A Harvard report Thursday warns that housing is becoming less affordable for low- and middle-income people due in part to rising property insurance rates, which jumped 21 percent on average from 2022 to 2023.
Some families could face eviction or foreclosure, a report author said.
Both insurance and homeownership are “becoming completely unaffordable and unattainable to large swaths of the American population,” said Carlos Martín, a director within the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, which publishes annual reports on U.S. housing markets.
Property insurance and costs such as rents have risen so sharply that a record 12 million rental households were considered “severely cost-burdened” in 2022, the Harvard report says. That’s an additional 1.5 million households spending more than half their income on housing since before the coronavirus pandemic.