Addressing the Unmet Need for Home Repairs in St. Louis

The Community Innovation and Action Center (CIAC) worked alongside St. Louis City departments and the region’s largest home repair providers to shed light on a problem that had largely been hidden from public view: the enormous unmet need for home repairs in St. Louis.

Home repairs, when adequately funded, improve people’s physical and mental health as well as their overall quality of life. In addition, home repairs help to preserve affordable housing and our city’s historic architecture, stabilize neighborhoods, and prevent property abandonment while protecting hard-earned generational wealth through homeownership. In order to assess the full scale of the problem, CIAC adapted a national methodology to measure home repair needs that had yet to be expanded to mid-sized cities. The final study and toolkit details our methodology and provides information for other cities who may want to replicate a similar assessment. This effort also led to the creation of a Home Repair Network in St. Louis to carry the work forward.