Home Repair is a Critical Housing Supply Strategy

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

America’s housing affordability crisis is driven by an estimated shortage of 4.7 million homes. New construction is important, but building new housing is not enough to fully address the scale of the crisis. Preserving the existing housing stock is an essential part of a well-rounded housing strategy. 

The Center for Community Progress, where I serve as an associate director on the technical assistance team, estimates that the nation loses between 350,000 and 400,000 housing units each year due to deterioration, demolition, and severe weather. Home repair policies and programs are critical to preserve these properties, prevent housing loss, and adequately increase supply. To advance this goal, Community Progress has helped hundreds of communities develop policies, tools, and programs to address the full cycle of property revitalization, from redeveloping vacant properties to preserving deteriorated, occupied homes to prevent future vacancy. 

Vacant properties are not always harbingers of property loss. Some level of property turnover is a natural and healthy part of a functioning housing market. However, when vacancy is accompanied by visible debris, overgrown vegetation, deferred maintenance, and tax delinquency, it can have significant impacts on community stability.

Visible damage and deferred maintenance on occupied properties may be early warning signs that a property is at-risk for this type of harmful vacancy. If left unaddressed, deteriorated properties may become unlivable or lost. Early intervention to repair deteriorated, occupied properties, therefore, is an important strategy to preserve existing housing stock. Below are several pillars of repair as an approach to vacancy prevention.

Housing and building code enforcement – a function of local government that ensures privately owned properties meet certain health and safety standards – is one of local governments’ most important tools to prevent vacancy. As noted above, identifying and addressing deterioration and deferred maintenance for occupied properties enables intervention to preserve these properties and prevent vacancy and housing loss. Code enforcement is also a critical public health tool to protect residents from housing-related health hazards.

Currently, many communities rely on a siloed, “reactive” approach to code enforcement, where local governments only inspect properties and cite owners in response to complaints. A community-centered, “proactive” approach is more effective in identifying and preserving deteriorated properties. In proactive code enforcement, inspectors build relationships with community members, connect residents to resources before a citation or notice of violation is issued, and reward compliance. The most effective proactive rental inspection programs include: 

1. Mandatory registration of rental properties, including up-to-date contact information for landlords and property managers
2. Regular, systematic inspections of rental properties by code enforcement staff using a checklist of conditions that affect health and safety
3. Incentives for compliance, such as being able to go longer between inspections if no violations are found
4. Penalties for noncompliance, such as fines, more frequent inspections, or loss of certification (for municipalities with a certification system tied to their rental registry)

Proactive code enforcement is especially important for preserving deteriorating rental properties. Of the 6.5 million severely or moderately inadequate occupied units identified through the 2023 American Housing Survey, more than half were rental properties. Low-income tenants who lack the resources to move and would struggle to find alternative, affordable housing may be less likely to report interior code violations due to fear of landlord retaliation and displacement. Proactive rental inspection programs remove the burden of reporting from vulnerable tenants while incentivizing landlords to achieve and maintain compliance. 

Proactive measures treat code enforcement as the health and safety tool it is. Evidence from two of the nation’s oldest proactive rental inspection programs in Baltimore, Maryland and Rochester, New York shows the potential benefits. The prevalence of children with elevated blood lead levels in both cities dropped after implementation of proactive rental inspections. Proactive rental inspection programs find hazards and enable intervention both before residents are harmed and before the property is unsalvageable and lost to disrepair.  

A robust home repair funding ecosystem shores up supply by preventing housing loss. Owner-occupants and responsible landlords who want to maintain their properties sometimes lack the resources to do so.

With limited dedicated funding for home repair at the federal level, the municipalities that do fund home repair do so through a patchwork of programs leveraging piecemeal funding. Each funding source typically carries its own, often divergent, eligibility criteria. The result is that in many communities, home repair resources are insufficient and application processes are difficult to navigate. 

The recently passed federal 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act includes promising provisions to increase access to home repair nationally. This includes a national Whole Home Repairs Pilot, building off the model piloted in Pennsylvania. Notably, this program provides grants to low-income homeowners and loans to small landlords of affordable properties, providing much-needed preservation resources across the housing market. However, funding for the Whole Home Repairs Pilot is dependent on future appropriations. The Pennsylvania program leveraged over $100 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, enabling grants of up to $50,000 per unit for comprehensive repairs. The federal pilot will need funding at a comparable scale to replicate the success of the Pennsylvania program.  

At the local-level, Detroit’s Citywide Home Repair Task Force is a model for municipalities seeking to streamline access to home repair services. The Task Force was created to improve coordination between home repair programs, identifying gaps and reducing overlap in services. A critical component of this work, the Task Force’s Home Repair Census, aggregates data from repair programs across the city providing a comprehensive overview of program impact, successes, and lessons learned.

Vacancy prevention is an essential component of a well-rounded approach to increase housing supply. Too often, tactics to preserve deteriorating housing stock such as proactive code enforcement and investment in robust home repair resources are siloed from strategies intended to spur production of new housing stock. Upstream approaches to preserve existing units should be prioritized alongside supply-side strategies to comprehensively address the nation’s housing affordability crisis. 

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.