Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released its annual report on the state of the nation’s housing. Here are a few of their facts:

• Declines in the national homeownership rate accelerated in 2011 as increasing numbers of households opted—or were forced by foreclosure—to rent.
• The recession helped to dampen the rate at which young people begin to live independently, contributing to a decline in the number of households under age 25—the years when renting is most common.
• The bright spot continues to be the rental market, where demand has spiked. Indeed, the number of renters surged by 5.1 million in the 2000s, the largest decade-long increase in the postwar era.
• Despite the spectacular boom early in the decade, 2002–11 was the worst 10-year period for overall housing production since recordkeeping began in 1974.
• Real median household income dropped from $53,200 in 2000 to $49,400 in 2010, some $1,700 below the previous cyclical trough in 2004. Declines among householders aged 35–44 and 45–54 were particularly sharp, more than erasing all of the gains since 1990 for these age groups.
• The number of owner households down by 350,000 and the number of net new renters up by 1.0 million.

Click here to see the full report.

Summary courtesy of  NARPM