In the Media

“As cost burdens show up in places where we don’t expect it, there seems to be more political momentum around addressing these problems,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, senior research associate at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A record 21.6 million U.S. households are rent-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent.

Nearly half of renters — an estimated 49% — are cost burdened, according to a recent report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Homeownership remains one of the the largest wealth generators in the United States, according to a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, and lack of funds for a down payment is often the greatest barrier to buying a home.

Rent in California is becoming increasingly difficult to afford, and low-rent units are harder to find. Sophia Wedeen, a research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, wrote in a blog post that the supply of rental units in California that are priced below $1,400 per month has gone down between 2011 and 2021.

According to Sophia Wedeen, a research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, some of the problems laid out in the report can be remedied with subsidies like housing vouchers. “Housing assistance is really effective and wonderful for the households who get it, and obviously, there's not nearly enough funding,” Wedeen said in an interview with Motherboard.

A new Harvard study confirms what most Californians can plainly see: housing is getting increasingly unaffordable in the Golden State, despite more people leaving. In their 2023 State of the Nation’s Housing report, researchers with Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies note that the market for both for-sale and rental houses has cooled, though homeowners and renters face costs above pre-pandemic levels.

Naturally occurring affordable housing is basically cheap enough for low-income people to afford it without a government subsidy. “These tend to be older units, units in some cases that might not be particularly desirable in terms of the location or the kind of amenity value of those units,” explained Alex Hermann, a housing researcher at Harvard.

“There’s a larger number of existing mortgage holders with record-low interest rates. So if you have a mortgage with an interest rate in threes or low fours, you’re less inclined to take on mortgages with rates in the sixes today,” Alexander Hermann, a research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, which recently released a report on the state of the nation’s housing, said.

The decline in home buyers wishing to renovate hasn’t put a dent in overall spending on remodeling. In fact, the market for homeowner improvement and repair projects in the U.S. is projected to reach $484 billion in 2023, up from $471 billion last year and $328 billion in 2019, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.