In the Media

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.

“Unaffordability is going to be here for a while,” said Chris Herbert, who runs the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. Even with a slight drop in mortgage rates, he said, “at the home price levels we’re at, it still means very few renters can afford to buy a home at that level.”

The construction labor shortage has been growing for about two decades, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Studies vary, but most estimates project that the United States needs to add around half a million people to the construction workforce for each of the next few years in order to meet housing demand.

Fewer people are becoming homeowners now than just a few years ago, said Daniel McCue, a senior research associate at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “The interest rates went down below 3% and we saw so many households take advantage of this,” he said.

“Now, across the country, prices are five times income in places like Boston … and in the high-cost markets in California, they’re 10 times income,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

By focusing on the Fed, Trump and his team hope to distract from their disastrous economic agenda. Trump and Pulte should be working to make housing more affordable, but instead they are driving prices skyward while proposing deep cuts to affordable housing programs. “High home prices and elevated interest rates reduced homebuying to its lowest level since the mid-1990s,” reports Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

“In Zurich there are millionaires who live in co-ops,” says Susanne Schindler, a research fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. For Americans, “cohousing that’s totally self-funded is fine, but the minute there’s some kind of public support, people start to look more closely.”

Rent control was banned in Massachusetts through a 1994 ballot referendum, and the Legislature over the years has shown little interest in reinstituting the policy. The majority of renters struggle to afford their rent, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies.

In 2023, half of renters in the U.S., or 22.6 million tenants, were “cost burdened,” meaning they were spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, according to a recent report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

In the 2010s, we heard a lot about young people opting for urban areas, notes Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. But now, he says, “more Millennials are suburbanizing than are not.”