Harvard researchers document the increasing costs and challenges of finding housing for both renters and owners
A new report from one of the nation’s premiere housing research groups confirms what many of us already know: residential real estate is pulling further away from ordinary Americans, becoming more expensive, less attainable, and increasingly stymying efforts to make a market that works for everyone.
The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025, from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, lays out the numbers in stark detail.
- Home prices hit a new all-time high in 2024, with the median at $412,500.
- A borrower would need an annual income of at least $126,700 to afford a mortgage payment on a home of that price, using the traditional lender ratio of 31% debt to income.
- As of 2023, only 6 million of the nation’s nearly 46 million renters can meet this benchmark.
- A whopping half of all renters are “cost-burdened” as of 2023, the most recent data available, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities. That includes the 27% who spend more than half of their income on those expenses.
What those numbers actually look like can be seen in the charts below.
Do young people complain too much about the high cost of housing? Americans have always stretched to buy their homes, and many older people remember when mortgage rates were in the double digits. But by one measure, conditions have rarely been this challenging.
The median-priced home was five times greater than the median household income in 2024, according to the report, “significantly” above the ratio of three times, which has traditionally been a rough rule of thumb about what’s affordable. Going back to 1990, the only other period in which the ratio was this high was 2005, at the height of the subprime bubble.
Of course, one of the oldest truths about housing is that all real estate is local. Even now, there are plenty of places where dollars stretch further. Consider: a borrower would need an income of $595,389 to afford the median-priced home in the San Jose, California metro area, which is just over $2 million. But you could pick up a typical home in Waterloo-Cedar Falls, Iowa, or Charleston, West Virginia, for one-tenth that amount.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that it’s not just homes for purchase that are pulling out of reach. The rent is still too darn high for far too many Americans.
There are some policies that may help alleviate high costs, Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, told USA TODAY.
Zoning tends to be the first point of friction. Allowing multifamily housing in places that are zoned for single family only can ease that. But the reform needs to go beyond that change.
“We can make building as easy as possible,” Airgood-Obrycki said, “but for people at the bottom of the market who are severely rent burdened and have been over time, new construction really isn’t going to solve their problem.”
That is where federal and state subsidies, in the form of vouchers and public housing, can be helpful, Airgood-Obrycki added.
The Harvard report reminds readers that “cost burdens” have a human toll: in January 2024, 771,480 people were homeless, up a whopping 33% since January 2020.
