In the Media

Spending on home-improvement and repair projects in the U.S. increased by an estimated 15% in 2022 to a record $567 billion, following an 11% increase in 2021, according to a report issued Thursday by Harvard’s housing studies center. Historical growth has averaged around 5%, says Ms. Will, the lead author.

Meanwhile, high-market renters — and even some in the middle tier — got a break in 2020. Those rents dropped and landlords offered incentives for new renters, noted Whitney Airgood-Obrycki of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “In the meantime, the middle- and lower-quality apartments just continued a steady rise,” she said.

“The number one thing that I’m seeing through my position as a researcher but also through my residence in the Boston area is that people seeking to downsize often have a hard time doing it if they want to stay in their community,” said Jennifer Molinsky, project director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

The drift of the relatively affluent toward renting is making the rental market a much more competitive place, said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a researcher at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Just between April 2021 and April 2022, as interest rates rose by 2 percentage points to hit 4.98%, the number of Black renter households that could afford to buy a median-priced home in the US slid by more than half, with monthly payments on a median-priced home up by several hundred dollars, according to Raheem Hanifa of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“The deterioration in affordability that we have seen over the last two years, even the last year, is frankly stunning,” said Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “It’s not that Boston was affordable before, but this has become a housing market for almost no one.”

“Right now, the study of resale value for any individual projects is much more of an art than a science,” said Carlos Martín, who follows the remodeling industry at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

For many, aging in place is about remaining in the home they have lived in and, in some cases, owned for decades, says lecturer in urban planning and design Jennifer Molinksy, who directs the JCHS’s Housing an Aging Society Program.

The 2022 State of the Nation’s Housing report from Harvard University revealed that the US housing supply is at a deficit of 3.8m homes.

In 2017, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies concluded that almost 44 percent of all households and slightly more than 27 percent of renter households in the New York–Newark–Jersey City metro could afford a median-priced home in their area.