In the Media

Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, notes that some urban areas may see even more demand.

“Unfortunately it’s a repeating story,” said Carlos Martín at the Brookings Institution and the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “We see the most vulnerable people — this includes low-income people, people of color and people with mixed immigration status — living in precarious housing that is more likely to be damaged by these disasters.”

A report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and Penn’s Housing Initiative drives the point home: In 2019, 3.5% of landlords who responded to the survey said they had a rental property listed for sale. By 2020, it jumped to 21%. Deferred maintenance jumped from 5.4% to 36%.

“We’re seeing fewer and fewer and fewer of these very big metropolitan business places that are affordable,” Raheem Hanifa said. “And Chicago was one of the last few that was on that list.”

A report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that smaller landlords were hurt the most by the eviction ban, with 20% reporting they were owed at least half of the rent they charged last year. By comparison, only 8% of midsized property management companies and 5% of large ones said the same.

A 2019 report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies said about a third of older households in Pima County are cost-burdened, meaning an inordinate amount of their income goes to housing and keeps them from spending money on other needs.

A report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimated as many as 4.8 million Black and Hispanic households were spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

Raheem Hanifa found that by June 2021, extremely-and -very low-income households with under 30 percent AMI, and between 30-50 percent AMI respectively, could not afford the median-priced home in any of the 100 largest US metro areas.

Many property owners were more willing to offer concessions during the pandemic, waiving late fees and sometimes reducing or forgiving rent, according to a synthesis of two recent studies of mostly small landlords carried out by the Terner Center of Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Multifamily construction is “robust” right now, says Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.