In the Media

After three years of 6% to 7% growth, the home renovation market is now projected to stop growing and even shrink by the fourth quarter of this year, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA), a quarterly measure of remodeling activity by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

As household incomes decline due to unprecedented job losses, mortgage payments will be difficult or impossible for millions of people, writes JCHS Senior Fellow Rachel Bratt.

With millions of homeowners predicted to start missing payments, the industry says it needs an immediate lifeline to head off servicer failures that could trigger nothing less than the collapse of the housing market.

Three decades ago, only about 20% of US homeowners 65 and over had mortgage debt, according to the Joint Center. Economists calculate that about 40% of older Americans today have housing debt.

The months ahead could bring a construction slowdown caused by a skittish luxury market, while landlords could face their own cash crunches as renters default, said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a research associate at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that in 2019 in California, 35% of renters ages 65 to 79, and 42% of renters 80 or older, were rent-burdened, meaning that more than half of their incomes went to housing. The job losses and economic strains resulting from the coronavirus crisis are placing many more at risk of losing their homes.

According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, a quarter of the nation’s 44 million renter households paid more than half their income in rent in 2018.

A 2019 report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing studies found that California has the highest share of households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, while 42 percent of Californians are struggling to make ends meet.

Nearly half of Twin cities renters pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing, and more than half of area households earning less than $30,000 a year pay more than half their income for rent, according to a report in January from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

Millions of workers in the United States live paycheck to paycheck. According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, 18.2 million U.S. families pay more than 50 percent of their income on housing.