Detroit organizations spent $63 million addressing the city’s home repair crisis last year according to a first-of-its-kind report, but a major source of home repair funding won’t be available for much longer. 

A Citywide Home Repair Task Force partnered with Data Driven Detroit over the last year to document the efforts of more than 30 organizations that completed 3,058 home repair interventions in 2024. The report also flags a critical challenge for the future of this work: Roughly 44% of all home repair funding came from the American Rescue Plan Act, which expires at the end of next year.

Heather Zygmontowicz, senior housing advisor for the city’s housing department, said the looming loss of ARPA dollars is a big concern for organizations that spent the last few years building up their capacity to turn funding into repairs.

“Our ecosystem is capable of expanding and scaling, but if you were to ask me if we spend $63 million on home repair every year in the city of Detroit, I don’t think the answer is yes,” Zygmontowicz said. “It’s probably somewhere around $30 million to $40 million.” 

It’s another way Detroiters will feel the absence of pandemic relief dollars the city used to improve the lives of residents. Renew Detroit, the city’s flagship roof and window repair program, was funded with $30 million in pandemic relief. The city received $827 million total through the American Rescue Plan Act, which must be spent before the end of 2026.

The report provides a new look at the impact home repair organizations are making. That’s cause for celebration, said Gwen Gell, senior program manager of housing stability at the Rocket Community Fund.

“What the (new) report is showing is that Detroit can deliver on home repair … we know the need is big and $63 million deployed in one year is huge,” Gell said. “We have built home repair programs that just need capital infused into them and more people can be reached. The scale is built in to meet the need, and now we have numbers and insight into the extent of the ecosystem. We can see that this reaches a tremendous number of families.” 

Federal funding uncertainty requires more investment 

Federal funding covered 68% of the total spending on home repair last year, and 64% of the federal funds came from the Biden administration’s pandemic relief package.

The next-largest sources of federal funding for home repair in 2024 were Community Development Block Grants and a lead hazard program. Federal block grants help the city of Detroit carry out a 0% interest home repair program, among other housing rehabilitation initiatives. 

The future of federal funds in general is uncertain. President Donald Trump proposed eliminating block grant funding and other housing programs in his 2026 budget request, though Congress ultimately preserved the funding. 

Mayor-elect Mary Sheffield discussed partnerships to invest in affordable housing with the Trump administration’s top housing official last week. U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner visited Detroit on Dec. 4. 

Sheffield has also said her administration will seek to work with corporate and philanthropic groups to secure funding. Philanthropy represented 12% of the home repair funding last year, while 13% came from energy utility programs. 

Gilbert Family Foundation Executive Director Laura Grannemann said a major philanthropic investment has already helped to build a better foundation for coordinating home repair work. 

The Detroit Home Repair Fund (DHRF) was launched in 2022 by the Gilbert Family Foundation in partnership with DTE Energy and ProMedica. It began with a $20 million, three-year investment. According to the report, it was among programs with the greatest number of repairs completed, along with Renew Detroit and DTE’s Efficiency Assistance program. 

Grannemann said the collaboration will ensure that future dollars will be spent faster and to greater effect. Grannemann is also a co-chair of Sheffield’s mayoral transition committee focused on philanthropic services. 

“Our goal is to ensure that the administration has the support of philanthropy in the right places, and so we’re not separately creating a list of priorities,” she said. “We are working to align philanthropic priorities with the administration. Home repair is very high on the top of that list.” 

Residents who attended a Dec. 1 strategy session hosted by Sheffield’s transition team also flagged greater access to home repair grants as a key demand. Detroiters have consistently advocated for increasing home repair funding  in the city budget and expanding eligibility to middle-income and non-seniors. 

Sheffield secured $2 million in one-time funding for home repair programs in the 2025-26 fiscal year budget. As a council member, she’s touted efforts to invest more APRA funding in home repair and shift city General Fund dollars toward repair grants. Sheffield will release her first budget recommendation as mayor by March 6.

“How do we demonstrate the actual need and go to funders and say, ‘we actually have an infrastructure that’s capable of absorbing far more money than anybody thought we could, is anybody interested in partnering with us so we can start making a dent in this?’” Zygmontowicz said. 

”That’s the upshot at a kind of dark time, when we know the funding situation is going to change, but this is what allows us to lay the groundwork to potentially do more.”

‘You can’t spend enough’ 

Eastside resident Joyce Jennings-Fells has a hole in her roof and weathered windows that are unsecured. She applied for the Renew Detroit program but was too late; it was designed to help 2,000 low-income seniors and residents with disabilities. Now the tarps she’s using to cover her roof are coming loose.

“That means we still have water, as well as when the snow melts, coming into the home, which contributes to the mold problem,” Jennings-Fells said. 

Detroit’s home repair needs have been well documented as a citywide crisis driven by aging homes, low incomes, lending barriers and landlord neglect.

A 2021 University of Michigan Poverty Solutions report estimated the total need for the city in 2018 would cost between $2 billion and $4 billion. Zygmotowicz said the true number is unclear. She recalled a community meeting where one resident said “it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, you can’t spend enough.” 

“We hear that a lot, and it resonates, but I also think that’s a tough way to view our work,” Zygmotowicz said. “Ideally we’re not doing something that doesn’t have a possibility of success. We know every individual that gets some kind of improvement, there’s a success there. We are all working toward something greater, where we don’t have this crisis on our hands for a long-term basis.”

Detroit organizations provided repair services at 2,628 homes last year, including 366 homes that received multiple repair interventions. 

U-M researchers estimated 38,000 families live in substandard housing. A 2025 housing assessment performed by the city of Detroit found 34,280 owner-occupied units and 71,630 renter-occupied units had at least one housing issue. The city found 39% of homes have at least one deficiency needing repair.

Roof repairs were the most common type of intervention performed in 2024, followed by plumbing and HVAC. City Council District 4 residents received the most investment ($10.3 million) and highest number of repairs (555), but the repairs occurred across the whole city. 

“It wasn’t necessarily concentrated in one district,” Gell said. “There are districts that did receive more funds than others, but every single district received repairs, and it really almost every single residential neighborhood in the city.” 

Zygmontowicz said the spending says more about the home repair ecosystem than what type of repairs are most needed and where. More roofs were fixed due to the existence of the city’s roof repair program, she said.

Gell said granular data on the exact type of home repairs needs is hard to come by. That’s why the programs should be designed to be flexible, she said. 

“We don’t have a database of housing quality in the city,” Gell said. “We know that roofs are a big issue. We can drive by and see that with our eyes. We don’t know how many people are without heat. We don’t know how many people are without hot water, unless they raise their hand and say, ‘Hey, I need some help.’” 

Funding from the Detroit Home Repair Fund can only be used at homes that are being assisted by another home repair program. Grannemann said the DHRF uniquely seeks to make homes habitable instead of targeting one type of repair. Officials want this kind of layered response to become more common. 

“We recognized that we needed to empower those local neighborhood grassroots nonprofits to be able to do a whole plethora of repairs,” Grannemann said. “Nobody just has a roof repair issue, for the most part.”

The Citywide Home Repair Task Force plans to continue data collection and reporting in the future. It will help officials understand the level of investment necessary to make a long-term impact on Detroit’s extensive home repair needs and coordinate a better response.