Press Releases

Homeowners are expected to increase spending on improvements across all 50 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas in 2018, according to new Metro Area Home Improvement Projections.

There are very few signs that slums will transition out of the urban landscape in the foreseeable future. Even after more than one and a half centuries of policy interventions, starting from efforts to address the effects of industrialization in Europe, slums persist in almost every geography on the planet.

Homeowners are expected to increase spending on improvements and repairs at a solid clip over the coming year, according to the latest Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA).

Since the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies first released its seminal State of the Nation’s Housing report in 1988, more than 40 million housing units have been built in the U.S., the country has added 27 million new households, and last year’s national homeownership rate of 63.9 percent was very close to the 64 percent rate of the late 1980s. At the same time, however, the number of Americans burdened by housing costs has risen by nearly 14 million households over the last 30 years, the number of households with student loan debt has nearly doubled, and the gap between black and white homeownership has widened.

Improving responses to natural disasters, preserving historic black communities in Seattle, providing affordable housing in California, and addressing the housing needs of refugees in Paris are among the 18 summer student fellowships and research projects being funded this year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS).

Harvard doctoral students studying the impact of climate change on housing prices, changes in rental housing markets after the Great Recession, and the impacts of forest conservation on housing prices in urbanizing rural areas have been named 2018 John R. Meyer Dissertation Fellows by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Cambridge, MA – The robust pace of spending on home renovations and repairs is expected to stay strong over the coming quarters, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA)

CAMBRIDGE, MA – The coming year is expected to be another robust one for residential renovations and repairs with growth accelerating as the year progresses

CAMBRIDGE, MA and WASHINGTON, DC – A decade of unprecedented growth in the rental housing market may be coming to an end, according to the 2017 America’s Rental Housing report

CAMBRIDGE, MA – Accelerating growth in residential improvement and repair expenditures is anticipated through the third quarter of 2018, according to the Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) released today by the Remodeling Futures Program at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. The LIRA projects that annual gains in home renovation and repair spending will increase from 6.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 to 7.7 percent by the third quarter of next year.