Todd Swanstrom (second from left), the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy, discusses the importance of a strong home repair ecosystem for providing affordable housing and maintaining strong communities while speaking on a panel during “Preserving Homes, Strengthening Communities: A Home Repair Symposium” last Thursday at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. (Photos by Steve Walentik)

Constance Siu knows better than most about the home repair challenges that exist across the St. Louis region.

Those challenges might be most acute in the nearly two dozen neighborhoods of north St. Louis served by the North Newstead Association, where Siu is the executive director.

Among the community building services the association offers area residents is a program to assist low- and moderate-income senior homeowners with needed repairs that the organization hopes will allow them to age in place.

“We used to call it our Minor Home Repair Program because it only focused on minor home repair,” Siu told an audience of nearly 75 people gathered last Thursday morning in the Gateway Auditorium at the Federal Reserve Bank in downtown St. Louis. “As we’ve done this work over the years, we recognized that was not an option for actually doing comprehensive home repair, especially in North City where the needs are so great.”

Debra Cornell (at right), a community volunteer with Rebuilding Together, talks about the impact home repairs made on her quality of life while speaking on a panel a “Preserving Homes, Strengthening Communities: A Home Repair Symposium.”

Siu was part of a panel that kicked off “Preserving Homes, Strengthening Communities: A Home Repair Symposium,” a day-long event hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis in conjunction with the University of Missouri–St. Louis. It aimed to shine a light on the scale of the home repair needs in St. Louis and the work local organizations are doing to address them.

Attendees, both from the St. Louis area and far beyond, also heard from local and national experts, about the impact that home repair can make on the economic health of communities and the safety and well-being of their residents.

Todd Swanstrom, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy at UMSL, was central to organizing the symposium. He has been researching and facilitating community dialogues on improving the home repair ecosystem in St. Louis for the past several years, and those conversations are what led to the establishment of the St. Louis Home Repair Network, a coalition of nonprofits working to provide free and low-cost home repairs for residents.

Swanstrom has also been collaborating with researchers around the country to increase and expand the scope of data collection around the home repair system.

“In 2023, Todd and his group at the Community Innovation and Action Center at the University of Missouri–St. Louis published a report that focused on the need for home repair and the impact of home repairs in the city of St. Louis,” said Elaine Powers, the executive director of Rebuilding Together, who moderated the opening panel. “They specifically focused on older homeowners and those who had received home repairs through one of several agencies that worked together with them on the study. Because of that, we have some really solid local data that we are all able to use when we talk about why we’re doing the work that we’re doing.”

The study found that electrical work, weatherization, heating and cooling were among the most common repairs that needed to be made, and that the average homeowner had more than $13,000 in needed repairs. When issues go untreated, minor problems escalate into major hazards, which can create unsafe living conditions, increase energy costs and force people from their homes.

The report estimated that the cost of providing necessary repairs to older adults in the city alone would exceed $300 million. There are plenty of neighborhoods in St. Louis County with significant home repair challenges of their own, with the burden of housing deterioration landing disproportionately on the most vulnerable populations.

“That data reinforces what we hear directly from residents,” said Joe Zmudczynski, the construction program director at Beyond Housing, which provides home repair services in north St. Louis County. “The upkeep of old houses costs a lot of money. I can say from personal experience as a person living in an old home that every time I fix one problem, another one crops up like some endless game of Whack-a-Mole. Many of the homes that we see through Beyond Housing’s home repair programs were built in the early 1900s and are now in need of critical repairs – roof replacements, plumbing and electrical updates, HVAC and accessibility modifications, just to name a view. Unfortunately, the rising costs of materials and labor make these repairs unattainable for low-income households.”

It can leave homeowners with the impossible choice of making needed repairs or paying for everyday necessities such as food or medication.

The good news is home repairs have a positive impact on a resident’s quality of life.

“This is a place where you have sanctity, pride, a place you can pass down for generations,” said Debra Cornell, who benefitted from home repair work done by Rebuilding Together and is now a community volunteer with the organization. “It is just a joy to be able to stay in your home, to be able to not have to worry about the roof caving in. I know for myself, when I walk into my shower, the tears just flow because I had a tub, an old tub, that I would have to step over, and having bad knees, I couldn’t do that. Now I just walk into it. That is truly a blessing.”

It can help Americans across the country.

“This entire gathering is premised on the idea that this is an issue that deserves more attention than it presently gets from the public, from politicians and from policymakers,” Swanstrom said. “We need to join this issue to the affordable housing crisis conversation. It’s not either we build new housing and increase supply or we preserve the existing housing stock. We need to do both.”

“Alan Mallach, who’s up here, did a calculation that we lose something like 400,000 homes in this country from decay and decline that are abandoned. That’s 400,000 homes that could have contributed to addressing the affordable housing issue. So, it needs to be made part of the conversation.”

Swanstrom spoke as part of a panel that also included Karen Black, the CEO of May 8 Consulting, which works on housing issues in Philadelphia, and Carlos Martin, the project director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. They discussed how a strong home repair ecosystem can increase affordable housing and improve economic mobility in low- and moderate-income communities.

“This is a systemic issue,” Black said. “Either we pony up and invest in this housing stock so that we can keep it, or we lose it, and then the issue is not how many new units can we add each year, it’s how many neighborhoods do we lose. Who gets to own a home in this country, that American Dream? Is it only people who make over $200,000 or $300,000 a year? We have this moment in time to preserve something that is incredibly important to this nation.”

Afternoon breakout sessions focused on ways home repairs can contribute to wealth preservation, preserving rental housing, improving  health outcomes and greater safety through weather resilient housing.

In conjunction with Thursday’s symposium, Swanstrom and fellow researchers gathered last week for a peer review session of their work on home repairs. They are working to produce an edited book they hope will bring further attention to the issue.