Home repair grants help Portlanders stay in beloved houses

It was 1991 and Sarah Moon stood in the entryway of the house that would soon become her home. The orange shag carpet had to go. So would that terrible drop ceiling. But the small Mount Tabor home, built in 1913, had potential, Moon knew. And it was just blocks from Atkinson Elementary School, which would be perfect for her young children.

More than three decades later, Moon, 67, still lives in her lovingly cared for home. But much has changed. Her children are grown. She’s divorced. And Moon, a longtime preschool teacher now working as a nanny, could no longer afford to buy a house, not even a fixer-upper, in her now well-to-do Portland neighborhood just blocks from Mt. Tabor Park.

This last fact – that even as an established homeowner, she’d have trouble finding another, comparable place to live – became starkly evident to Moon last winter when an inspection in December 2023 revealed that her nearly 30-year-old furnace was on its last legs.

A fix, she was told, would cost north of $10,000.

“There was no way I could do that,” she said. “I try to have a little savings, but $10,000 is not in the picture.”

Moon’s story is not uncommon. Many Portlanders, especially seniors, find themselves without the funds to address major repairs in their beloved but aging homes. Replacing leaky roofs, failed siding or old furnaces can easily exceed what most Americans have in savings. Even smaller fixes, like adding wheelchair ramps and grab bars to allow aging or disabled people to stay in their homes, can be out of reach.

And with U.S. homelessness among those older than 65 growing, the case for subsidizing repairs that will keep people safely in the homes they already own is clear, said Steve Messinetti, president of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region.

“The need is really large because the cost of everything is going up,” Messinetti said. “People who own homes that are in disrepair that are living on very low incomes or fixed incomes are struggling even more. Still, the most affordable home is the one folks are already in.”

Moon and her adult son, who is unable to work, live off her nannying income. A home equity loan she took out during tough times means she’s still paying more than $1,600 a month on the house. Moon doesn’t think her neighbors would guess that she’s living paycheck to paycheck. And yet, that’s exactly what’s happening.

“I’ve worked my whole life for nonprofits and that’s kind of the way it is,” she said.

In recent years, loans and grants to help with repairs for homeowners like Moon have become a growing part of the region’s housing strategy. The federal, state and local government offer free repairs for those who qualify based on income, as do several private nonprofits.

Since 2010, the Portland Housing Bureau has provided grants for home repairs. The bureau’s annual repair budget is now $3.9 million, according to bureau spokesperson Gabriel Mathews. Last year, 542 Portland households received home repair grants, Mathews wrote in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive.

And, for the first time, the state is now offering home repair services through the Oregon Health Authority’s new healthy homes grant program. Established by the Legislature in 2021, the first round of grants will send $20 million to 34 local organizations and agencies to repair the homes of low-income Oregon residents, according to health authority spokesperson Jonathan Modie.

The grants can be spent on lighting, plumbing, windows, roofs, radon mitigation and lead treatment, among dozens of other fixes, said Brett Sherry, who oversees the program. If it helps someone stay safe in their home, no matter their age, it counts, Sherry said.

“We don’t have enough housing, so if homes need to be repaired to extend the usable life of the home, there’s just going to be more housing,” Sherry said. “It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the need.”

The Portland-area Habitat is one of the beneficiaries of the new grants. The rest have yet to be announced. Habitat’s grant of $250,000 a year for three years will help expand its work from about 50 home repairs a year to 100 by 2027, Messinetti said. The organization will need additional private funding to meet that goal, he said. This fiscal year Habitat is on track to repair about 60 homes on a budget of $790,000, all of which has been privately donated.

Faced with the prospect of getting through an Oregon winter with no heat, Moon knew she needed outside help. The old oil furnace was still hanging on, but for how long? She called Multnomah County’s Aging, Disability and Veterans Services. She was directed to Habitat’s home repair program, which was accepting applications. She applied. Then she waited.

“I didn’t have a whole lot of plan B,” Moon said. “I have a fireplace, but quite honestly, fireplaces don’t really heat your house. I have lived in cold climates so I know about layering up.”

She used to work in homeless services and said she knows people who have been homeless for various reasons. She knew it could happen to her too. And the prospect scared her.

“I could sell my house, but then what? I could barely afford a studio apartment here,” Moon said.

Her daughters have just moved back to town. One has a new baby. Moon wondered if space heaters would be sufficient to get through the winter.

“I don’t want to leave,” Moon said. “To find something affordable, I’d have to leave Portland and I have a job here.”

Back in 1991, Moon and her then husband bought the two-bedroom, one-bath home for $71,000.

“We did a vast amount of work on the house,” she said on a recent winter day, her hands wrapped around a mug of steaming tea as she sat at her dining room table. “It was a bad 1970’s remodel. And the porch wasn’t there.”

Zillow and Redfin now estimate that Moon’s house, which now has an additional bedroom and bathroom in the basement, could sell for about $600,000. That estimate doesn’t take into account the value-depressing effect of having no working furnace. And since she wouldn’t be getting the entire sale price after fees and paying off her existing loan, Moon didn’t think she’d be able to buy anything comparable.

“I feel like staying here is my best bet,” Moon said.

She’s probably right, said Habitat’s Messinetti. He’s found that among the homeowners they work with, many have even lower incomes than those who use Habitat’s traditional service of building affordable homes for families that cannot afford a house at market price. And while the Habitat repair program is available to homeowners of any age, many of those it serves are older.

“It takes a lot of work to stay in a home,” said Joel Dixon, Habitat’s director of home repair for the Portland region. “It’s not something that fixes itself. It degrades over time. It takes a lot of time, energy and investment to keep your house maintained.”

