(Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania’s 2024 Homes Within Reach conference.)
Whole Home Repairs is “an incredible program, a precedent-setting program,” Jeremey Newberg said.
Thanks to the funding it made available, thousands of needy Pennsylvania homeowners have been able to make critical repairs. They now have roofs that don’t leak, intact energy-efficient windows, wiring that is no longer a fire risk.
Newberg credited not only the program itself, but the hundreds of local county and nonprofit staffers who mastered its intricacies and set up the systems to make it work.
The task going forward, Newburg said, is to make the case to legislators to keep it going — highlighting the successes, but also the pain points that, if reformed, could make Whole Home Repairs even more effective.
Newberg is CEO of Capital Access, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits, local governments and financial institutions navigate housing and community development funding programs. He led a panel discussion on Whole Home Repairs at the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania’s Homes Within Reach conference at the Hershey Resort.
The Pennsylvania legislature authorized the program in 2022, using $125 million in federal pandemic relief money. Supporters’ efforts to secure additional funding in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 budget cycles have fallen short.
Out of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, all but three are participating. Lancaster County received just under $4 million, with the program run by the county redevelopment authority. To date, the authority has committed $1.78 million to 74 projects, of which 63 projects (totaling $1.46 million) have been completed.
The local program has a substantial waitlist. It stopped accepting applications provisionally last fall and for good this summer, pending additional funding. All eligible applicants on the waitlist will be served, the authority says.
Statewide, there are more than 18,000 waitlisted households. Around 8,000 of them are in Philadelphia, said Nicholas Horting, director of residential reinvestment programs at the state Department of Community & Economic Development.
Room for improvement
What are the shortcomings of Whole Home Repairs? For starters, although the program allows grants of up to $50,000 to repair owner-occupied properties, many counties, including Lancaster County, cap their grants at $25,000 to avoid triggering Pennsylvania’s prevailing wage requirements.
In today’s economy, you can’t get far with $25,000, said Rich Kisner, executive director of Community Strategies Group, a nonprofit that runs the Whole Home Repairs program in Columbia County. Just replacing a roof can cost $30,000, he said.
Administrators try to layer in other sources of funding to allow for comprehensive repairs, but that adds complexity and is not always possible, due to eligibility requirements. Homeowners understandably become frustrated when they’re told that only a small fraction of the work their house needs can be funded.
By making “modest changes in wording,” legislators could make it easier to mix-and-match funding sources, said Jane Allen, executive director of the Urban Affairs & Housing Committee of the Pennsylvania State Democratic Caucus.
Besides increasing project costs, prevailing wage is prohibitively complex to administer, especially for small contractors, staffers say. Construction workers deserve living wages, but there should be ways to simplify documentation and reporting requirements, Newberg said.
Lancaster County is also among the majority of counties that have not extended Whole Home Repairs to landlords. Landlords are eligible for loans under the program, but only on condition that they keep rent affordable for 15 years. That has to be monitored, which local authorities say isn’t administratively feasible.
Brandon Frantz is the CEO of Sturdy Boots, a social enterprise construction company based in Meadville, Crawford County. His team tries to stretch Whole Home Repair dollars by doing lower-cost but high-value preventive work: Foundation repair, roof gutters, water mitigation.
The program’s documentation requirements mean his company has to incur the costs up front, then wait three or four weeks to get paid. Not many small contractors can afford to do that, he said.
The virtues of consistency
Just the fact that the state and its county partners were able to set up a program like Whole Home Repairs from scratch is encouraging, Horting said. The preservation of housing stock is one of the focus areas in the Housing Action Plan that the state is developing, and the lessons of Whole Home Repairs will certainly feed into that — though exactly how that will play out remains to be seen.
Too often, agencies are caught in a boom-bust cycle, said Grant Johnson, Capital Access’ chief operating officer. A big new funding stream allows them to set up programs and build expertise, then the funding dries up and all that institutional capacity is dismantled.
Policymakers and funders need to commit to the long term, he said.
“We need the dollars to be consistent so that we can build these operations over time,” he said.
The economic case for critical repair programs like Whole Home Repairs is compelling, Newberg said. These days, building an apartment building designated as affordable housing costs $400,000 per unit or more. Repairs of $25,000 to $50,000 are a bargain by comparison. Plus, they’re often part of a package that includes homeowner education and other social services.
“We’re adding value,” he said.