After a mild pullback over the previous year, spending for improvements and repairs on owner-occupied homes is set to expand once again by the middle of next year.
With funding from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 19 students from across Harvard will work on issues related to housing and community development this summer.
Annual expenditures for improvements and repairs to owner-occupied homes are projected to decrease this year and into the first quarter of 2025, but at a moderating rate.
For over three decades, Dr. Margot Kushel has both cared for people who experience homelessness and studied the causes, consequences, and solutions to homelessness.
Climbing rents have propelled cost burdens to staggering new heights: in 2022, half of all US renters were cost burdened. The number of renter households spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities rose by 2 million in just three years to a record high of 22.4 million.
Spending for residential improvements and repairs is expected to shrink this year for the first time since 2010, but signs point to some easing of declines by year’s end.
The US population 65 and over soared by 34 percent in the last decade, from 43 million in 2012 to 58 million in 2022. In the coming decade, the fastest growth will occur among those over 80, when people are more likely to need accessible housing as well as services and supports at home. The US, however, is not ready to provide housing and care for this surging population.
