This story was originally published by Outlier Media. Sign up for Outlier’s newsletter.
This story is part of Beyond Repair, a series on Detroit’s home repair crisis — and what the city stands to lose if it doesn’t take action. Read all the reporting.
For more than a decade, Jennine Spencer-Gilbert has searched high and low for help fixing up her home on Detroit’s eastside. The foundation is unstable, the roof leaks, and the old knob-and-tube electrical system needs updating. The repairs altogether would cost tens of thousands of dollars.
At 55, she’s not old enough to qualify for grants for older adults. She makes too much money for income-based programs, but too little to cover the costs herself.
“It always gets to — ‘the money is gone, we’re gonna get back to you’ on this, that and the other,” she said. “Continuously.”
Spencer-Gilbert is one of thousands of Detroit homeowners desperate for help keeping their homes safe and habitable. Experts peg the cost of Detroit’s unmet home repair needs at more than $1 billion. But public and private funding doesn’t come close to meeting that need.
Right now, there are no city-run home repair programs accepting applications. One is expected to open in March for “critical” issues.
In 2024, the city and other organizations spent over $63 million on home repair programs in Detroit. That could be a high-water mark, as nearly half of those dollars came from a one-time infusion of American Rescue Plan Act funds. The city is spending a little over $20 million on home repair this fiscal year.
“We want to believe that this can be solved in a year or two,” said Heather Zygmontowicz, the city’s senior housing advisor. “But the fact of the matter is that this is a crisis that was created over decades.”
‘I can breathe’
Homeowners facing major repairs don’t have decades to wait for help.
Mary Solomon has lived in her home in Dexter-Linwood for nearly all of her 53 years. After inheriting it from her grandparents in 1998, she struggled to keep up with maintenance — a challenge that worsened after she was diagnosed with lupus in 2017 and could no longer work. In 2021, a series of floods hit her basement, and she thought she would have to move.
That changed in 2024 when she connected with the Detroit Home Repair Fund. The following year, contractors replaced her roof, remediated mold, installed new gutters, stabilized her foundation and installed a new furnace and water heater. In total, the repairs cost nearly $30,000.
“I can breathe, literally and figuratively,” Solomon said. “You don’t know how good it feels to hear the pitter patter of rain and know that no water is going to come in.”
The grant program, backed by $20 million from the Gilbert Family Foundation, health company ProMedica and DTE Energy, has helped nearly 700 households repair their homes since 2022. The foundation said it expects to reach 1,000 homes.
(Editor’s note: The Gilbert Family Foundation is one of Outlier Media’s funders.)
Want to follow our reporting, get notified of new home repair programs or share your experience? Text REPAIR to 67485.* You’ll get occasional updates from Outlier Media on home repair and other helpful Detroit info, and you can talk directly to a reporter.
It’s straightforward for those enrolled: One program addresses all of a home’s major needs. Otherwise, it can be a huge struggle for individual homeowners to try to stitch together financing. Different programs require their own applications, often with different qualifications, for different repairs, sometimes in different parts of the city.
The city’s Home Repair Task Force, with nearly 50 member organizations, has been working since 2023 to get these groups on the same page. The task force has some simple goals, like shared terminology. It also has some more ambitious ones, like creating a universal assessment to track what work has been done on a home — and what still needs to be done.
Zygmontowicz, who organizes the task force, hopes its work will demonstrate the impact of home repair and convince funders to contribute.
“How do we get more money in to address a problem that we know is so large?” she said. “I truly believe that we can’t do that unless we have a baseline understanding.”
The city will likely need to identify new sources of home repair funding, whether from foundations or by adjusting its own budget priorities. Federal help isn’t coming soon: President Donald Trump proposed eliminating grants that fund most home repair programs in the region.
Who will benefit?
Homeowners like Spencer-Gilbert, who stuck through Detroit’s hardest decades, have been anchors of neighborhood stability. In 2000, she moved back to Field Street, where she grew up, to take care of her parents. She rescued their home — and the one next door — from tax foreclosure. When she bought her house, it had been completely stripped and required a major rehab.
Without help to fix her home, Spencer-Gilbert worries she could be forced to sell. And she knows that some of her neighbors are in even worse shape. As the captain of her block club, she said she came back to her neighborhood to help care for all the people who raised her.
“God told me I had to go get back to what he blessed me with,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for those neighbors.”
Detroit’s longtime homeowners managed to persist through tough economic times, city bankruptcy and a foreclosure crisis that claimed tens of thousands of homes. Today, the houses they’ve held onto have grown in value and could be passed down to family, creating the kind of generational wealth that’s eluded many residents.
But if these Detroiters can’t fix their homes and are forced to sell, someone else will likely profit from them.
Alex Alsup, chief strategy officer at property data firm Regrid, said it’s not a question of whether a home will get rehabbed, but who will do it. His research suggests that even in some of Detroit’s poorest ZIP codes, homes are being bought for cheap, then rehabbed to rent or flip.
“The question is, who gets the return on investment?” Alsup said. “Because the homes are going to be fixed up regardless after the private market steps in.”
This article first appeared on Outlier Media and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
