What organizers say they learned from a campaign to create a statewide home repair program in Pa.

In 2022, Pennsylvania created a program to help residents repair and weatherize their homes to make properties safer, accessible to people with disabilities, and energy efficient.

The driving force behind the creation of the Whole-Home Repairs Program was a coalition of advocates, community groups, and everyday people struggling to keep a roof over their heads, pay utility bills, and repair their homes.

“A critical part of this story is that the Whole-Home Repairs Program was community driven from start to finish,” said Carrie Santoro, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Pennsylvania Stands Up, which is a member of the PA Climate Equity Table coalition. “And I think that it’s a story of hope and vision when a lot of people are really aching for hope and vision.”

Pennsylvania has a lot of old housing stock and widespread need for home repairs. In a report published last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that necessary repairs on homes in just the Philadelphia metropolitan area would cost billions of dollars.

Preserving homes through repairs is a critical part of the “holistic and multipronged approach” needed to make sure people are not only housed but can live in homes that are safe and accessible, said Daniella Zessoules, a senior policy analyst at the New York-based public policy nonprofit Dēmos.

Dēmos teamed up with Pennsylvania Stands Up to publish a report Tuesday with lessons learned from the campaign for the Whole-Home Repairs Program. The organizations see a road map for how organizers can successfully campaign for government support for a variety of public needs. Their main message is that organizing works.

“The hope with some of these takeaways is whether it’s around home repairs or another housing policy that folks want to enact in their local jurisdiction, in their state, that these are some key takeaways that are also applicable to other community values,” Zessoules said. “This is a model for how to organize effectively, wherever you are.”

According to data the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development provided for the report, a total of 1,151 homes had been repaired for almost 5,700 residents as of June 30. But the program has been plagued by a lack of funding, long wait lists, and administrative issues.

Below are some of the advocacy coalition’s takeaways from its campaign to create the Whole-Home Repairs Program.

There’s no denying it: Pennsylvania lawmakers passed legislation creating the program as quickly as they did — less than a year after campaigning for the program started — because the state had millions of dollars from the federal government to spend.

The state budget that passed in the summer of 2022 included $125 million in federal pandemic aid for the program. Although the program is popular among residents and was created with bipartisan support, lawmakers have not funded it in subsequent state budgets.

As lawmakers plan next year’s budget, “there’s a huge amount of interest in figuring out a funding solution,” said State Sen. Nikil Saval (D., Philadelphia), the legislator behind the program.

» READ MORE: More funding for a home repair program was left out of the Pa. state budget despite high demand

“Our intuition that this would be popular and widely needed has proven to be true,” Saval said. In counties across Pennsylvania, demand for the program “way exceeds the available funding.”

As of June 30, county administrators had received more than 25,700 applications for funding, but less than 10% of applicants were set to receive grants, according to the report.

Santoro at Pennsylvania Stands Up said the coalition that got the program created will continue “to advocate for this to be a permanent program and permanently funded.”

In September, Gov. Josh Shapiro, who supports the program, announced that his administration would create Pennsylvania’s first-ever housing action plan and said repairing aging homes will be one of its pillars.

People in need of safe, affordable, and accessible housing were directly involved in creating the Whole-Home Repairs Program.

“Sen. Saval’s office actually created a structure where communities could be at the table and be a part of cocreating solutions,” Zessoules, of Dēmos, said. “So they made co-governing infrastructure that helped inform this bill.”

Feedback from community members led to the addition of assistance for renters and more streamlined processes to make the program more accessible, for example.

Santoro said she had never seen a legislator engage with community members in this way to draft legislation.

“And the exciting thing for us continues to be that this is a model,” she said. “Because we have that model, it’s also a standard to which we can hold other legislators.”

She said the program is an example of what happens when government “understands the community need and then involves community in designing the solution to meet that need.”

The concept of the Whole-Home Repairs Program started off as a “Green New Deal for Housing in Pennsylvania.” Rebranding the program and connecting home repairs and weatherization “to the conservative legislators’ priority issues of addressing blight” were key to getting the program created, according to the report.

The campaign for the program “centered on the stories of directly impacted community members to make the bill relatable and underscore the urgency of acting on the housing crisis,” the report said.

The campaign also crisscrossed the state to build support, instead of focusing only on more progressive areas. This “helped bridge political divides that could have stalled legislation,” according to the report.

“The truth is, whether you live in a rural township or a small town or a big city, in Pennsylvania, there’s a good chance that your home is old and that it needs repairs,” Santoro said. “And there’s a good chance that you can’t afford your utility bills. And there’s a good chance you can benefit from Whole-Home Repairs. And we really saw that as we were organizing for this program.”

Organizers didn’t have a comprehensive strategy for implementing the Whole-Home Repairs Program, because they thought getting it created was a long shot, according to the report. Organizers should make a plan ahead of time “for successful implementation,” it said.

Counties administer the program and have taken different approaches. In some cases, funds have gone to existing home repair programs that are not as comprehensive as backers of the program envisioned.

And many counties have excluded small landlords from the program, citing red tape and the desire to direct limited funding to homeowners. This excludes renters from benefiting from home repairs.

Saval said that “most of our work since the winning of the program is figuring out how the program is functioning in different counties” and how to improve it.