JCHS Report Highlights ‘Uncertainty’ in Housing Market

CAMBRIDGE, MA — The nation’s housing market is “shrouded in uncertainty,” with elevated home prices and interest rates pushing sales to their lowest level in 30 years amid little indication that the record-high levels of unaffordability will ease anytime soon, housing analysts said this month.

According to The State of the Nation’s Housing 2025, an annual report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, state and local governments are ramping up efforts to tackle the affordable-housing crisis amid concerns about diminished federal supports, “but the increasing possibility of an economic downturn threatens to deepen these challenges.”

“There must be a concerted effort to do more to address the affordability and supply crises,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Cambridge, MA-based JCHS. “The potential consequences of inaction are simply too harmful to the macroeconomy and the millions of households striving for a safe, affordable place to call home.”

Among the key findings from the JCHS report were the following:

• Homeowners are increasingly burdened by rising housing costs, while the scale and frequency of climate disasters has prompted private insurers to not only raise premiums, but in some cases to reduce coverage or pull out of markets entirely. Property taxes, at the same time, have increased significantly.
• As of early 2025, home prices are up 60% nationwide since 2019, and are still rising at a rate of 3.9% year over year. As a result, the median existing single-family home price hit a new high of $412,500 in 2024, while existing-home sales have dropped to a 30-year low.
• Contending with the same affordability pressures as existing-home sellers, many builders have responded by producing homes that are smaller and/or feature fewer amenities. Others have also reduced prices or offered mortgage rate buydowns to facilitate sales.
• As fewer households have been able to become homeowners, the renter population has grown, with multifamily developers completed 608,000 new units, in 2024 the most in nearly four decades. Much of that construction, however, was at the upper end of the market. In contrast, the number of lower-rent units has fallen substantially.
• The outlook for housing is inextricably linked to that of the economy and federal policy. “As such, much of its future is uncertain,” the JCHS report said, adding that homebuilders estimate that newly imposed tariffs on construction materials will increase new home prices by $10,900, while reduced immigration could shrink the already-thin labor pool.

“Roughly a third of construction workers are foreign-born, about twice the rate of the overall labor force,” the JCHS report said. “Additionally, reductions in federal staff and funding threaten to exacerbate an already-unprecedented housing crisis.”