In the Media

The rental market in many metropolitan areas has been tightening for years as house hunters from Denver to Boston find themselves priced out of soaring property markets and joining the ranks of renters.

An eviction crisis isn't new for the United States. Even before the pandemic, renters of color were already more likely than white renters to have high rent burdens, to be threatened with eviction and to experience homelessness.

The remodeling market was slowing down even before COVID-19, says Abbe Will, a research associate at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The industry grew 4.7% annually in 2019, a little lower than the historic average.

Chris Herbert, managing director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, also called for increasing the supply of affordable housing. “It means we have to think about ways to expand the ability of the private sector to reach those people who are in the middle of the income distribution” — for example, looking at regulatory barriers that make it difficult for tiny homes to be built in Houston.

Even before COVID-19 struck, America faced its worst housing crisis in a century. According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, 20.5 million families already struggled to scrape the rent together, and only 1 in 4 eligible renter households received financial assistance.

An in-depth analysis by Don Layton, Senior Fellow at the Joint Center For Housing Studies at Harvard, calculates that the fees charged to lenders would need to increase by 20% to 40%, or 10 to 20 basis points.

In 2016, nearly half of all renter households were spending at least 30% of their incomes on rent, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Now, with more than 20 million people still out of work, the proportion of people struggling to pay each month is almost certainly higher—especially among lower-income earners, who have disproportionately been affected by recent layoffs.

Alex Hermann, research analyst at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, measures the fall of low-cost housing in the US. “From 2014 to 2018, the number of units renting for under $600 declined by about a half a million units per year on average. That’s about 2.7 million units in total,” he says.

A Q&A with JCHS Senior Industry Fellow and former Freddie Mac CEO Don Layton.

Despite a 14.7 percent unemployment rate and millions of new jobless claims each week, rent collections at many buildings are only slightly below where they were last year, when the economy was booming.