In the Media

People in this group often face the reality that “it’s more expensive to get a smaller condo than the single family you’re selling — and that presumes the condo exists, which may not be the case,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard University.

The income required to afford a home in, for example, the middle-third of the New York City area market in September 2019 was about $117,450, assuming a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, according to an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Nationally, “household growth and new construction have been essentially coincident for the last seven or eight years,” said Chris Herbert, of Harvard. “Typically, housing construction exceeds household formation by about 20 percent, because we’re always removing housing that has outlived its useful life. We haven’t been doing that for a long time. Just by that very simple measure, we’re not building enough.”

“New England is predicted by some as being a receiver community,” said Carlos Martín, a project director at the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “I’m a little more skeptical of that because I think there are going to be places like Atlanta and Orlando that can continue to receive more population because they’re closer to where people want to be.”

“When you look at that mortgage transaction, you're really at the end of a long string of other factors that discriminate against people of color that have created obstacles to owning homes as well,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

More than a third of US households are renters, or some 44 million people, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Most of those houses were bought for cheap after the 2008 housing crash, then turned into rentals. This national trend picked up pace through the pandemic, with institutional investors buying a record share of single-family homes — more than a third of sales in some cities.

Housing in Greater Boston is expensive and has gotten significantly more so over the past year. As the Report Card notes, renters in the region―who already pay some of the highest rents in the country―saw asking rents on the typical unit increase 11 percent in the past 12 months.

Despite efforts to build new units, there still aren't enough to meet the demand. Rent and home prices have skyrocketed. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, households now need an income of at least $181,254 to afford to buy a median-priced home in Greater Boston.

"It's not easy or clear-cut,” says JCHS senior research associate Abbe Will. “We see headwinds, but there are tailwinds too.”