More than 4,800 Detroiters have applied for a new roof repair program that can accommodate 1,000 homes, demonstrating the vast need for home repairs across the city.
City officials expect as many as 10,000 applications by month’s end, when the application window for the roof repair program closes.
The city of Detroit earlier this month announced a program to replace 1,000 roofs next year for low-income seniors and homeowners with disabilities. The $30 million program, dubbed Renew Detroit, is the first initiative to come out of more than $400 million in federal COVID-19 recovery dollars the city received.
The roof repairs are expected to cost $20 million, with each project estimated to cost between $7,000 and $13,000. The city plans to spend the remaining $10 million allocated to the program on repairs to at least an additional 500 homes but has yet to decide what types of home repairs that money will fund.
“We know that home repair need is great in the city and I think this program is specifically structured to try and speak to that,” said Heather Zygmontowicz, chief of special housing programs. “Our prior estimates of annual numbers of home repairs coming out of the city are usually anywhere between 100 and 300 a year. This program is looking to significantly increase that.”
Home repairs were among the top issues Detroiters raised when asked how they would like their city government to spend federal dollars. Researchers and community leaders have said the breadth of repair needs in Detroit are vast and available programs are difficult to tap into or have long wait lists.
Daisy Jackson, vice president of the Field Street Block Club in Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood, said that $30 million is not nearly enough to address the need for home repairs and that it shouldn’t be restricted to seniors and those with disabilities.
Jackson, a fourth-generation Detroiter who has lived in her Islandview home for 50 years, said roof repairs are a top priority in her neighborhood.
“People have leaks coming in their house. When it rains, the animals get in their homes, get in their attics and everything,” Jackson, 66, said.
Roofs are key to safe homes.
“We associate stable housing with having a roof over our heads and we know that in Detroit, for thousands of Black homeowners with fixed incomes or historically low incomes, this just is not a reality,” said Alexa Eisenberg, a postdoctoral research fellow with the Poverty Solutions initiative at the University of Michigan.
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