In the Media

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.

A record number of U.S. renter households — 21.6 million, or nearly half of all the nation’s tenants — were spending 30% or more of their income on housing in 2021, according to a new analysis from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A more diverse older population, increasingly without close family connections and often hard hit during market downturns like the 2008 recession, means the number of affordable units needed for future seniors is “daunting,” said Jennifer Molinsky of Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies.

When people have to spend so much on rent, they have less to save for a down payment to buy a house, per Alexander Hermann, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “They’re also spending less on food, less on school supplies, less on health care, clothes. Really it means less leftover for all other essentials,” he said.

Some of that household growth was accomplished by the largest generation in the nation’s history (i.e., Millennials) coming of age, according to Daniel McCue of JCHS, peaking a trend that had been building since 2016.