In the Media

While nearly 11 million tenants–a quarter of the US’s tenant households–qualify as “extremely low income,” earning 30 percent of AMI, and while the median tenant made just $40,500 a year in 2018, the vast majority of Affordable Housing built through all mechanisms targets higher income thresholds.

President Joe Biden is seeking to ease a national affordable housing shortage by pushing local governments to allow apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes.

Despite the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, home renovation spending increased 3% last year to $271 billion, according to a new report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. This year, JCHS is forecasting spending will reach $281 billion.

Home remodeling spending rose from approximately $332 billion in the third quarter of 2020 to an estimated $339 billion in the fourth quarter, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The US economy retracted 3.5 percent last year, but home improvement spending increased nationally by 3 percent to nearly $420 billion, according to a report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Total spending on home and yard improvements is actually expected to decline by 1 percent this year in Greater Boston, according to Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies, which has compiled data on remodeling expenditures for more than 25 years.

In 2019, according to Harvard’s 2020 State of the Nation’s Housing report, 37.1 million households — or roughly 30 percent of all American households — were “housing cost burdened,” meaning that they spent 30 percent or more of their income on housing.

“We need both more rental assistance as well as more funding to expand the supply of affordable housing,” said Jennifer Molinsky, senior research associate at the Harvard center.

As the aging of the nation accelerates, most communities need to do much more to become age-friendly, said Jennifer Molinsky, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.

“The housing stock has not been growing as fast as demand,” says Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at the Center. “Construction has been so low for so long that we’ve seen kind of a constriction of opportunities to buy homes.”