In the Media

A new Harvard University report finds that housing was unaffordable for a record half of renters in 2022. And a softening rental market might not help those who struggle most.

Half of American renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs — a key benchmark for affordability — with the financial strain rising the fastest for middle-class tenants. That’s according to a new report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, which found that the number of such renters, considered to be “cost-burdened,” hit a record 22.4 million in 2022 — up 2 million from just three years before.

Unaffordability in America has soared to new heights, a report released on Thursday by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies shows. Nationwide, half of all renters now spend more than 30% of their paycheck on rent and utilities, the center found after analyzing 2022 census data.

“A lot of that growth is coming from renters who are married, who have a college education and in some ways fit the profile of what would have been first-time home buyers,” says Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a rental-housing researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“We’re not just treading water — we’re falling further behind,” said Chris Herbert, the managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, which prepared the analysis at the request of The New York Times. “That was an eye-opener, even for me.”

But the post-pandemic years have delivered a financial double-whammy that has hit vulnerable Americans particularly hard. For one, government supports that helped people weather the economic turmoil of the pandemic drew to an end, cutting off funds and protections.

Secondly, rents have surged, pushing cost burdens for renters to their highest recorded level, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Almost 9 in 10 low-income households with incomes below $15,000 spent more than 30% of their income on housing in 2021, the analysis found.

Nearly two-thirds of households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes face “severe cost burdens,” meaning they pay more than half of their income for rent and utilities, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

By 2034, the Census Bureau projects that the US will be home to more people over 65 than people under 18. Finding safe and affordable housing for this fast-growing segment of the population is becoming an urgent task, according to a new report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The report, Housing America’s Older Adults, was issued by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS). It explores the many ways the housing stock of the U.S. has been built without the needs of older people in mind, from a lack of accessibility features for those with mobility challenges, to geographic isolation from services, to the sheer dearth of affordable housing for those with limited means.

“It's definitely an increase from before the pandemic,” says Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. “In the past decade, interstate migration seemed to kind of plateau a little bit. And then during the pandemic, it has increased, even as mobility overall has continued to go down.”