In the Media

“Property is nine-tenths of the law, says the cliche, so renters are screwed,” said Carlos Martín, project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. But, Martín continued, lots of renters want to see climate-focused improvements to their homes.

Miami has more “cost-burdened renters” than any other major metropolitan area, with 60% of its population spending 30% or more of household income on housing, according to a report released this year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Soaring costs mean a family needs to earn more than $181,000 to buy a typical house in Greater Boston, according to data compiled by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. That’s nearly twice the region’s median household income of $93,537.

“There’s very little area in most markets that’s zoned for anything other than single family homes on relatively large lots,” Chris Herbert of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies said. “And so it’s just very hard to build housing anywhere close to the center of urban areas, because most areas are built out.”

A buyer paying the median price ($660,000) for home in Greater Boston needs to earn more than $181,000 a year, nearly twice the region’s median household income, according to a recent study by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“That’s not to say that the supply story isn’t important,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. “But it’s intersecting with other factors that are driving housing prices up.”

The plight of this group is perhaps best summed up in one stunning figure: Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimated earlier this year that families need to earn a combined $188,400 to afford the median-priced home on the Cape, about $7,000 more than what’s needed in Greater Boston.

Housing payments for home buyers and renters spiked in 2021, but higher levels of construction and reduced competition for homes may ease the pressure later this year and in 2023, according to “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2022” report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Builders were completing units at an unusually rapid 349,000-per-year rate in early 2022, about 1.2 times the prepandemic pace, based on estimates in a report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.

"Twenty years ago, it was about 1 percent of older adults were house-sharing with a nonrelative. Today, it's over a million older adults, more than double the number in that time," says Jennifer Molinsky of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.