As America continues to grapple with a housing shortage, Republican and Democrat lawmakers together have introduced a bill to establish a nationwide home repairs pilot program. If passed, the Whole-Home Repairs Act of 2024 would represent an important step in addressing the problem of housing deterioration by supporting low-income homeowners and potential homebuyers, especially Black and Latino households, according to advocates. As law, it would assist eligible home and rental property owners with critical repair needs, building on a statewide home repair program launched last year in Pennsylvania.
Such efforts signal a growing movement to address a significant threat to the health, safety, security, and financial well-being of millions of low-income residents due to the deterioration and loss of housing in America, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies Senior Research Analyst Sophia Wedeen and Remodeling Futures Program Director Carlos Martín.
Wedeen and Martin co-wrote (with Center for Community Progress Fellow Alan Mallach, University of Missouri Professor Todd Swanstrom, and Rhodes College Assistant Professor Austin Harrison) a working paper—titled Catalyzing a Movement to Produce Greater Public, Private, and Civil Resources to Improve Housing Conditions Through Home Repair Programs—that surveys evidence of inadequate housing conditions and the current landscape of public- and civil-sector home repair assistance programs.
In producing the paper, JCHS hosted a series of virtual workshops with federal, state, and local government officials and civil-sector home repair stakeholders to amass insights on recent and ongoing innovations and actionable obstacles.
While recognizing recent improvements (advances in building codes for new home construction, housing inspections of severely inadequate homes, and local small pools of financial and charitable aid, for example) participants’ nailed down key challenges, the most fundamental of which “is the simple shortfall in investment,” authors noted.
“Although the magnitude of the effect varies, home repair interventions are shown to produce positive outcomes for individuals and communities, and underfunding limits the scale, reach, and impact,” authors noted. “[In workshops] Home repair providers in the public and civil sectors alike underscored the urgent need for a coordinated and well-funded approach to home repairs.”
As of 2021, 6.7 million households lived in moderately or severely inadequate housing with multiple physical deficiencies. “Substandard housing is linked to a range of negative health outcomes including lead poisoning, asthma, physical injuries, and poor mental health” Wedeen said. That’s in addition to related financial hardship, energy insecurity, disaster vulnerability, social isolation, neighborhood instability, and further problems explored in the paper.
There exists a complex ecosystem of state and local home repair programs subsidized by a range of federal agencies and/or local government coffers, but these “are uniformly underfunded,” the authors noted.
Further complicating things is the sheer number of civil-sector groups—essential for filling gaps in government-sponsored programs—that often inadvertently confuse applicants and households in need of assistance and dilute resources. Policymakers, advocates, and other stakeholders must come up with strategies for conscientious collaboration, the authors note, adding that “recent efforts to combine public funding from various sources are allowing for more substantial and comprehensive repair interventions that address multiple deficiencies within a home.”
All of the programs and groups that participated in workshops and mentioned in the research paper “share a long-term goal of making America’s homes as whole as possible, in the physical sense of the word and beyond,” the authors said. “That vision is a foundation from which to build.”
The full paper is available at jchs.harvard.edu.
