In the Media

Less than 4 percent of US homes had basic accessibility features in 2011, the latest available measure, according to JCHS. This puts pressure on grandparents raising children who have a disability, which is roughly a quarter of all grandparents raising children.

Why hasn’t more housing been built? The rising costs of labor and lumber are one reason, according to a recent report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The desire to purchase a home accelerated particularly fast among millennials who are now in their peak home-buying years, explained Alexander Hermann, a senior research analyst with the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

Individuals used to own two-thirds of apartment properties with five to 24 units. But from 2001 to 2015, that share fell to two-fifths, and researchers from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that as large, Wall Street-backed investors purchased the buildings, they raised rents more quickly.

With prices skyrocketing, homeownership is increasingly out of reach for many Black Americans. Is the end in sight and what solutions are possible to help people find a house they can afford?

“After you take into account that they may have these 18 months of payments, and insurance and property tax payments along with it, they’ll have less than 10 percent equity left in their house,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Even before COVID-19 struck, America was plagued by a lack of affordable homes, defined by the government as one that a household can rent for 30% or less of their income. A quarter of American renters pay more than half their incomes on rent, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies says.

In a healthy housing market, you'd have about six months of housing supply. According to a report last month from Harvard, there's currently less than two months of housing supply in the US, which is very, very tight.

Tight supply and continued strong demand from buyers has caused home prices to skyrocket, says Alexander Hermann, a research analyst and one of the lead authors of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2021 State of the Nation’s Housing report.

There were almost 610,000 single-family homes in Ohio in 2019 that were rented, or 17.3% of all homes in the state, a percentage that is in line with the US number, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.