The Other Housing Crisis

The problems Lekquan Young had at her Baltimore home generally don’t make their way into discussions about the national housing crisis. Yet they are common enough and an important contributor in their own right to our lack of housing. 

Young and her son DaWayne, who was 8 years old at the time of this story, had leaks in the kitchen, bad insulation and a mold problem that contributed to DaWayne’s chronic asthma. They also didn’t have enough money or access to credit to get it all fixed. 

These kinds of problems — housing deterioration — affect millions of lower-income Americans living in both rental and owner-occupied houses. They contribute to a huge range of problems, from health problems, like DaWayne’s asthma, to lead poisoning, as well as wider social problems like neighborhood disinvestment and global warming. 

Delayed maintenance also directly exacerbates the affordable housing crisis, limiting the overall supply. That is especially true of the kind of housing lower-income people are most likely to live in: older houses and rental units. Every year, 400,000 homes in the U.S. slide into decay and end up vacant. Oftentimes, they have to be demolished, when for a relatively low financial and environmental cost — compared to building new homes — they could be brought into good condition. 

A group of scholars and practitioners, led by Todd Swanstrom, director of the St. Louis Home Repair Network, is arguing this issue ought to be a larger part of the housing debate. In their new book, “The Other Housing Crisis” (Princeton University Press), Swanstrom and his co-contributors propose making repair a key pillar of the solution and realigning a portion of government housing spending toward small-scale fixes, where relatively small investments can have a big impact.

The authors estimate that about one in three U.S. homes and apartments is in need of repairs: everything from sagging porches, leaky windows and cracked foundations to the kinds of problems the Youngs struggle with. The average unfunded repair cost is $5,000. In total across the U.S., “The Other Housing Crisis” authors estimate there are around $200 billion in deferred housing maintenance needs. Despite the overwhelming demand, only 2% of U.S. housing programs are devoted to these kinds of small-scale fixes. Federal and state support for home repair has declined since the 1970s. 

Charles Lerner, a Boston nonprofit leader with extensive experience managing housing programs (and who wrote a chapter in “The Other Housing Crisis” about the effects of disrepair on children’s health), calls repair the “stepchild” of the housing agenda. Alan Mallach, an author and scholar who authored another chapter, said, “It is not even on the public agenda.” That’s in part because many of the places where housing disrepair is most pressing, like the Mississippi Delta, are outside of major media centers. Instead, the focus has been on “superstar cities” and their problems, like NIMBYs and restrictive zoning, and pent-up demand for new housing construction.

The authors of “The Other Housing Crisis” argue we shouldn’t lose sight of the promise of relatively small investments in housing repair and the huge savings they can offer. Housing repair is broadly prosocial, benefitting not just occupants but whole cities and neighborhoods.

DaWayne Young’s mother Lekquan sought support through a number of programs to fix her house — unfortunately, however, applications for assistance far outstrip supply. Not only is public funding for home repairs scarce, but it’s also fragmented and hard to navigate. Fourteen federal programs support housing repair in some capacity, the most important of which may be the Community Development Block Grant Program (where only 15% of funding goes toward home repairs).

Lekquan Young was lucky to win support for home improvements through an innovative program called the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative. This program “braided together” funding from seven different programs to get the Youngs a new furnace and hot water tank, new insulation, ventilation upgrades, carpet removal and plumbing repairs. The work took just six days to complete. 

Afterward, the family’s energy bills dropped 30%. Even better, DaWayne’s asthma subsided. Ruth Ann Norton, president of Green and Healthy Homes, and her co-authors (who wrote the “Whole House Model” chapter of the book) say the estimated Medicare savings for just that one family totaled around $48,000. 

There are other major savings like that that could be realized with a more aggressive and comprehensive approach to housing repair, say the book’s authors. They argue financial assistance should even be made available to landlords — provided they limit rent increases and reduce code violations. Otherwise, the financial incentive for landlords to milk properties in declining neighborhoods for rent revenue without investing in critical maintenance can drag down whole neighborhoods. 

As an example, the book discusses a Philadelphia program targeted at landlords, which provided up to $25,000 per property in forgivable repair loans. The program helped leverage $100 million in investment in the city’s rowhouses, helping preserve the supply of low-cost housing.

Unfunded repair needs also contribute to the homelessness crisis — one of the most visible and urgent problems in the housing space. Homelessness can and does often occur not just when enough new units don’t get built, but when existing ones “filter” out of the market through disrepair. These stories don’t feature prominently in narratives about the problem, however, which have tended to focus on aforementioned “superstar” cities. 

Nonetheless, disrepair is an important force contributing to homelessness. One of the most famous natives of my region (northeast Ohio), LeBron James, was a victim of this kind of vicious cycle in his youth. When he was 3 years old, the future basketball superstar and his mother lost their house where they had been living with his grandmother in Akron, Ohio, after she died of a heart attack.

LeBron’s mother, Gloria, who was just 19 years old, could not maintain the house they lived in — she did not have the money or the know-how. The house was condemned by city officials a short time later. For years, until he was 8, the young family bounced between friends’ couches and short-term apartments, a period of semi-homelessness which forced young LeBron to miss around 80 days of school.

For lower-income households, especially in poorer or declining places like Akron, this cycle of disinvestment is a threat to the existing supply of affordable housing.

Mallach, a contributor to the book, says these places need to be part of the wider housing crisis discourse, and this issue should be near the top of the list. And yet, for years it has been neglected.

“It has no organized constituency, no big-money players actively lobbying for it,” unlike the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program, Mallach points out, which funnels a good deal of its spending to attorneys and consultants who usher projects through the complex legal process.

“Even within the world of contractors, [repair] has few advocates, both because home repair is dominated by small mom-and-pop firms, and even there, low-value homes in lower-income neighborhoods are at the bottom of the industry's priorities.”