In the Media

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.

Taken together, the sheer volume of Massachusetts’ regulations can drive up the total cost of construction in significant ways. For example, a report by Boston Indicators suggests that the requirement for two stairwells along with other fire safety regulations can result in the use of a construction style that adds 15 to 25 percent to the cost of a project.

“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.