Though the safety and quality of housing has improved in the United States over the last several decades, problems with substandard housing conditions and disrepair persist in many neighborhoods. To discover how severe and costly home repair needs really are, PolicyMap and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia embarked on a research project to answer the question—how much investment would it take to repair all occupied housing in the United States?
OUR JOINT STUDY SHOWS
$126.9 billion needed for housing repairs
$2,920 average cost of repairs for houses in disrepair
More than 1/3 of occupied homes need repair
1 in 20 homes need more than $5,000 in repairs
In order to craft effective policies, housing experts need to know what level of investment, in dollars, is needed to bring homes into good repair. Researchers from PolicyMap and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia have created a new measure that assigns a repair estimate to every occupied housing unit surveyed in the American Housing Survey. This measure allows us to explore in more detail what kinds of households, in terms of geographic, demographic, and housing unit characteristics, need the most expensive repairs.
The research team is currently developing forthcoming neighborhood-level estimates that will ultimately reveal the extent of local home repair needs, informing the best policy and programmatic ways to address them.
Find out the extent and cost of the housing repair needs in your metro area, and compare it to others across the United States. Under development – census tract and zipcode level estimates.
Easily accessible data and mapping tools allow local, state, and federal governments to:
Learn how leading government agencies are using data on maps for better outcomes.
Read about our study in Cityscape, a publication of the Office of Policy Development and Research at HUD.
Housing quality is inequitably distributed across socioeconomic lines. At the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and PolicyMap we have quantified repair needs and housing quality to measure the problem.
Thanks to the following members of the committee that provided guidance and feedback on this work:
Kermit F. Baker, PhD, Hon. AIA
Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, Project Director of the Remodeling Futures Program; Chief Economist for the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Vice President for Survey and Housing Policy Research, National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)
President, Policy Solutions, Reinvestment Fund
Lauren Lambie-Hanson
Principal Financial Economist, Supervision, Regulation, and Credit, Consumer Finance Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Vice President of Research, Opportunity Finance Network
President and CEO, Opportunity Finance Network
Senior Policy Analyst, Policy Solutions, Reinvestment Fund
Senior Research Fellow, Consumer Finance Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division, U.S. Census Bureau
Director of Research and Information, Housing Assistance Council
Additional thanks to Joseph Kelble at Gordian and Dave Huber at Kaliber Construction for being generous with their time and expertise.
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