A proposed bill in Pennsylvania would use the power and budget of the state government to help homeowners and small-time landlords make critical repairs to their properties, in an effort to address the growing challenges of housing affordability and climate change.
The Whole-Home Repairs Act would create a program to make grants of up to $50,000 to homeowners to pay for repairs, weatherization, and energy-efficiency upgrades. It would also provide for loans to landlords who lease units at affordable rates to carry out maintenance and improvements.
State Sen. Nikil Saval, a Democrat who represents parts of Philadelphia, is the lead sponsor of the bill. He explained that it is designed to supercharge a patchwork of local programs and extend home repair assistance to all parts of the state.
“In many instances with this fund, we’re scaling up existing programs and helping them to function better—the effect of which would be a holistic approach to home maintenance and energy efficiency,” Saval said.
Part of Broader Push to Solve Housing Problems
The proposal comes as housing insecurity and unaffordability is a growing problem around the country, and as more state legislatures are seeking to join local governments in proposing solutions.
Pennsylvania has some of the oldest housing stock in the country, according to Saval’s office. His office also says that “Hundreds of thousands of homes … 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.”
But despite these issues, the state has left much of the policymaking on housing to local governments, says Saval, who was elected in 2020.
“The state just doesn’t do very much right now,” he said. “We don’t have budget hearings on housing, there’s no housing line item in the budget, there’s no department that directly addresses housing.”
In coming up with his bill, Saval said he “wanted to find an issue that resonated across the state.” While housing policy tends to focus more on big cities, like Saval’s district, smaller towns and rural areas, which make up much of Pennsylvania, have deep housing challenges as well.
“We have a lot of homeowners in both urban and rural areas that struggle to maintain their homes at the level that they need to to stay healthily and happily housed,” said Corianne Payton Scally, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
But assistance for people who already own their homes tends to be at the bottom of “the housing policy pecking order,” Scally noted, with policymakers often instead prioritizing assistance to low-income renters …….