St. Louis-area Realtors and housing providers want city officials to adopt home improvement programs from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to increase the city’s affordable housing stock.
In a recent home repair report, St. Louis Realtors and the St. Louis Housing Solutions Coalition proposed to expand the city’s housing by addressing its low housing inventory with innovative home repair methods.
The St. Louis Rental Improvement Fund: A Home Repair Program states that cities with an aging housing supply require more money and investment to repair and maintain. This kind of investment creates a challenge for St. Louis renters and homeowners because they cannot afford the upkeep and repair of homes as needed, which further exacerbates the city’s vacancy issue.
“We want safe, healthy, affordable housing for everybody, but if you can incentivize that, we think that's a better approach,” said Charlie Hinderliter, senior vice president of government affairs at St. Louis Realtors. “We think that is going to be better in terms of bringing the type of landlord that the city wants to see into the city.”
Besides an aging housing stock and increased rental prices, housing leaders say St. Louis cannot afford to hire the necessary building inspectors to enforce habitability.
Hinderliter said St. Louis’ focus is on landlord and tenant issues and its recent safe temperatures ordinance can help improve the city’s rental supply, but it barely touches the surface of a larger issue.
“We have an under-resourced building division that can't enforce [the laws], and it's adding regulation after regulation after regulation that makes it harder, especially for the mom-and-pop landlords,” he said.
Over the past year, the St. Louis Realtors and the St. Louis Housing Solutions Coalition, a group of landlords and housing providers, surveyed the housing markets in cities including Austin, Houston, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia to see how housing developers kept up with demand. They noticed that developers in growing cities in Texas were building more homes to keep up with the increased population, which is driving their rental prices down and increasing their affordable housing stock.
St. Louis is an aging city and developers are not building enough housing. As the two organizations surveyed the housing market in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, they found similarities within the cities. Neither city in Pennsylvania is growing because they are older, similar to St. Louis. However, in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the state implemented home repair and rental improvement programs to help drive rental prices down and provide more available rental units.
In particular, the housing coalition and Realtors association are encouraging St. Louis city leaders to adopt Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Preservation Initiative and its Rental Improvement Fund. It is an incentive-based model that creates a neighborhood program and funding structure that focuses on the safety of homeowners and housing providers.
The Rental Improvement Fund, which launched last year in Philadelphia, provides forgivable loans to landlords to help with repairs and maintenance. It offers 10-year forgivable loans of up to $24,999 per property and 15-year zero-interest loans of up to $50,000 per property. This fund allows homeowners or landlords to repair roofs, windows and doors. It also helps with improving plumbing and electrical systems, as well as removing asbestos, lead and mold.
Hinderliter said it could specifically help St. Louis homeowners and landlords who have been historically locked out of home loan financing with direct access to capital. It could also increase physical and health safety for St. Louis renters.
A home repair program with no strings attached in north St. Louis could be beneficial because it is challenged with a high number of vacancies that need major restoration, which is costly, said Constance Siu, executive director of North Newstead Association, a north St. Louis community development corporation.
“The programs will allow us to have dollars that we can access easily in order to turn units,” she said. “Being able to access these funds where there are less strings attached to less compliance, less grant reporting and other things would be instrumental in really letting things move a little quicker.”
The past four years have been difficult for the North Newstead Association. Siu said north St. Louis does not have enough available housing and she is constantly turning away renters. The community development corporation has units, but it cannot afford to rehabilitate each one.
She said St. Louis’ Healthy Home Repair Program, which assists homeowners, but not landlords, helps with those major renovations, but the organization does not rely on those dollars anymore for home repairs because the process to receive those funds is cumbersome.
“North Newstead and several other organizations within the Home Repair Network have shifted to private dollars because private dollars are a lot less strings attached,” Siu said. “But then at the end of the day, we are all drawing from the same pot of money, and it's not a very big pot of money.”
She wants city leaders to streamline the repair process and increase public and private funding to allow homeowners and landlords to pull from a larger pool of money.
To pilot the home improvement program, the report suggests funding it through a city appropriation bond, a public-private partnership or through legislation.
Some city leaders support adopting some of Pennsylvania’s home repair initiatives as models to maintain the affordable housing market in St. Louis.
"[Through the programs] the city can help good landlords keep their units in good shape, which would then allow them to continue to rent out their properties at affordable rates,” said Alderman Michael Browning of the 9th Ward. “It will take funding, primarily, as well as an office to administer the program. It does not need to be a large office, but the experts from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh estimated $3 million or so to get a program like this started.”
