Rain is in the forecast for Detroit and anxiety creeps in as Ms. Jones walks around the house gathering buckets to place under the hole in her roof. She pulls up a chair in front of her stove and bundles up. With Social Security payments as her only source of income, Ms. Jones cannot afford to fix her roof or furnace. She’s reached out to countless organizations for help, and each one says the same thing: “We will put you on the waitlist and give you a call if we get more funding.” If she doesn’t get help, and soon, Ms. Jones will resort to sleeping on a friend’s couch or searching for space in shelters. Her home will stand vacant, falling further into disrepair, resulting in the loss of her family’s home and adding another single-family unit to the list awaiting public demolition. 

Home repair has become a multi-billion-dollar housing policy challenge hidden in plain sight in large cities and small towns alike across the United States. As of 2024, the estimated cost of needed repairs to occupied housing units was $198.4 billion, with an estimated 6.7 million households living in moderately or severely inadequate housing. Without intervention, these homes will continue to decline until they are no longer occupiable. Many communities offer residents assistance with critical home repairs, but the demand far exceeds the resources available. In Detroit, within the first 24 hours of launching the Detroit Home Repair Fund (DHRF), the hotline received an overwhelming 120,000 calls – despite the program being designed to support only 1,000 households. 

The effects of substandard housing transcend urban, rural, and political divides. Structural racism, legacies of segregation, and discrimination contribute to the complexity and intersectionality of this issue. Research shows homeowners of color in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods are more likely to live in substandard housing. Those residents also face greater difficulty in accessing capital to make needed repairs. Unmet repair needs undermine property values and, consequently, the prospect of building intergenerational wealth. 

Recently, local home repair programs have received renewed attention for their potential to improve health and quality of life, reduce household financial uncertainty, preserve naturally occurring affordable housing supply, enhance neighborhood safety, and generate savings for health and social service systems. In addition, many housing experts have identified that increasing housing supply through new construction alone will not solve the problem. 

Rarely is the case made for the role that home repair, if funded at scale, can have in addressing the housing crisis. Greater financial investment could help preserve a community’s existing housing stock and maintain access to the benefits of homeownership for lower-income households. 

Solutions may look slightly different depending on the community, stakeholders, and degree of need, but we pose the following recommendations for a national strategy: 

Flexible Funding

Large-scale institutional funding from all levels of government and philanthropy is essential. The bottleneck for home repair results from inconsistent, unpredictable, and inflexible funding. In order to leverage existing programs, flexible repair dollars to address underlying conditions and/or incidental repairs must be a part of the solution in order to reach the homes with the greatest need. 

Whole Home Approach

With greater flexibility, repair funds could support “whole home” repairs by creating a basic standard of housing quality that prioritizes the health and safety of the occupant, rather than piecemeal individual repairs across programs. DHRF, for example, is a public-private partnership that has leveraged philanthropic funding to provide flexible home repair dollars to unlock public resources, ensuring that residents are not deferred from receiving home repairs because of the underlying condition of their homes. 

Collaboration

Programs, policies, and practitioners must address the immediate crisis while building ecosystems to support long-term housing solutions. In Detroit, stakeholders have come together to form the Citywide Home Repair Task Force to develop system-wide best practices and data collection, communicate and case-manage across programs, and measure collective impact. 

Without high-dollar investment and bold policy changes, the U.S. stands to lose housing units, and the expense and complexity of addressing housing quality will only increase. At the same time, millions of residents across the country are in need of assistance, with only a small chance of receiving repair support. Ms. Jones was fortunate. Through DHRF, she was able to secure the critical repairs her home needed. But for every homeowner like Ms. Jones, many others remain on waiting lists or go without help as they watch their homes deteriorate before their eyes. 

Gwen Gell is a Senior Program Manager at the Rocket Community Fund. Her portfolio consists of alternative pathways to homeownership and home repair. She is an active member of the Citywide Home Repair Task Force. 

Jess Wunsch is the Director of City Engagement at the NYU Furman Center’s Housing Solutions Lab. There, she works with small and midsize city leaders on local housing policy and convenes a growing community of practice dedicated to strengthening and scaling municipal home repair programs.