In the Media

“People get expectations rooted in their mortgage payments or in their psychology and they just don’t sell,” says Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Millions have been priced out of the market due to high housing costs and interest rates, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 2024, the national median single-family home price grew to five times the median household income, according to the center.

Most older Americans want to age in place, electing to remain in their homes rather than move into senior housing facilities, according to a 2024 survey by AARP, the advocacy organization focused on older Americans. Yet fewer than 4 percent of American homes have basic accessibility features. “It’s a really dire situation,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

There is no one solution to the housing crisis in Maine. That's the message of Dr. Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and keynote speaker at a conference of real estate professionals in Portland this week.

“We need alternatives,” says Jennifer Molinsky of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. And people are coming up with them. About 990,000 older adults were living with unrelated housemates or roommates in 2023, which is up 8.8% since 2021, and more than double the number two decades ago, according to Harvard’s Joint Center.

Momentum in the housing market — driven, in part, by falling mortgage rates — could boost consumer spending on home improvements in 2026, new research out from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies finds. “We think that’s going to help unlock some of the pent-up demand from buyers and get a few of them off the sidelines,” said Rachel Drew.

Another issue with aging in place is the lack of American housing stock that is safe and accessible for seniors. Only 1 percent is wheelchair accessible, making falls more of a risk, said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

A 2024 report by Boston Indicators, Utile, and the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, suggests that in Greater Boston alone, an additional 130,000 new homes could be built if single-stair construction were allowed in four- to six-story buildings.

What might be more valuable than fixating on any one shortage estimate, said Daniel McCue, a researcher at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, is to look at all the estimates together and appreciate that, by and large, they’re all huge. “Whether it’s 1.5 million or 5.5 million, these are big numbers,” he said.

During and after the pandemic, rural areas and small metros have seen disproportionate increases in home prices, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, leaving families everywhere worse off.