In the Media

Among renters 80 and older in the Boston metropolitan area, three out of five pay more than that, said Jennifer Molinsky, project director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. One of five pays more than half, she said. “Much of the assisted living [that’s available], and many of the retirement communities are for higher income people,” Molinsky said. “People in the middle really have very little choice if they want to move to a [new] place.”

From 2019 to 2021, the share of renters spending more than 30% of their income on housing rose 2.6 percentage points to 49%, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Between 2019 and 2021, the number of cost-burdened homeowners increased by 2.3 million households, to 19 million, according to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Unable to trade up to nicer digs, locked-in homeowners have invested more in fixing up their current homes. The rise of remote working has reinforced this trend, with people adding extra office space to their houses. Remodelling expenditures in 2022 reached nearly $570bn, or about 2% of gdp, up by 40% in nominal terms from 2019, according to the Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Extreme weather is putting more people at greater risk, including 60 million homes in areas that could expect at least moderate losses, according to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Harvard’s Improving America’s Housing Report shows that 34% of home improvement spending goes to energy-related projects, which has remained steady during the last decade.

“Even if people would want, in a perfect world, to move to a different place that didn’t have whatever-it-might-be laws, they’re kept in place by these bigger, more salient forces for them,” Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. “Even though there are abortion restrictions, people move because of affordability. Even though there are wildfires and more natural disasters in a place, people move because of affordability.”

In the US, it’s clear the future of aging will involve millions more people living alone, says Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society program at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A paper from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard studies looked into why landlords would want to keep their storefronts vacant. “We conclude that in the long run, a primary driver of retail vacancy in dense urban areas is the fact that landlords are willing to forgo rents today in order to preserve the option to lease their space to someone else (who might pay higher rents) tomorrow,” Erica Moszkowski, one of the study’s co-authors, explained.

A 2021 survey of renters in the U.S. found more than half of respondents said indoor air quality was their biggest source of concern among healthy housing issues. It ranked well above any other factor including pests, water quality and chemicals, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and the Farnsworth Group.