Across St. Louis, there are a handful of organizations that help seniors with home repairs, as well as people with disabilities. The work is critical: Keeping the area’s vast stock of older homes in good condition doesn’t just help people stay in those homes, but helps prevent blight and vacancy.
During the pandemic, though, those organizations started to ponder some bigger questions. As Elaine Powers, executive director of Rebuilding Together St. Louis, explains, she’d long had good relationships with the Urban League of St. Louis, Mission: St. Louis, and the City of St. Louis’ Community Development Agency. Each has different funding sources and different areas of focus and expertise; if one agency couldn’t help someone in need, they’d suggest another that could.
But during their pandemic Zoom calls, they found themselves thinking about their work more broadly, and contemplating a big question. As Powers puts it, “What would it look like if we actually started working together better?”
She recalls the conversations: “How can we make it better for the homeowner, so they’re not having to fill out a bunch of different applications when we could have centralized intake? That could make sense. Well, what about the contractors who we hire? How do we equip them for this kind of work? How do we find more small contractors? How do we get our voices together?”
After all, while the agencies each tackle what they can, the need is greater than all of their efforts combined. A 2023 study by the Community and Innovation Action Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis estimates that it would take $302 million to address all the repairs needed by older homeowners in St. Louis. “Perversely, those with the lowest incomes had the greatest need for repairs,” the researchers wrote. “No one should be forced, as one respondent said, to choose between paying for their medicine or fixing their roof. Unfortunately, the waiting lists for home repairs in St. Louis are long; applicants must wait years.”
Constance Siu, executive director of the North Newstead Neighborhood Association, has seen that firsthand. She’s also seen people who just don’t know about the resources they might tap into.
“We sometimes see seniors that call us maybe a little too late,” she says. She remembers someone who called a few years ago to say their porch was pulling away from my property, the Building Division had cited them, and now the house was set to be sold at a tax sale. “They were at that point where there’s nothing that we can do,” she says. “The question is, where do we fit in to prevent that from happening? It’s a huge issue.”
From those questions have sprung an ambitious solution to an all-too-common St. Louis problem: Instead of a proliferation of nonprofits, each in its own silo, the groups have come together to form a new umbrella organization capable of coordinating between them and, the founders hope, expanding what they can do. The board of the new Home Repair Network includes directors of the agencies working in that space, including Powers and Siu. Thanks to funding from the Missouri Foundation for Health and fiscal sponsorship from Paraquad, which focuses on serving people with disabilities, they’ve just hired an executive director.
The new agency will now serve as a single point of contact for people needing help. Instead of having to apply to multiple agencies, each with their own waiting list, homeowners can fill out one, then get directed to the place that can best serve them. Or make that places: Sometimes, homeowners are routed to multiple agencies to complete different projects within the same house, Powers says. Now there can be more coordination on homes with greater needs.
And, Powers says, the hope is that the new organization can tackle more systemic issues as well. As one example, she says, St. Louis city offers funding for these kinds of repairs, but St. Louis County does not, even as pockets of North County deal with big needs. Drawing more attention and funding for this kind of work is something no one nonprofit had capacity for. A policy brief for the new agency, developed with help from UMSL, outlines the bigger mandate the Home Repair Network could take on.
The agencies already got a taste of that kind of expanded mandate through a grant from the James F. McDonnell Foundation. It grew interested in the problem of what’s called tangled titles, where families lose the equity built into a home if the owner dies without an estate plan. Now, when people get repair work done through agencies under the Home Repair Network umbrella, they also get a referral to Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. Through a grant from the foundation, it now provides pro bono legal work to get an estate plan in place—the kind of seemingly small step that can make a big difference.
Siu notes that, years ago, some of the same organizations came together with the idea of coordination in mind, and made some headway. The momentum stalled out when the graduate student who’d been working on the project moved on. Siu believes this time is different; a dedicated, full-time staffer can commit to the problem in a way temporary help cannot.
The need is great—but so is the chance to make a big difference.
“For us, home repair is not only a racial equity issue, a generational wealth-building issue, but it’s also a bipartisan issue,” she says. “We think that this is something that will resonate with both sides of the aisle, because everybody has a grandma with a leaking sink that they can’t fix.” Keeping her in her house, and that house in livable condition, doesn’t just help Grandma and her neighborhood. It saves money, too. And who wouldn’t get behind that?