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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Marketwatch

How the pandemic broke the yardstick for measuring home values

Inflation-adjusted home renovation expenditures rose to $312 billion in the first quarter of 2021, the third highest amount on record, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, sitting just below the fourth quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2007.

Marketplace

Hurricane Ida flooded their basement apartment. Months later, they’ve barely begun to recover.

“Unfortunately it’s a repeating story,” said Carlos Martín at the Brookings Institution and the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. “We see the most vulnerable people — this includes low-income people, people of color and people with mixed immigration status — living in precarious housing that is more likely to be damaged by these disasters.”

Philadelphia Weekly

The landlord’s lament

A report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and Penn’s Housing Initiative drives the point home: In 2019, 3.5% of landlords who responded to the survey said they had a rental property listed for sale. By 2020, it jumped to 21%. Deferred maintenance jumped from 5.4% to 36%.

MSN Money

Mom-and-Pop Landlords Hit Hardest by Pandemic, Face Toughest Recovery

A report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that smaller landlords were hurt the most by the eviction ban, with 20% reporting they were owed at least half of the rent they charged last year. By comparison, only 8% of midsized property management companies and 5% of large ones said the same.

Arizona Public Media

Affordable senior housing gets harder to find with pandemic

A 2019 report from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies said about a third of older households in Pima County are cost-burdened, meaning an inordinate amount of their income goes to housing and keeps them from spending money on other needs.

Wired

The ‘Broadband Gap’ Is Now a Housing Problem

A report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimated as many as 4.8 million Black and Hispanic households were spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

ABC News

Eviction confusion, again: End of US ban doesn't cause spike

Many property owners were more willing to offer concessions during the pandemic, waiving late fees and sometimes reducing or forgiving rent, according to a synthesis of two recent studies of mostly small landlords carried out by the Terner Center of Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.