In a nondescript office over One Bow Street in Harvard Square, the Joint Center for Housing Studies keeps a finger on the pulse of America’s housing markets — and tries to connect city planners, advocates, and business groups to solve some of the country’s thorniest issues.
The center was initially formed in 1959 as a collaboration between MIT and Harvard, first recognized as the Joint Center for Urban Studies. Neither institution had yet established an urban studies program, and the new center was deliberately designed to be flexible as it explored a developing field.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the center formalized its work, establishing a faculty advisory board and new connections with firms and housing groups, and in 1985, it took on its current name. By 1989, MIT had backed out of the JCHS, and the research institute became a collaboration between Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and the Harvard Kennedy School.
While administratively affiliated with both Harvard institutions, the JCHS has always remained financially independent, taking the majority of its funding from private foundations, which have previously included the MacArthur, Ford, Wells Fargo, and Qualcomm Foundations.
It also draws funding from a group of companies — dubbed the Policy Advisory Board — that include Wells Fargo, Home Depot, the real estate listings site Zillow, and the plumbing manufacturer Kohler. The board’s members do not approve the JCHS’s studies before they are published, but they are closely consulted on some of its research.
The JCHS’s flagship project is the annual State of the Nation’s Housing report, which it has produced for more than three decades. Each year, several dozen staff and students crunch numbers from a list of private and public authorities — the National Association of Realtors, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, the U.S. Census Bureau — to put together accurate national data on housing costs and rent burdens nationwide.
“I was actually a grad student who worked on the very first State of the Nation’s Housing report in 1988,” said JCHS Managing Director Chris Herbert, a lecturer in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the GSD.
Herbert said that the project’s genesis was in the 1980s — during “a period not unlike now, when there was very rapid inflation, and house prices, interest rates were very high, and the housing market was very challenged.”
During this period of uncertainty, the numbers that Congress used to set housing policy came from an array of interest groups that would each present their own figures, said Herbert.
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“People would say, ‘Well, your numbers don’t match their numbers. So how do we know what’s true?’” Herbert recalled.
The State of the Nation’s Housing report was designed to centralize housing market data into one unbiased, trusted source that wasn’t tied to an advocacy group.
“The idea was this report would be meticulously produced to be a clear and accurate state of the housing market,” Herbert said. “That’s why we have this broad range of groups who are providing feedback on it.”
“If the Realtors and the National Low Income Housing Coalition can say, ‘Yes, this is an accurate depiction of the state of the world,’ then let’s stop arguing what the state of the world is and start arguing what we do about it,” he added.
Today, the team that produces the report begins in January, locking in a few key themes, then consulting with a group of 15 to 20 companies and other organizations from the Policy Advisory Board. By April, the first draft report is set. Then it’s sent out to the groups for a second, separate set of meetings — which Herbert said is designed to make sure nothing is left out. By June, the report is finalized and published.
Housing advocates, as well as lawmakers, find the annual reports important, Herbert said.
“I go out in the world and give talks to the affordable housing communities, and people come up to me every time I give a talk and say, ‘your reports are so important for us because we want to advocate for housing policies to our legislators,’” he said.
David Luberoff, the JCHS’s director of fellowships and events, said the center takes its “reputation as a very trustworthy, non-partisan source of information” seriously.
““I’ve joked, or half-joked, that the only place with a more rigorous fact-checking process is The New Yorker,” he said.
The JCHS also provides extensive support to student and faculty research. Some of its affiliates conduct more specialized housing research — like Graduate School of Design lecturer Jennifer H. Molinsky, who has worked at the JCHS since 2012 and currently directs the Housing an Aging Society Program.
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Molinsky and her team have examined how people shift toward multifamily housing as they age, tracked rising mortgage debt among older Americans, and the dual burden of housing and assisted living costs. The program’s research is designed to give policymakers the tools to understand what Molinsky refers to as a “demographic reckoning.”
“All of the issues that we work on intersect in some way,” Molinsky said. “So if it’s gentrification or homelessness or rental housing and subsidy, home repair — there’s an aging component to all of it.”
Daniel D’Oca, an associate professor in practice of urban planning at the GSD, used JCHS funding to help run a studio course in Los Angeles, where students study housing insecurity in the city through conversations with developers, policymakers, and activists.
Students in D’Oca’s courses identify unconventional places to put housing — like golf courses, power line rights-of-way, freeway medians, or the roofs of parking lots — and puzzle out how it would be possible to build there.
“We’re really trying to train students who understand that you can’t tackle the housing crisis in a silo,” D’Oca said. “If you’re a planner, we want you to understand the importance and the value of design when it comes to housing. And if you’re a designer or architect, we want you to understand policy and we want you to understand implementation.”
The JCHS also provides grants to graduate students — both to support thesis and dissertation research and to facilitate on-the-ground policy work.
Kim Davila, who is pursuing a Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, traveled to Los Angeles, her hometown, this past summer to work with the Inner-City Law Center as a JCHS fellow.
The $8,000 fellowship supported her advocacy through the ICLC and the Keep LA Housed coalition, a group of tenants, community organizers, and public-interest lawyers that advocates for tenant protections. Much of Davila’s work focused on advocating for rent limits — such as capping annual rent increases in units subject to Los Angeles’ Rent Stabilization Ordinance at 3 percent.
The experience encouraged Davila to continue studying housing policy, including through a social housing class this semester, she said.
GSD doctoral student Nour-Lyna Boulgamh worked for a summer with the Boston Housing Authority as a recipient of the JCHS’s Community Service Fellowship. While there, she helped the BHA develop a tracking system for the minority- and women-owned businesses that it contracts with.
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The goal is to make sure that small business owners from all backgrounds are applying for BHA contracts, Boulgamh said.
“We cannot do much about who gets the contract at the end of the day, but we just want to make sure that they know about us and they know about the projects so that they can place a bid,” she said.
Boulgamh said she appreciates the JCHS’s interdisciplinary focus on design and policy.
“That’s what the Center does — it bridges the two. If you want to figure out how to alleviate the housing crisis or work on affordable housing, these issues are very much entangled,” she said.
“As Chris often says, it’s a wicked problem. It’s a complex problem,” Molinsky said. “There’s no one solution. There’s no one discipline that has a monopoly on the solutions, either, and so we really need to think about it holistically.”
—Staff writer Ramon Moreno can be reached at [email protected].
—Staff writer Yahir Ramirez can be reached at [email protected].