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This is the fourth article from A Green New Deal on the Ground, a series produced with Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank developing cutting-edge research at the climate and inequality nexus. The series examines how Green New Deal initiatives aim to create climate policy that positively impacts everyday life. It also explores the political coalitions and campaigns centering environmental justice and equity in decarbonization across the US and champions both broad-based movement building and institutional power to harness resources and push for change.
In August 2022, Pennsylvania saw a major win for public investment when the state legislature established the Whole-Home Repairs Program. Designed to improve housing livability and affordability and prepare state residents for a low-carbon future, the program will fund grants for low- and moderate-income homeowners to undertake significant home repairs. It will also provide loans and other support to small landlords (accompanied by affordability protections for renters) to repair homes.
The program merits review as it reveals that home repair and retrofitting are popular programs that can mobilize coalitions and secure large-scale public investment. Such programs can simultaneously advance progress toward both climate and housing justice—including increasing affordability, remedying legacies of racial inequality, and securing better housing for the elderly and disabled—all while creating jobs.
The Whole-Home Repairs Program
WHR’s main sponsor is Nikil Saval, a progressive Democratic senator representing Philadelphia’s District 1. Saval was elected in 2020 on a democratic socialist platform, which included housing justice and a state-level Green New Deal.
In August 2022, after a year-long coalition-building push that led to WHR’s passage, the program’s language was written into Pennsylvania’s fiscal code. The state’s Department of Community and Economic Development was named the program’s administrator. The Pennsylvania General Assembly approved an initial $125 million for WHR in the 2022–2023 state budget. This funding was sourced from Pennsylvania’s share of the federal American Rescue Plan, approved by the Biden Administration in March 2021 for broad-based pandemic relief and recovery efforts, and from a 2022 state budget surplus. This first year of funding will seed the program and show proof of concept. Saval and other coalition partners intend to level ongoing pressure to increase funding in future budget cycles.
Each Pennsylvania county may apply for a share of WHR funding, allocated according to a formula based on counties’ median income by household size, the average age of housing stock, and the number of households that meet a set income limit. County governments may run their WHR program themselves or authorize a nonprofit entity to do so.
Counties may spend up to $50,000 in WHR funds per home on repairs through grants to eligible homeowners and loans for small landlords. Homeowners are eligible if their household income does not exceed 80 percent of the area median income. Landlords are eligible if they own no more than five properties and if they keep rent at affordable rates. Eligible uses of WHR funds include repairs or retrofits to address quality and safety concerns, improve energy and water efficiency, and add accessibility infrastructure, such as wheelchair ramps and handrails for people with disabilities.
WHR funds may also be spent on county-level program administration (for example, hiring new staff to work with homeowners on the application process) and to create workforce development programs—training qualified home-repair workers, supporting apprenticeships, and connecting trainees to jobs through employer partnerships. Dedicating resources to growing the workforce that will construct and transform homes is essential to building large-scale, lasting change.
Homeowners should be able to apply for funds in spring 2023 and start to receive funding in spring or summer.
Making Home Repairs Affordable
WHR presents a novel solution to two major problems confronting existing home weatherization and retrofitting programs: delivering enough resources upfront to cover major repairs and providing grants that do not impose further financial pressures on cost-burdened households.
A central challenge facing home-repair efforts is lower-income households’ inability to access the financial resources needed to pay for them—even interventions like energy-efficiency retrofits that should pay themselves back over time in the form of lower household energy bills. While many utility, nonprofit, and government programs—such as the federally funded, state-administered Weatherization Assistance Program, or WAP—provide some weatherization assistance to low-income homeowners, these programs have historically been underfunded, understaffed, and over-subscribed.
Previous government efforts to muster more resources to meet this challenge have taken the form of public-private partnerships and exotic forms of debt finance sold to low-income households. For example, California, Florida, and Missouri have started using residential Property Assessed Clean Energy lending, a novel financing tool, to pay for bigger retrofitting jobs. But consumer advocates have charged PACE lenders with predatory lending practices.
Weatherization funds have not historically covered the full cost of needed repairs. For example, replacing a roof might cost $10,000—but the average WAP grant is only around $8000 per household. Further, WAP typically defers or denies applications to fix leaky roofs if the homes have major mold issues since fixing such leaks might worsen indoor air quality, an issue affecting over 50 percent of households applying for Philadelphia’s WHR funds. A significant goal of WHR has been to fill this gap by funding bigger repair work and connecting households with programs that can provide further resources for more modest repairs and technological upgrades.
WHR will also build more durable county-level infrastructure for assisting homeowners applying to other home-repair programs, whose application processes are often piecemeal and overly bureaucratic. The program’s technical assistance funding is intended to help counties increase enrollment in home-repair programs across the board by creating a clear entry point and connecting programs through tools like a one-stop digital application portal.