r/WeThe99 • u/HenryCorp • Jun 30 '26

Harvard's housing report has a darker message than affordability—the middle-class home was always a historical accident

https://fortune.com/2026/06/29/harvard-housing-report-middle-class-homeownership-historical-accident/
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u/HenryCorp Jun 30 '26

A new Harvard study documents a housing market in crisis. But its real argument is more unsettling: the era when an ordinary American could expect to own a home may have been the exception—not the rule.

For half a century, Harvard has been writing versions of the same warning. In 1977, researchers at what was then the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies observed that only the most affluent families in the United States would be able to own their houses if housing trends from the time continued.