Keeping Housing Affordable Over Time

For homeowners, a mortgage is only one component of the total affordability equation. Property taxes, homeowners insurance, utilities, maintenance, and repairs can all increase after a home is purchased. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ 2026 State of the Nation’s Housing Report, property taxes increased 31 percent nationwide between 2019 and 2025, while average monthly homeowners insurance premiums increased 72 percent. Nearly one in four homeowners were cost-burdened in 2024, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

These increases can be particularly difficult for households with lower or fixed incomes. Research from the Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that rising non-mortgage expenses like insurance, taxes, utilities, and maintenance, are increasingly contributing to homeowner cost burdens, including among longtime homeowners with relatively low mortgage payments.

Insurance offers one example of how a necessary housing expense can threaten affordability. A 2026 Urban Institute report found rising insurance costs are making it harder for prospective buyers to purchase homes and for existing homeowners to sustain homeownership. Lower-income borrowers face the added challenge of paying higher insurance costs while having less income available to absorb those costs.

Renters are not immune from these growing costs. Owners of rental housing face many of the same increases in insurance, utilities, taxes, maintenance, and other operating expenses, which can result in rent increases. In affordable multifamily housing in particular, Enterprise Community Partners found rapidly rising insurance costs are putting pressure on already tight operating margins and threatening the long-term financial stability of affordable properties.

Your solution could focus on one cost or several. For example, you might:

• Explore new ways to insure homes or pool risk
• Help homeowners plan and pay for major repairs
• Restructure or defer property-tax obligations for households at risk of displacement
• Finance improvements that lower long-term utility or maintenance costs
• Create a new savings, lending, refinancing, subsidy, or preservation model

These are only examples. We encourage you to identify a specific affordability problem and develop your own approach to solving it.

Your proposal may take the form of a standalone startup or nonprofit, a financial product offered through an existing organization, a public program, a public-private partnership, or another model.

Housing costs and household needs vary considerably across the country, so you may also want to focus on a particular population or geography. A solution designed specifically for retirees facing rising property taxes in one market, for example, may ultimately be more compelling than a solution intended to work for every household everywhere.

Whatever approach you choose, focus on creating a solution that is financially sustainable, scalable, and capable of making a meaningful difference in the long-term cost of housing.

We would like to thank JPMorgan Chase for their support of Hack-A-House as a Prompt Sponsor.