A bipartisan group of lawmakers is warning that badly needed home repairs are blocking housing from reaching the families that need it.
In a Sept. 30 letter urging the Department of Housing and Urban Development to implement a new federal home-repair program, Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Rep. Nikema Williams (D-GA) pointed to seniors who might otherwise downsize but cannot afford to update their homes before selling.
“This is an issue that disproportionately affects America’s seniors, many of whom would like to downsize but do not want to sell the home at a steep discount due to the updates required,” they wrote.
But their warning points to a much larger supply problem.
The U.S. is already losing an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 housing units every year to deterioration, demolition, and severe weather, according to the Center for Community Progress.
If losses continued at roughly that pace, 3.5 million to 4 million units would disappear over a decade—nearly as many homes as the country is currently estimated to be short.
That creates a second front in America’s housing crunch. At the same time the country needs to build new homes, it also has to preserve the ones it already has.
And a coming generational shift could raise the stakes.
An estimated 13.9 million homes currently occupied by baby boomers and the Silent Generation will leave older owner-occupancy through 2036, according to the Generational Housing Succession report from Realtor.com®.
Whether that handoff helps ease the shortage will depend partly on what condition those homes are in when the next household needs them.
Homes survive because someone keeps investing in them
Homes rarely become unusable all at once.
More often, roofs, plumbing, electrical systems, and other components deteriorate until keeping a property habitable requires more money than an owner can—or is willing to—spend. Eventually, some homes are abandoned, demolished, or otherwise removed from the housing stock.
Researchers at the Urban Institute estimate that about 0.21% of one- to four-family homes become obsolete each year, rising to roughly 0.25% among homes built before 2000.
Those rates remain relatively low in part because owners continually pour money back into the properties they already have.
Homeowners spent about $825 billion on improvements from 2021 through 2023, according to Urban Institute researchers—roughly 1% of the total value of owner-occupied residential real estate each year.
As homes age, more of that investment goes toward keeping them functional. Maintenance and replacement projects accounted for 61% of remodeling and repair spending on homes built before 1960 in 2023, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Existing housing, in other words, is not a permanent reservoir of supply. Keeping it there requires continual investment. But the opportunity to make those investments isn’t equally shared.
‘We are fixing the wrong house’
Among owners of homes built before 1960, households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $12,700 on improvements and repairs in 2023, according to Harvard. Those in the lowest income quintile spent just $3,400.
Yet lower-income households depend more heavily on that older stock.
About 1 in 4 homeowners lived in a home built before 1960 in 2023. Among homeowners in the lowest income quintile, that share rose to 29%.
“Because older homes tend to have lower values, they make up a disproportionate share of the housing options available to lower-income households,” writes Sophia Wedeen, a research associate at Harvard.
The condition of those homes reflects the investment gap.
More than 22% of owner-occupied homes built before 1960 had a structural deficiency in 2023, more than twice the rate among homes built since 2000.
Across the occupied U.S. housing stock, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia estimates that eliminating outstanding repair deficiencies would cost $198.4 billion, with lower-income households accounting for a disproportionate share of the need.
Those deficiencies are accumulating just as cheaper homes have become harder to find.
The number of homes listed for sale that were affordable to households earning $75,000 or less was 60% lower in March 2026 than in March 2019, according to Harvard.
“We are fixing the wrong house,” Harvard researchers write. “The costs of inaction, spread across millions of households, represent an enormous and largely invisible drain on household finances, community wealth, and national health trajectories.”
Losing a cheaper home can be harder to undo
That’s part of what Congress is now hoping to address.
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act, which became law in July, authorized a federal pilot through 2031 to fund repairs for eligible homeowners and landlords. In their recent letter of support, Fetterman, Lummis, and Williams noted that almost 7 million Americans live in homes needing significant repairs.
The stakes may be highest at the lower-cost end of the market.
HUD data following the same rental units from 2015 to 2017 found that units renting for less than $500 a month were about four times as likely to be permanently lost from the housing stock as units renting for at least $1,500.
The figures cover rentals rather than owner-occupied homes, but they show how losses can disproportionately strip away housing serving households with the fewest alternatives.
And once a lower-cost home evaporates from the market, building a new unit doesn’t necessarily replace what was lost.
The share of active home listings priced below $200,000 fell from 39% in 2016 to just 13% in 2025, according to the Urban Institute. Researchers say rising land, construction, and financing costs have made smaller, less-expensive homes difficult for builders to produce profitably.
Homes priced below $300,000 accounted for just 23% of new-home sales in June 2026, according to the National Association of Home Builders, which says reaching that price point generally requires relatively low development and construction costs.
It’s one of the biggest limitations of measuring the housing shortage as a single number: If the homes we lose are mostly cheaper ones, building enough new homes may still leave buyers short on affordable options.
