Opinion: This Is Another Aspect of the Housing Crisis

Key points:

• America’s aging housing stock is a silent crisis eroding neighborhoods nationwide.
• Millions of Americans live in homes that are crumbling and unsafe due to deferred maintenance.
• Deferred maintenance hits hardest in areas with stagnant incomes and aging homeowners.

When we talk about the housing crisis, the conversation almost always falls into familiar grooves. The debate centers on supply, affordability, and the contentious battles over zoning, development, and who gets to decide where new housing is built. Those arguments are important, but they overlook another piece of the puzzle — one that is quietly eroding neighborhoods across the country.

America is living in an aging housing stock, and too many people are trapped in homes that are crumbling beneath their feet.

As The Washington Post recently reported, the story of Bernadette Reese-Hobson in Philadelphia captures this crisis in stark relief. Reese-Hobson, a retired social worker and day care attendant, purchased her pre-World War II-era rowhouse more than 20 years ago for $75,000. For a time, it represented stability and pride — a home where she raised her children and built her life.

But as the years passed, small repair problems grew into structural nightmares. A burst pipe left a trash-can-sized hole in her living room ceiling, and water continues to corrode the house’s foundation. Her shower floor threatens to give way. Her kitchen floor has buckled, mold spreads unchecked, and the local gas company shut off her stove because of unsafe conditions.

She and her autistic adult son live on a combined $2,700 a month in Social Security benefits, nearly half of which goes toward the mortgage and utilities. The repairs she needs would cost about $50,000. She cannot afford them, and programs designed to help families like hers have years-long waiting lists.

This is not an isolated case. It is part of a growing national problem.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, homeowners across the country face more than $100 billion in needed maintenance. The average American home is now 40 years old — nine years older than the average just 15 years ago. In Philadelphia, one of the nation’s oldest cities, 40 percent of houses were built before 1939, and nearly two-thirds were built before 1954. Nationwide, 6.7 million households live in what the U.S. Census Bureau calls “inadequate” housing.

The Post report describes consequences that are visible and devastating. In March, an 81-year-old woman in Philadelphia was killed when the floor of her house collapsed. In other cities, homeowners have seen brick facades disintegrate, porches cave in, or entire rooms rendered unusable. This isn’t about aesthetics — peeling paint or old siding. It’s about safety, health, and the dignity of living in a home that doesn’t threaten to collapse around you.

Too often, the policy conversation misses this reality. When we argue about how many new homes California or Texas or Pennsylvania must build, we forget that millions of Americans are already housed — but barely. They live in structures that are dangerous, unstable, and deteriorating, unable to afford even the most basic repairs.

Philadelphia officials have recognized the scope of the problem. David Thomas, president of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, told the Post he hears every day from neighbors worried that nearby homes might collapse. The city’s Basic System Repair Program, which provides low-income homeowners with grants of up to $40,000 for essential repairs, has a waiting list of 5,000 people. Another initiative, Built to Last, pools resources to address plumbing, roofing, electrical, and heating failures. Both programs are out of money.

Mayor Cherelle Parker has moved to borrow $800 million to preserve and build 30,000 affordable housing units, with a portion of that money earmarked for home repair. At the state level, Pennsylvania used $125 million from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan for major repairs, but the need dwarfs the available funds. Gov. Josh Shapiro is now seeking $50 million more.

What these programs recognize is a principle that should guide national housing policy: “The most affordable home is the home that you currently live in.” Preservation is as essential as production. Helping a family remain in their existing home, safely and securely, is often cheaper and more humane than building new housing or displacing them into already overburdened rental markets.

But the need isn’t just in Philadelphia or the Rust Belt. Aging housing stock stretches from rural Appalachia to urban centers in the Northeast, from older suburbs to small towns where the tax base no longer sustains reinvestment. Deferred maintenance hits hardest in places where incomes are stagnant and homeowners live paycheck to paycheck. A Harvard study cited by the Post found that the country’s poorest homeowners spent an average of $3,100 on repairs in 2023 — more than 16 percent of their household income. Meanwhile, wealthier households spent three times as much in raw dollars, but only 4 percent of their incomes.

This disparity means the poorest households are forced to make impossible choices. Fix the roof or pay the utility bill? Replace the water heater or buy groceries? And when the choice is deferred, the problems multiply — leaks turn into ceiling collapses, broken pipes rot the foundation, and mold spreads through the walls.

The housing crisis in America is multi-faceted. Yes, we need more homes. Yes, we need more affordability. But we also need to confront the fact that too many people live in conditions that undermine their safety and their health. This is especially true for elderly homeowners and those with disabilities, who may be physically unable to address problems even if they had the money.

There’s also a racial and economic equity dimension. In many cities, Black and Latino families own older homes in neighborhoods that never saw the kind of reinvestment that whiter, wealthier neighborhoods received. Generational wealth tied up in housing becomes meaningless when the house itself is literally falling apart. The promise of homeownership — long touted as the foundation of middle-class security — collapses when maintenance costs overwhelm fixed incomes.

Some critics will argue that government should not foot the bill for private homeowners. But that argument ignores reality. When homes become uninhabitable, families are forced into rental markets that are already stretched. Abandoned homes destabilize neighborhoods, reduce property values, and increase blight. Fires, collapses, and unsafe conditions put burdens on emergency services. Inaction costs money — just in different ways.

The question is whether we treat this as part of the broader housing crisis, or whether we continue to silo it as a matter of individual responsibility. If we are serious about housing as infrastructure — as essential to the functioning of society as roads and bridges — then repair and maintenance must be part of the public investment strategy.

That means federal support for programs like Philadelphia’s Built to Last, scaled up across the country. It means targeted aid for elderly and disabled homeowners who cannot keep pace with mounting repair costs. It means policies that see preservation not as a side project, but as central to ensuring that millions of families can live safely in the homes they already have.

The stories highlighted by The Washington Post are heartbreaking, but they are also warnings. Without action, more families will find themselves in similar situations — clinging to homes that once symbolized security, now turned into sources of fear and despair.

We cannot afford to ignore this aspect of the housing crisis. If we are going to debate housing seriously, then crumbling roofs, sagging floors, and collapsing walls must be part of the conversation. Because for millions of Americans, the housing crisis is not abstract. It is water dripping through the ceiling at night. It is the fear of falling through the bathroom floor. It is living in a house that no longer feels like a home.

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