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.”
Home prices, as of early 2025, 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 declined to a 30-year low.
The outlook for housing is inextricably linked to that of the economy and federal policy, and “as such, much of its future is uncertain,” the JCHS report said, adding that newly imposed tariffs coupled with curtailed immigration, reductions in federal staff, and cuts in funding ”threaten to exacerbate an already-unprecedented housing crisis.”