The Hidden Housing Cost Pushing Millions of Homeowners Over Budget

A new roof can be just as essential to homeownership as a monthly mortgage payment. Yet only one of those expenses is factored in when determining whether an owner is housing cost-burdened.Now, preliminary findings from Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS), presented on Friday, suggest that the omission has been hiding a much larger affordability problem in plain sight.Under conventional measures, 22.7 million homeowners, or 26%, spent more than 30% of their incomes on housing in 2023—the threshold for being considered cost-burdened.But when researchers included spending on routine maintenance and major replacement projects, that figure jumped to 28.4 million—nearly 1 in 3 homeowners."It would be a surprise to many that nearly every measure of cost burdens that you see out in the wild, including those that we most often published, do not account for these expenditures," says Alexander Hermann, a senior research associate at JCHS and co-author of the analysis.For some homeowners, even that expanded measure may underestimate the financial strain.The housing costs that don't show up in affordability statisticsMuch of the housing affordability debate has focused...