A recent addendum to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) projections highlights that lower than expected immigration levels are set to influence U.S. housing demand through 2035. The original household growth projections relied on the U.S. Census Bureau’s middle-series population forecast, which assumed annual net international immigration around 870,000.
However, administrative shifts in immigration policy have reduced actual migration, prompting forecasters such as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to lower their estimates and spurring JCHS to evaluate a low-immigration projection with annual net immigration near 420,000.
Under the lower-immigration scenario, total projected household growth for 2025–2035 falls by roughly 20%, compared with the middle series. This reduction disproportionately affects younger households and households of color, groups more likely to rent, which, in turn, dampens renter household expansion. While lower renter growth slightly pushes measured homeownership rates higher — since renters constitute a smaller share of the projected population — the absolute number of new homeowner households still declines. Annual homeowner growth under low immigration is projected to be 15%–26% below the middle series across key scenarios.
For the housing industry, these shifts carry significant demand implications. Household formation is a driver of new housing demand, and fewer households translate into weaker overall demand for both owner-occupied and rental units. Under lower immigration assumptions, renter household growth could fall by 74,000–86,000 per year, versus projections based on higher immigration, further softening multifamily and rental market demand.
Developers, builders, and planners should anticipate a more subdued demand environment, particularly in entry-level and rental segments that traditionally cater to younger and newly formed households. Lower household growth may reduce pressure on new construction, potentially moderating starts and absorption rates. However, it also intensifies the importance of aligning housing supply with shifting demographics, including the growing need for age-appropriate and accessible housing as the national age distribution skews older.
With the changing face of housing, immigration trends now play a pivotal role in shaping the outlook of the industry.
And according to the revised report, “The low-immigration scenario does, however, lead to slightly higher homeownership rates in 2035 than projected under the middle-series projections, but the higher homeownership rate is due to an outsized reduction in renter household growth in that scenario, rather than to an increase in homeowner household growth.”
