In the Media

According to a new Harvard report, rising interest rates are just one of the factors pushing housing towards an inflection point.

From 1990-2019, the US added 13.3 million rental units. However, the number of those renting at the lowest end of the market fell by 3.7 million.

“Record-breaking home price appreciation, solid home sales, and high incomes are all contributing to stronger remodeling activity in our nation’s major metros, especially in the South and West,” said Sophia Wedeen, a researcher in the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

But Black political hopefuls hoping to kickstart their careers outside Boston face an uphill battle to secure elected office in the suburbs, said Sharon Cornelissen, a postdoctoral fellow who has studied the migration of Black Bostonians at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “Just because people are displaced to suburban cities doesn’t mean they’ll get political power,” Cornelissen said. “It hasn’t been transferred from the wealthy, white old-timers to the new groups that have made a home.”

The other thing that’s making buying less affordable is home prices — up by double digits since last year and far outpacing income gains, said Daniel McCue, senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

By 2019, there were actually 3.6 million fewer renters who had moved in the previous year than in 2006. “That’s a precipitous decline,” said Riordan Frost, who studies mobility at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. “It’s really only going to get lower as people are unable to afford the asking rent” on a new unit.

A 2019 report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University noted that an existing challenge for groups attempting to implement affordable housing methods in communities is the vast financial resources of private investors who can move more quickly to complete a purchase, compared to community development groups who must jump bureaucratic hurdles to secure funding.

“It’s becoming more prevalent in Massachusetts and everywhere,” said Adam Travis, a Harvard doctoral candidate studying rental housing and the private market. “More and more rental properties are coming to be owned not by individuals, but by companies, by business entities.’’

“We see this pattern of displacement out of Boston, and so it is changing the face of the city as we know it,” said Sharon Cornelissen, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, who has been researching the migration of Black residents from Dorchester to communities south of Boston, specifically Brockton.

"We absolutely need to be looking under every stone for places that we can add housing ... to allow for greater density," said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.