In the Media

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Black applicants who are granted mortgages face higher interest rates, paying more than white homeowners with lower incomes, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University has found.

According to numbers from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard, homeowners need to make $48,000 more than they did even a year ago just to afford the average Greater Boston home.

"Just 1 in 4 income-eligible renters receives rental assistance, and with nearly 20 million cost-burdened renter households there just isn't enough support to go around... That's part of why we're in the current crisis, that incomes just aren't high enough to keep up with the rent increases and there just isn't enough support" says Whitney Airgood-Obrycki.

Home prices and rents hit record highs last year and prospective home buyers need to earn $181,254 to afford a home in Greater Boston — double the region's median income — according to a new housing report from Harvard.