In the Media

In some housing markets rents are up 20-30% over last year, according to Whitney Airgood-Obrycki of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

While more Black and Latino borrowers have turned to risky lenders as a solution, such forms of financing are not designed to build equity for homeowners, said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

The number of households occupied by people in their 80s is projected to more than double to 17.5 million in 2038, from 8.1 million in 2018, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. And many of them will be women, who outlive men in the United States by an average of five years.

As Carlos Martín, the director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me, energy efficiency upgrades are climate mitigation steps; they would help reduce future emissions to make the crisis less severe.

A survey Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies Remodeling Futures Program and the Farnsworth Group conducted in September found that 43% of the renters surveyed said they were worried their home had a negative impact on their health, safety, or well-being.

“The younger boomers were hit especially hard in the Great Recession, many losing their homes close to retirement,” said Jennifer Molinsky, project director for the Aging Society Program at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

While the economy shrank by 3.5 percent, spending on home improvements increased by 3 percent in 2020, according to a study from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

In 2020, more than 7 million households moved to a different county as many people moved from big cities to the suburbs, an increase of half a million compared to 2019. But the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found that these upticks in early and late 2020 did not represent "a significant change from prior years in the total number of moves."

“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.

This shifting view of tech’s impact on the urban landscape was a key thread running through a recent symposium at Harvard, ​​Bringing Digitalization Home, which explored how tech can help or hinder progress on housing affordability and discrimination. The question of technological innovation and housing has long been a topic of interest for David Luberoff, deputy director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.