How long someone in the Richmond region typically waits for home repair assistance depends on where they live.
For one federally-funded program that lets the nonprofit project:HOMES make larger repairs, the waitlist is typically about 18 months for Henrico County residents and three years for Chesterfield County residents. In Richmond, it’s about five years.
Nicole Storm, project:HOMES’ senior director of advancement, said Richmond’s wait is longer because the city has more residents in need of assistance and a significantly older housing stock. She said there’s also limited resources available overall, requiring the nonprofit to find alternate funding sources for home repair initiatives.
The regional nonprofit Partnership for Housing Affordability released a new report last Friday detailing a study in which authors surveyed low- to moderate-income Black homeowners in the Richmond region from 2023 to 2025.
The report paints a stark picture about what a lack of home repair assistance means for the homeowners and the racial wealth gap in the US.
“Their experiences reveal a clear reality: without access to home repair assistance, their power to preserve and pass down wealth through homeownership becomes increasingly fragile,” the report reads.
The Partnership for Housing Affordability contracted Karen Black, who runs Philadelphia-based May 8 Consulting, for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded study.
Black, who also teaches in the urban studies department at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that research shows that home repairs can help bring down healthcare costs and that better living conditions help children with kindergarten readiness. She said it also allows seniors to age in place in their own houses.
“But we really don’t have the information as to what this means for the Black-white wealth gap or for intergenerational wealth generally,” she told VPM News in an interview, adding that she felt that it was the study’s mandate.
Homeownership provides stability, ability to pass down accrued wealth
The new two-year study from the Partnership for Housing Affordability covers Community Development Block Grant funding, which is administered by HUD. A portion of those federal dollars are allocated by Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield to project:HOMES each year for its critical home repair program.
Project:HOMES helps applicants with repairs, most commonly fixing roofs, heating and steps. Each locality has slightly different criteria for the programs, but the average cost per house was $8,300 in fiscal year 2023-2024.
From 2021 to 2025, the report says project:HOMES received an annual average of $557,400 from Richmond, $587,000 from Henrico and $425,000 from Chesterfield for the critical home repair program.
With surveys and focus groups, the authors got responses from 44 low-income Black homeowners in the counties of Henrico and Chesterfield and in the City of Richmond who got repairs from project:HOMES from 2024 to 2025 — and 58 eligible households on the waitlist that didn’t.
Of the 102 homeowners who initially responded in 2024, 73 took part in the survey in 2025.
May 8 Consulting acknowledged that constraints — including the small pool of potential respondents and short study period — limited the study’s final conclusions.
But Woody Rogers, Partnership for Housing Affordability’s policy director, told VPM News that the survey responses underscore the importance of home repair assistance and need to expand funding sources for the effort.
Rogers said that many participants, who he said were given stipends, talked about the financial and physical stability that their homes give them — particularly in a market that has priced out many people.
“Being able to pass that down, both that stability as well as the wealth that has been accrued since purchasing a home, is really invaluable to a lot of these homeowners who are kind of nervous about what their children or grandchildren will experience in this very tight and expensive, hot real estate market we have in Richmond,” Rogers said.
The bulk of participants were aged 63 or older (84%) and female (86%), per the report. Nearly 75% had owned their homes for 20 years or more, with only 3.9% buying their home in the last five years. The average age of a respondent’s home was 74 years, with houses ranging from 25 to 126 years old.
Most people who responded (66%) said their homes were less structurally stable and less safe to live in (54%); however, the report says “in apparent contradiction to their home’s significant repair needs, 75% of survey respondents maintain that their homes are safe and comfortable.”
Focus group participants said their home is a safe place that they would view as comfortable until a major urgent repair is needed.
According to the report, low-income homeowners who took part in the study see their home as an asset despite requiring significant repairs. And 79% of survey participants said they believed repair services from project:HOMES would increase their house’s value.
After the study, Black said, many people expressed fear over being displaced and not having other options available to them.
“People gave examples of friends who sold their home and went to a place that began as affordable, and those rents have continued to go up, and now they risk being out on the street,” she said.
“Home repairs ‘eat last'”
According to the report’s analysis of census data, there are nearly 5,000 fewer Black homeowners in Richmond in 2020 than there were in 2000.
A 2022 US Department of Housing and Urban Development report under President Joe Biden’s administration cited “longstanding structural barriers” — such as mortgage redlining and lending discrimination — that have kept Black homeownership at lower rates than white homeownership.
The HUD report said the Black homeownership rate was 44% in 2021, compared to 74% for white homeownership. It added that racial disparities in homeownership is “perhaps the biggest drivers of the racial and ethnic wealth gap.”
Data reported by Axios in 2024 also showed that Richmond-area homes owned by Black residents are valued less than white-owned homes. A 2022 report from the Urban Institute found that houses accounted for 81% of the total net worth of Black homeowners who were 62 and older at the time, compared with 47% for white homeowners.
Both Rogers and Black highlighted the need for more funding for home repairs to help people stay in their homes — and for more estate planning assistance, because 61% of participants said they don’t have a will or trust to pass down their homes.
Participants said home repairs often take a backseat to other priorities because of fixed incomes, saying they first worry about putting food on the table and keeping their lights on.
“We definitely heard that home repairs ‘eat last,’” Black said. “That the bank is going to foreclose on you. That all these terrible things are going to happen if you don’t pay your utility bill, you will have no heat or electricity, but home repairs you look through a lens of hope that some day I’ll get to that.”
Storm, with project:HOMES, said local governments set aside federal funding for home repairs done by the nonprofit, telling VPM News that she believes it would be helpful if it was a multiyear commitment instead of year-by-year.
“If you knew on a more regular basis how much money would be available, you could make some better decisions about how to use it,” she said.
Storm says she understands why eligibility regulations are in place, particularly with federal dollars on the line, but she thinks flexibility “would be one way that the money could be better utilized without necessarily growing the pot of money.”
The nonprofit needs to verify people’s income, that they own the home and take other steps that Storm says she knows are vital to the process, but take time to navigate.
“There’s a very prescriptive list of what we can and can’t do for them, and those might not be all of the things that that homeowner needs,” she said.
To help address gaps, Storm says project:HOMES works to raise private funding so it isn’t as reliant on federal dollars. “But there’s only so much of that money to go around too, so we are always trying to do the best we can with what we have and meet as many of the needs of that homeowner as possible,” she told VPM News.
According to budget documents, Chesterfield’s spending plan for fiscal year 2027 allocates $398,000 for project:HOMES’ critical repair program. But the county also has set aside $400,000 for Habitat for Humanity’s own initiative.
Richmond Mayor Danny Avula’s budget proposal, which is set for a final vote by city council Monday night, earmarks $860,000 for project:HOMES’ critical repair program. The plan also has money set aside for Habitat for Humanity and other programs.
“Preservation of existing Black homeownership is essential to address the racial wealth gap in Richmond at a time when Black homeowners’ ability to hold on to their house is eroding,” the report concludes. “When homes fall into disrepair, families lose equity, housing security, and the ability to pass anything of lasting value to the next generation.”