And, especially as food prices, utility costs and property taxes have risen, many older homeowners do not have funds left over to pay for repairs.

In a recent national survey, one in five people over age 55 reported living paycheck to paycheck. Of all people with nothing leftover after each pay day, 40% reported having no more than $100 in savings. Older women are more likely to have precarious finances than older men, the survey found.

And a growing number of older Americans are experiencing homelessness, according to a report out last week from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. More than 145,000 people over the age of 55 were homeless on a single night in January. 2024, the last time national data was gathered. That included nearly 5,000 Oregonians over 55 and represented a nearly 6% increase over the previous year among people older than 65 and a nearly 14% increase among people 55 to 64.

To qualify for the Portland-area Habitat home repair program, homeowners must make less than 80% of the Portland area median income of $75,550 for a family of two. The average repair loan Habitat offers is for about $10,000. The 15-year loans are forgiven at the end of the time period as long as the recipient is still in the house. The loans come due only if the home is sold out of the family before the 15 years are up.

Getting approved for one of those loans and qualifying for two Portland Housing Bureau grants was like “winning the lottery” for Michelle Vosika-Cooper, who inherited the Humboldt home she’d lived in for years from her uncle in 2020.

“My home was my grandmother’s house,” Vosika-Cooper said. “She bought it in the late 60’s, maybe early 70’s, which was unusual for a single Black woman at the time. Keeping the house in the family was quite hard.”

Vosika-Cooper, 44, loved her three-bedroom, one-bath house and was grateful for the inheritance, but the home still wasn’t paid off and needed more than $80,000 in repairs. The roof was leaking, the gutters were coming loose and the paint inside and out contained dangerous levels of lead, she said. At the time, she was still living on food stamps while she slowly built her anti-racist psychotherapy practice.

“The ability to finance anything to keep the house in repair was nil,” Vosika-Cooper said. “I did not want to let the family down. I didn’t want to inherit the house and finally pay it off just in time for it to collapse.”

Like Vosika-Cooper’s home, houses bought decades ago often have the potential to be an extended family’s biggest asset if they are kept in good repair. But the income now required to maintain such a home and stay up-to-date on Portland property taxes is far higher than was true when these homes were first purchased. And the costs of deferred repairs can add up. Vosika-Cooper feared that if she sold the North Portland house in the state it was in and with the liens on its title, she’d end up owing money and with nowhere to live.

Repair grants are “a growing need as things get more expensive,” Dixon said. “I’ve worked with so many homeowners where it’s grandma’s or grandpa’s house and they might have kids camping out in the backyard while looking for their next situation.”

In one case, Dixon said he helped a homeowner with four generations under one roof. None of the adults were able to afford local rents or purchase a home elsewhere in the city. Without help to preserve their house, he said, all of those people could be without a place to live.

“There are quite a few folks who are just one incident away from being houseless,” Dixon said.

By March, Moon’s furnace had died for good. She started sleeping in one of the basement bedrooms she and her then husband had created back in 1997, the last time the house was updated. The basement rooms were better insulated and kept off the spring chill, she said.

She still didn’t want to think about leaving. Where would she go? What would she tell her neighbors? How would she babysit her grandson?

Summer was better. Moon tended her native plant garden and sat on her porch – the one she’d salvaged from a house in Northeast Portland; the one she sat on with friends and family during the long months of the pandemic. Nearly every day, she made the trek up Mount Tabor, a hike that kept her fit and grounded.

“It’s a wonderful neighborhood,” Moon said. “There are young families and older people like me. I just love it here.”

Finally, this fall, Moon got the call she’d been waiting for: She qualified to get a new furnace with a zero percent loan from Habitat. By mid-November, with another damp winter setting in, Moon was the proud new owner of a highly efficient furnace, a new electrical panel to run it and an A/C unit to keep the house at a safe temperature in the summer as well.

“I don’t have to make payments and I can remain in my house,” Moon said. “The stipulation is if you sell the house, you do pay it back. I would want to pay them back something. They’ve really helped me out.”

But she has no plans to leave. And while she doesn’t have money to help the organization that helped her, she still has her voice. She wants other homeowners to know there is help out there if they need it. Applications for Habitat loans will re-open in late spring 2025. Anyone can call 211 for more information about Portland Housing Bureau programs.

“There’s a great need,” she said. “It’s rough out there.”

Vosika-Cooper’s home repair needs were also met. Habitat put on a new roof and replaced the gutters. The Portland Housing Bureau installed a bathroom fan, replaced 15 old windows, painted the exterior of the house and repainted the kitchen cabinets. The repairs and lead paint mitigation revitalized the home and gave Vosika-Cooper a new sense of possibility that she said she now tries to pass on to her psychotherapy patients.

“I’m a living testament that the struggle does have another side,” she said. “There is a horizon line that we can get to.”

Her home, which she hopes will one day become a community center or museum for the historically Black Albina neighborhood she cherishes, has turned from “a boat anchor to a launching pad,” she said.

She plans to throw her house a 100th birthday party next June in celebration of having finally paid it off this year and owning it “free and clear” for the first time in her family’s history.

“I’m in the market for a New Orleans-style second line band,” she said, laughing.

Meanwhile, Moon just got her first utility bill after the repair. And her new, high-efficiency furnace seems to be making up for the city’s surging utility rates. Her bill has stayed about the same as it was last winter.

She’s not taking any chances though. On a chilly December day before Christmas, Moon’s thermostat was set at 64 degrees.

Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian. Email her with tips or questions at [email protected]. Or follow her on Bluesky @lmonghughes.bsky.social or X at @lrmongeau.

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