The need for this program is enormous: one in four Pennsylvania voters lives in a home that needs a critical repair, and one in three can’t afford their utility bills.

We’re working for every household, in every county, to have what they need to make their home whole. Help ensure Whole-Home Repairs is funded for years to come by adding your name in support of the program.

It’s not just Pennsylvania residents who are supporting Whole-Home Repairs—a coalition of community organizations and housing and energy advocates worked tirelessly to make this program a reality. If your group wants to support, please reach out!

Please add your name below to support the Whole-Home Repairs Program and affirm Pennsylvanians’ right to homes that are warm, safe, and dry. We’ll make sure that you receive updates on the program and additional actions to support it.

About

The Whole-Home Repairs Program was introduced by Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval in March 2022 as Senate Bill 1135 and signed into law in July 2022 with an unprecedented $125-million appropriation in the state budget. The program language is enshrined in the state’s fiscal code.

Pennsylvania has some of the oldest housing stock in the nation. Hundreds of thousands of homes across the Commonwealth have moderate to severe physical inadequacies, including leaky roofs or windows, blown fuses or exposed wiring, unreliable heat, or the lack of a flushing toilet. As people struggle to simply hold on to their homes, they may be forced to forgo regular maintenance and small repairs and upgrades, deferring until a repair is more urgently needed, and far more expensive.

Deferred maintenance can result in homes with energy inefficiencies, which not only lead to dangerous low temperatures in the winter and high temperatures in the summer, but also impose extremely high utility burdens on households that can least afford them. In Philadelphia, low-income households spend an average of 23% of their household’s income on utilities alone. A household that can’t afford badly needed repairs may be forced into an untenable situation: continue to live in a home that is fundamentally unsafe, abandon it, or sell to a speculator for far less than their home is worth and risk losing their community.

The housing crisis is inextricable from the climate crisis. Pennsylvania’s climate is projected to become increasingly hotter and wetter. The “tropicalization” of our climate decreases the service life of building and roofing materials, increases demand for cooling and for energy, and increases maintenance costs for our built infrastructure.

The Whole-Home Repairs Program establishes a one-stop shop for home repairs and weatherization while building out our local workforce and adding new family-sustaining jobs in a growing field. This program is the first of its kind in the nation, making it so that Pennsylvanians can stay warm, safe, and dry in homes they can afford.

The Whole-Home Repairs Program builds on existing federal, state, and local home repair and weatherization programs to fill the three main gaps identified by practitioners:

First: Whole-Home Repairs provides grants for repair work for homeowners and forgivable loans to small landlords with affordability restrictions so that they can make habitability repairs and upgrades for energy efficiency and accessibility.

Second: The Whole-Home Repairs program allocates resources for support staff to ensure that eligible applicants are accessing the right programs in the right order to meet their needs and maximize their access to holistic repairs.

Third: The Whole-Home Repairs Program provides resources to increase retention in home repair and weatherization training programs and pre-apprenticeship programs, including with the provision of cash stipends to trainees, so that Pennsylvania can build the workforce we need to meet the demand while keeping our skilled workers, and the jobs they do, local.

Currently, there aren’t enough skilled workers to do be able to do the repairs at scale. A recent report on energy efficiency jobs in America found that there are decades of work ready and waiting for Pennsylvania’s growing energy efficiency workforce.

The Whole-Home Repairs Program is housed within the Department of Community and Economic Development. The program is administered at the county level so that individual counties can maximize their resources and address the needs of their residents. Nearly all counties applied to administer Whole-Home Repairs to their residents, showing near universal demand.

Dozens of stakeholders were involved in drafting and editing and finalizing the program logistics.

The Whole-Home Repairs program is a housing security initiative, an energy initiative, an anti-blight initiative, a jobs initiative, and a community safety initiative. The cumulative effect of all these things means that this program can tackle many of the root causes of community instability by keeping people in their homes and keeping these homes safe and healthy. Work to scale up the program is ongoing. We’re fighting for every household, in every county, to have what they need to make their home whole.