Don’t let Philly homes get abandoned. Fix them up instead.

Low-income homeowners in Philadelphia are losing their homes, and they need help.

In 2012, 38% of owner-occupied homes in Philadelphia were owned by people earning less than $35,000 a year, making it difficult for them to afford major maintenance repairs. It won’t take much for these homes to rapidly deteriorate, leaving them uninhabitable.

Of course, this isn’t just a problem in our city. In 2019, 6.3% of lower-income homeowners across the country — representing nearly one million households — were living in homes classified as structurally inadequate by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

These homeowners become susceptible to housing developers who offer cash for distressed properties. For many desperate residents, this is their chance to escape. However, the cash offers are low and not enough to buy a new home or sustain them for long. As a result, some former homeowners become homeless or end up relying on Section 8 housing, whose wait list has been closed since 2010. All because the former homeowners couldn’t afford basic repairs.

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It should be no surprise that between 2010 and 2020, the Philadelphia metropolitan area lost nearly one-quarter of its low-income homeowners. To address this, our government must provide funding to low-income homeowners to help maintain their homes.

Why should we protect low-income homeowners?

For one, it’s cheaper. Between 2009-2011, Philadelphia spent 87% of its subsidized housing dollars on new construction. In Philadelphia, it costs $300,000 to build a newly constructed single-family home, which requires a short-term loan of $200,000. That $200,000 could instead be used to renovate 14 to 30 existing homes, which prevents blight and reduces the need for Section 8 housing.

Secondly, maintaining homes is better for the environment than building new ones. A simple two-bedroom house construction emits around 80 tons of carbon dioxide. One study showed that if the city of Portland, Ore., restored all existing single-family homes and commercial office buildings it planned to demolish, it would avoid approximately 231,000 metric tons in CO2 emissions over 10 years. Preserving houses can make a massive impact in the fight against climate change.

“Maintaining homes is better for the environment than building new ones.”

Despite the positive changes preserving homes would make, many people still argue that the solution to the current housing crisis is building more market-rate homes. Some are even going as far as fighting to reduce regulatory policies to encourage building new homes. This is all being pushed forth with the claim that it would help increase the stock of “affordable” homes.

However, this cannot be further from the truth. Building new homes — instead of maintaining existing ones — doesn’t give families more access to affordable homes. Instead, it destabilizes and displaces low-income families, leaving them with nowhere to go.

They can become displaced just because developers have bought up and demolished properties around them and built new homes. These new homes increase property taxes within the area and, in turn, insurance costs. Low-income homeowners can no longer afford to live in their homes, let alone repair them, and are forced to sell.

The lack of support for low-income homeowners is one of the biggest contributors to poverty. Helping people maintain and preserve their homes helps give families stability, which is the key to stronger communities and generational wealth transfer.

Currently, Philadelphia offers a Basic Systems Repair Program, which provides free home repairs to low-income residents. The program is a great start, and with additional resources and broader implementation, it can drastically help the housing crisis.

Other organizations are seeking a solution, such as the Healthy Rowhouse Project, which is working with city officials and nonprofit partners to create a better way to offer loans and grants that let people stay in their homes. But organizations like these cannot take the place of a full government initiative. This is a public issue, and our government officials are not doing enough to combat this problem.

“Our brick rowhomes are those houses that the wolf couldn’t blow down in the three little pigs story,” Karen Black, the founder of the Healthy Rowhouse Project, told Next City in 2015. But it’s not wolves we need to worry about. It’s developers and the lack of government intervention.

Philadelphia must do more to help save low-income homeowners.

Layla Sayed is a freshman majoring in urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this op-ed misstated the number of homes that are awaiting service by the city’s Basic Systems Repair Program.