In the Media

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.

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.

"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.

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.