In the media

City street at sunset

Our research is regularly cited in national and local news outlets; below is some of our recent press coverage.

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Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

Rent

From 1990-2019, the US added 13.3 million rental units. However, the number of those renting at the lowest end of the market fell by 3.7 million.

The Boston Globe

This would-be candidate hoped to address Boston’s housing crisis — but was priced out before the campaign started

But Black political hopefuls hoping to kickstart their careers outside Boston face an uphill battle to secure elected office in the suburbs, said Sharon Cornelissen, a postdoctoral fellow who has studied the migration of Black Bostonians at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “Just because people are displaced to suburban cities doesn’t mean they’ll get political power,” Cornelissen said. “It hasn’t been transferred from the wealthy, white old-timers to the new groups that have made a home.”

The New York Times

When the Best Available Home Is the One You Already Have

By 2019, there were actually 3.6 million fewer renters who had moved in the previous year than in 2006. “That’s a precipitous decline,” said Riordan Frost, who studies mobility at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. “It’s really only going to get lower as people are unable to afford the asking rent” on a new unit.

PBS NewsHour

In California, tenants of a mobile home park try — but fail — to stop a corporate takeover

A 2019 report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University noted that an existing challenge for groups attempting to implement affordable housing methods in communities is the vast financial resources of private investors who can move more quickly to complete a purchase, compared to community development groups who must jump bureaucratic hurdles to secure funding.

The Boston Globe

Priced out of the city, Black Bostonians are finding their dream homes on the South Shore

“We see this pattern of displacement out of Boston, and so it is changing the face of the city as we know it,” said Sharon Cornelissen, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, who has been researching the migration of Black residents from Dorchester to communities south of Boston, specifically Brockton.