In the Media

“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.

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

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.

"When you think about low-income renters who are already reliant on social security to a greater degree than their higher-income peers, this is a big concern," says Jennifer Molinsky of the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“Renters typically have much less control over their housing costs,” said Jennifer Molinsky, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “And renters tend to have lower incomes and to rely more on Social Security, which is a concern if cost-of-living adjustments don’t keep up with rising rents.”

A steep cost increase means that about 4 million renter households who could have bought the median priced home last year could no longer do so twelve months later, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Annual rent growth there hit 11.6% at the end of 2021 and start of 2022, about three times what it was in the five years prior to the pandemic, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. "It’s a truly unprecedented market in a lot of ways,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Harvard housing center.