Housing market recovery depends on job growth, report says
THURSDAY JUNE 14, 2012, 4:52 PM
BY KATHLEEN LYNN
STAFF WRITER
THE RECORD
The housing market is beginning to recover, but could stall if the U.S. doesn’t have sustained job growth, the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University said Thursday.
And despite more affordable home prices, millions of households in the U.S. – mostly renters – struggle with monthly housing costs, the center said in its annual State of the Nation’s Housing report.
“Almost one-fifth of households report spending more than half of their income on housing,” said Eric Belsky, managing director of the center. “That’s not only a housing crisis; it means there’s that much less to spend on everything else.”
“The housing sector is turning a corner, but we need to think about what to do to serve everybody,” said George McCarthy, an executive with the Ford Foundation, one of the report’s sponsors, at a press conference in New York.
Rental construction is the liveliest sector of the real estate market, pushed up by demand from people who have lost their homes or held off on buying. The number of renters jumped 5.1 million in the 2000s, the largest decade-long increase since World War II, the report said.