Jen Molinsky 

Title: Research Associate, Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University    

Academics are often accused of pronouncing on things without real-life experience, but that’s definitely not the case with Molinsky, who worked in both the private sector and with the city of Newton as an chief planner before bringing her boots-on-the-ground experience to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, where this year she co-edited a book on the effects of the housing crash (“Homeownership Built to Last: Balancing Access, Affordability, and Risk after the Housing Crisis”) and helped lead a new study on how America’s aging population will impact its housing needs.  

Q: Do you think we’ve learned the right lessons from the crash?

A: Well, I guess my feeling [after helping to write and edit the book] is there’s a lot of good stuff happening out there, there’s a lot of solutions out there, but the problem is getting them to scale. The fundamental question is that we have to identify the right level of risk. What is the level that we’re willing to tolerate? Where’s the line going to be, for the individual, for the community, for society as a whole? I think that question is one that needs a lot of debate, and maybe that’s not a debate that’s happening out there. … You can’t aim for zero defaults. Something is always going to happen that’s idiosyncratic. But what risk do we tolerate, and how do we prepare people to sustain homeownership? Because the benefits really accrue when you sustain it.

Q: How did you get involved in studying housing in the first place?

A: I’ve always been interested in planning – in college I was an intern in the New Haven planning office. And – I hope this doesn’t sound too silly – I’ve always been interested in how people live. I was an American studies major in college. [My work now] kind of brings them together in a nice way … I’m glad [after working in the private sector] to come back to housing and its role because we have such associations with housing; it’s emotional, but it’s also an investment, and I think it has so much to do with people’s well being, where [housing] is located, the design of it. It intersects with so much.

Q: It seems like your recent work on the aging study touched on that.

A: That’s been my main focus for the last year. Really interesting. The center has always wanted to get into that area, because it’s so important as the population ages. With a background in planning, it was especially interesting for me, because so many of the issues are outside of the house – we looked at affordability and accessibility, but also the connection within the community, because isolation is such a concern. And also how you bridge housing and health care … understanding Medicaid, and how it influences how people are able to stay in their homes or not. Really personal, too – you couldn’t do the study without talking to people and hearing stories about their own parent or grandparent [and how they were affected by these issues].

Q: It seems like the current older generation is much more committed to staying in their homes than in previous years, where people often planned on downsizing.

A: Well, I think you have to be careful with preference surveys – you don’t always know what people are considering to be the alternative – are people thinking of the nursing home as the alternative? Are they thinking about housing – maybe housing that hasn’t been built yet – that would be more accessible but allow them to stay in their communities? But for the most part people definitely want to age in their community and stay in their homes – mobility rates in general have declined. … But we also know that their houses aren’t ready. They’re not accessible. Disability rates go way up as you age – in your 80s, over 60 percent of the population has some kind of a disability. The housing stock is just mismatched, and something is going to have to give, I think, if people want to stay in their homes. … There’s a dearth of accessible affordable housing [for people with disabilities], especially on the low end. They’re really caught, and there’s a concern that that forces them prematurely into an institution, or doesn’t allow them to come out of one. Someone who rents, who maybe goes into a nursing home [to recover from an illness] and now they can’t come out because they’ve lost their apartment. All those issues – planning, infrastructure, health care – it all ties into the housing.

Q: That seems like it might be a bigger issue here in Massachusetts.

A: That’s absolutely true. The northeast is among the least accessible housing stock in the nation. Stairs everywhere, and triple-deckers! In the South, 84 percent of the housing is on one floor, and that’s just not the case here.

Top Five Key Housing Issues For Older Adults:

1. Finding enough affordable housing.
2. Accessibility.
3. Making the urban environment more age friendly.
4. Bringing long-term care into the home.
5. Bringing together different policy worlds to accomplish these goals.