Ms. Carolyn has had a hole in her ceiling for two years.
During heavy rain, water leaks through the exposed wood and runs down the wall in the front room of her one-level home. The room’s water-soaked floorboards are cracked and splintering. Ms. Carolyn, who asked to be identified only by her first name in this piece to protect her privacy, keeps the worst of the damage hidden under a large box, worried that pests will come up through the gaps in the floor.
A contractor cut the ceiling hole in 2024 while attempting to fix a smaller water leak — but he never came back to repair it. Ms. Carolyn tried to contact her homeowner’s insurance company, which had hired the contractor, but was unsuccessful.
“I tried to call them back, but I couldn’t get nobody to actually answer me,” she said.
Her front room used to be where Ms. Carolyn laid out her best dinnerware, the far wall decorated with a mirror and floral candle sconces. Now, the wall is bare aside from the vertical stains the water leaves when it gets inside. Her decorations sit in piles on the dining table and floor. She rarely goes into the room at all.
As her home ages, other maintenance issues have emerged, including a broken water heater and electrical problems in the kitchen. In the front room, a dark spot that she suspects may be mold has appeared on another wall near an air vent. Because Ms. Carolyn is on oxygen therapy, mold in the home is especially dangerous.
Like Ms. Carolyn, many Memphis homeowners are living in unsafe or unhealthy homes they can’t afford to get fixed, according to multiple local assistance groups. It’s a nationwide problem that particularly impacts seniors and low-income homeowners, but due to a lack of data on home maintenance, it’s difficult to know the true scale of the repairs needed.
“There’s no easy way to measure this problem and put a number on it,” said Todd Swanstrom, a professor of urban politics at the University of Missouri who studies home repair needs in St. Louis. “There’s no standard public database. There is a lot of good data on affordability… but it totally ignores the issue of housing quality.”
Memphis is home to nearly a dozen assistance programs that make home repairs at no cost to owners — two are run by the city, while others are run by local agencies, nonprofits, the state and Shelby County. But these organizations say the need far exceeds their funding. Most programs don’t offer the major repairs that many homes require, like roofing, foundation work and electrical work.
Being behind on home payments or having multiple repair needs at once can also make residents ineligible for help. Habitat for Humanity of Greater Memphis often encounters these challenges when screening clients for its Aging in Place program, one of the largest home repair programs in the metro area.
“Anybody that calls me on any given day, it’s horrible. Many of them are crying,” said Shannon Morgan, the chapter’s associate director of programs. “Unfortunately, there’s hundreds of others out there that are living in just (as) bad of a situation.”
Not enough assistance
With the help of an Oakhaven neighbor, Ms. Carolyn has reached out to multiple assistance groups to get the hole in her ceiling fixed. But so far, none have been able to assist her.
MLK50: Justice Through Journalism identified 11 local programs that do some type of home repair work, but all are limited in the type of assistance they provide. Some programs only serve specific areas, while others limit the types of repairs they offer. But the main limitation on most of Memphis’ repair programs is funding.
Historically, Swanstrom said, money for home repair assistance was largely provided by the federal government’s Community Development Block Grant program. But in recent decades, that funding has significantly declined. Last year, the Trump administration threatened to eliminate it entirely.
Federal money also doesn’t go as far as it used to. Shelby County recently drafted a proposal for how it will allocate federal housing dollars from CDBG and the HOME program during the fiscal year 2027. While it lists “Housing Rehabilitation & Minor Home Repair” as a high-priority need, it proposes rehabilitating just 15 owner-occupied homes in the coming year, at a cost of over $850,000.
The City of Memphis receives its own CDBG money and allocates a portion of it to Aging in Place as well as the two city-run programs. One of these programs makes home accessibility improvements for seniors and disabled homeowners. The other is a new program designed to make a variety of repairs in order to stabilize homes so they can qualify for weatherization assistance.
Home repair groups in Memphis typically cobble together funding from multiple sources, including federal, state and city money as well as philanthropic grants and private donations. These varied sources of repair money often come with their own rules and stipulations, further limiting how many Memphians like Ms. Carolyn can access assistance. And many repair programs have rigid policies that exclude those in the most dire circumstances.
Qualifying for help
Simply being a homeowner living in poor conditions often isn’t enough to qualify for Memphis’ home repair assistance programs. Memphians can be denied for:
- Not being up to date on mortgage payments, property taxes, homeowners’ insurance payments or utility bills
- Having home repair needs that are too severe or expensive to justify using a program’s limited resources
- Not being the legal owner listed on the deed to their home
- Not meeting the age requirement for programs aimed at seniors
- Staying somewhere else due to the home’s poor conditions
Ms. Carolyn’s neighbor spoke with Habitat for Humanity about her situation, but said the group wouldn’t agree to assist her because she was behind on her mortgage payments. This requirement isn’t unique to Habitat — many programs require homeowners to be up to date on their bills to qualify for assistance.
“We don’t want to invest money into a home that they might lose very soon,” Morgan explained.
Repair programs generally aim to set seniors and their families up for long-term stability, rather than simply sticking a bandage on a larger problem. But in practice, this “whole-home” approach can cause assistance groups to turn away homeowners with extensive repair needs.
Rasheedah Jones, executive director of the Memphis-based Alliance for Housing Progress, recalled working with a disabled client who urgently needed accessibility upgrades to her bathroom. A local repair program ultimately denied the client because her home needed other costly repairs.
“Because the repair need was too great, she couldn’t get anything,” Jones said. “To me, that’s a problem. This is a quality-of-life safety concern that we couldn’t address with funds that were available.”
Rigid program policies and a lack of funding for home repair in general leave homeowners like Ms. Carolyn with nowhere to turn. And the longer they wait for help, the more serious the damage to their homes can become.
Jones believes changing this system will require funding grassroots organizations that are attuned to the community’s needs and able to respond quickly when problems arise.
“How do we get unrestricted dollars, or how do we get (repair funds) out of the hands of agencies that are bound by these extensive processes?” Jones said. “At the point you decided the resource is to help people, let’s just help people.”
Are you a Memphis homeowner in need of repairs you can’t afford? MLK50 wants to hear your story. Contact the author of this piece by emailing natalie.wallington@mlk50.com or calling or texting 901-633-4598.
Natalie Wallington is the housing reporter for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. Email her at natalie.wallington@mlk50.com.
This story is brought to you by MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom focused on poverty, power and policy in Memphis. Support independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation today. MLK50 is also supported by these generous donors.