In 2022, I was part of a research team that mailed 2,500 surveys to older St. Louis, Missouri, homeowners to determine their need for home repairs. The cover letter listed my phone number as the one to call with questions or concerns. I asked our survey research expert how many calls I should expect. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Maybe five.”
I received more than 200.
One caller told me she had completed the survey but couldn’t take it to the mailbox because her front stairs had collapsed. Instead, she handed it through the window to a neighborhood boy who took it to the mailbox. She asked me whether we had any funds to repair her stairs.
Our research team was never able to offer funds for repairs, but homeowners called anyway. Invariably polite, they were desperate for help. The best I could do was refer them to programs with multi-year waiting lists. These calls broke my heart, driving home to me, in ways that no amount of data could, the human cost of housing deterioration.
Housing affordability is now a huge issue in the United States. The bipartisan ROAD to Housing Act, which recently became law by a veto-proof majority despite President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign it, is laser-focused on housing affordability. It includes a range of provisions to reduce the burden of federal and local regulations to free up the market to build more housing, increasing supply to drive down prices.
The focus on housing affordability, however, ignores the issue of housing quality. These are not two separate issues, but rather, two sides of the same coin. Most lower-income families do not acquire affordable housing through government subsidies. Instead, they rent or buy homes that are so deteriorated, or in such disinvested neighborhoods, that they have become “affordable.”
The housing affordability crisis is worse than the public statistics suggest because many families are forced to sacrifice quality for affordability. They live in homes with unsafe wiring, damaged roofs, leaky plumbing, dangerous mold, and uncomfortable temperatures that threaten their health and safety.
A major reason housing quality has received so little attention is that the United States lacks good public data on housing deterioration, especially at the city or neighborhood level. It was to fill this gap that the St. Louis research team conducted surveys of the need for home repairs. Our study found that older homeowners lived in homes that were, on average, nearly a century old and in need of repairs averaging $13,023. It would cost over $300 million just to address the needs of older homeowners in St. Louis.
Housing deterioration is not just an inner-city problem. Our recent survey found that the average single-family home in suburban St. Louis County needed $9,146 worth of repairs. The problem is worse in many rural areas; the average repair needs for low-income households in the Mississippi Delta is about $25,000.
Federal investment in home repair is woefully inadequate. A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia pegged the total cost of needed repairs for all occupied housing units in the United States at $198.4 billion in 2024; $74.6 billion of this total would be needed to address the needs of lower income households lacking the resources to fund their own repairs.
By my estimate, federal support in 2024 met only about 3.4 percent of the national need for subsidized home repairs. And every year, the United States loses about 400,000 units of housing due to deterioration and abandonment.
Fortunately, the ROAD to Housing Act includes a pilot program to fund home repairs. Based on a successful program in Pennsylvania, it will fund up to ten competitive grants for “whole home” repairs for homeowners and landlords. Instead of funding stopgap repairs to individual systems, these grants take a holistic approach to making the entire home habitable.
But fixing the problem of housing quality will require more than a pilot program. Congress must enact a well-funded national home repair block grant that gives local communities the resources they need to address the hidden crisis of housing deterioration.
We do not need to choose between building new housing and preserving older housing. We need to do both. Now.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.