The Logan Civic Association meeting on Monday, September 12, at the True Faith Church, 725 Lindley Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19120, at 6:30 PM will discuss the Whole Home Repair Program.
https://www.pasenatorsaval.com/wholehomerepairs/
On any given day in Pennsylvania, tens of thousands of people across our Commonwealth experience houselessness or are on the brink of being displaced, and many more identify as being housing insecure. Pennsylvania’s housing crisis is decades in the making, a consequence of poverty and depressed wages, high utility burdens, systemic racism, a lack of affordable housing units, and a deepening climate crisis for which current housing stock is woefully unprepared.
Pennsylvania has some of the oldest housing stock in the nation. Hundreds of thousands of homes across the Commonwealth have moderate to severe physical inadequacies, including leaky roofs or windows, blown fuses or exposed wiring, unreliable heat, or the lack of a flushing toilet. As people struggle to simply hold on to their homes, they may be forced to forgo regular maintenance and small repairs and upgrades, deferring until a repair is more urgently needed, and far more expensive.
Deferred maintenance and system upgrades can result in homes with energy inefficiencies, which impose utility burdens on communities that can least afford them. Black and brown Pennsylvanians typically pay more in utilities than white Pennsylvanians, and in Philadelphia, low-income households spend an average of 23% of their household’s income on utilities alone. A household that cannot afford urgent repairs or upgrades may be forced into an untenable situation: living in a home that is fundamentally unsafe, abandoning it, or selling it to a speculator.
Our housing crisis is inextricable from our climate crisis. Precipitation from extremely heavy storms has increased 70% in the Northeast since 1958, and nearly 360,000 Pennsylvanians live in the 100-year floodplain, including urban and rural regions alike. By mid-century, annual precipitation in Pennsylvania is expected to increase an additional 8%, with extreme rainfall events projected to increase in magnitude, frequency, and intensity. The state’s average annual temperature is expected to rise 6 °F in the same time period. This hotter and wetter weather will continue to accelerate the deterioration of Pennsylvania’s aging housing stock under conditions these homes were never designed to withstand.
The housing crisis is borne by the whole community. Communities in which residents are forced from their homes see higher rates of crime. Conversely, blocks where even just one household has been provided with the means to repair and update their home have seen a reduction in crime by nearly 22%. Creating the means for people to repair their homes and for neighborhoods to fight against blight are important in providing whole communities what they need so that their residents can thrive.
Pennsylvania residents are falling through the cracks of our current system, and our communities, and our affordable housing stock, are suffering because of it.
The need for home repairs and weatherization far exceeds the available funding. Right now, the federally funded Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) has a 10,000 person waiting list, and many eligible households have been deferred because their homes have underlying habitability issues, like a hole in the roof or mold from water damage, that need to be addressed first.
There is also no way to address the structural problems of a home holistically. If a home has a leaky roof or mold, the homeowner or landlord must address that before any weatherization can happen. The lack of coordination among programs means that people who are eligible don’t get any assistance at all.
Throughout the housing field, experts, practitioners, and organizations all report that even if home repair and weatherization were fully funded to meet the need, our Commonwealth simply doesn’t have the workforce needed to scale up. More than four out of every five builders nationally indicate cost and availability of labor as their main concerns. Our team has heard from individuals across the public and private sectors that one of the biggest barriers to successful home repair programs is a shortage of workers—a trend that bears out at the national level, too. Of the builders surveyed by the National Association of Home Builders, 88% indicated labor cost and availability as their primary concern in 2020, as compared to 13% in 2011.
