found. And currently, more Americans are burdened by rent than ever before. Harvard defines "cost-burdened households" as those that spend more than 30% of income on rent and utilities.

The nation's overall housing supply already faces a severe shortage and challenges, according to the report America's Rental Housing 2024 by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), as the number of renter households spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities has reached a new high of 22.4 million, while the median age of renters is now 44.