Orginally posted by By Robin Bartram with Chicago Tribune
UPDATED: February 1, 2023 at 8:38 p.m.
“It’s a safety issue and a hazard,” Alice told me, “I need a porch bad, you know?” Alice is a Black woman in her 60s who lives alone in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood. In Illinois, like in the rest of the United States, residential fires and building and porch collapses kill people each year — especially in old buildings and disproportionately in communities of color.
Last month, Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the relaunching of a homeownership program. The Opening Doors, or Abriendo Puertas, program will provide working-class families and low-income residents of color with $6,000 for down payments and/or closing costs on homes. This is an important step to making up for past discrimination in housing markets, but it overlooks a critical issue: home repairs.
Alice’s home, which she has lived in for her entire life, is more than 100 years old. She is on a fixed income and cannot afford to fix her porch, even though she knows it is an issue and worries about her safety. (I am not using the real names of the homeowners quoted in this op-ed out of respect for their privacy.)
We often hear about landlords who neglect maintenance in rental buildings. But homeowners deal with maintenance issues too. And while a program like Opening Doors would help Alice purchase a home, it does not help her maintain her home’s value or safety.
All buildings age, and without preventive maintenance, bricks crumble and wood rots. Residents of older homes live with lead paint and lead pipes, mold caused by water damage, dangerous temperatures in the winter and summer, warped floorboards that increase the risk for falls and injury, and broken doors, windows and other conditions that make fires much more likely and more often fatal.
The inability to repair and update one’s home is an intractable, deadly epidemic. As a professor and researcher, I have studied how housing regulations, building materials and legal structures perpetuate this epidemic of disrepair in Chicago. I have shadowed building code inspectors and attended housing court cases. I have spoken with more than 50 homeowners in Illinois who struggle to pay for repairs to cover building code violations. I have seen firsthand how unattended repairs not only create dangerous and unhealthy conditions but also force longtime homeowners into foreclosure and prevent seniors from aging in their homes.
What continues to surprise me is the degree to which the burdens of this crisis fall on the shoulders of an individual homeowner. Despite the crucial role that our homes play in public health and community safety, and despite our knowledge that these buildings and the materials that they are made from have a shelf life, no comprehensive programs exist to support repairs and maintenance.
Until now. Pennsylvania recently dealt an important blow in its fight against housing insecurity with the Whole-Home Repairs Program. This program creates a one-stop shop for residents to repair, upgrade and adapt their homes with grants up to $50,000, while simultaneously building out a local workforce and adding new family-sustaining jobs in a growing field.
After nearly a decade of research, I am confident that launching a statewide program in Illinois like Whole-Home Repairs is one of the only ways to effectively protect the health and safety of people like Alice in their homes.
Adrienne is evidence of how repair programs can work in Chicago. She is 72 and managed to access a home repair program that exists through the city of Chicago, which helped her fix her roof and porch. The program provides grants to income-eligible homeowners for roof or porch improvements.
“I’m very happy that the city offers these programs because I probably would have been foreclosed by now,” she told me. “Because if I had to pay for all the repairs that I’ve been doing, especially the roof, I wouldn’t be able to do it. I would have to sell the house.”
As is the case across the U.S., much of Illinois’ housing stock is more than 100 years old. The repairs to Adrienne’s 110-year-old home helped her avoid foreclosure. Adrienne was one of the lucky ones — her name was picked in the city’s repair program lottery. The lottery is in high demand, and many homeowners remain on the waitlist.
Other people live in homes that are in such disrepair that they are ineligible for help, and many more who are in need don’t even know the current city program exists.
Everyone should be safe in their homes. No one should be crippled financially by the expenses of making repairs as our buildings age. This requires a broad coordination of programs to cover the costs of materials and labor, and it requires a ramping up of our skilled workforce to do the repair work and meet the high demand.
The Whole-Home Repairs Act in Pennsylvania is the first comprehensive bill to make these promises and provide a real path to make good on them. Pritzker has showed some commitment to improving disparities in homeownership. Illinois should follow Pennsylvania’s lead and address disrepair.
Robin Bartram is an assistant professor of sociology at Tulane University and author of the book “Stacked Decks: Building Inspectors and the Reproduction of Urban Inequality.”
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Originally Published: February 1, 2023 at 3:38 p.m.