Buying a home is hard. Keeping it can sometimes be harder. High interest rates and rising taxes, insurance premiums, repair costs and utility bills are squeezing US homeowners, forcing many out of the homes they owned.
Philadelphia topped the new Keepingly Homeownership Index, which ranked cities and states based on the systems they’ve put in place to sustain long-term homeownership and support equity wealth building. Los Angeles and New York were runners-up among US cities on cross-sector collaboration and homeownership protection and support programs, according to the new index.
“Philadelphia ranked number one because it treats repair as infrastructure, not charity, and backs that approach with capital, programs and execution,” said Daniel Smith, who founded Keepingly five years ago to create a digital platform to help first-time, low-income homeowners track and document the maintenance of their properties (read and watch, “Worker solutions, community insurance and other strategies for shared prosperity”).
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s $2 billion Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or HOME initiative, for example, aims to support the creation, repair and maintenance of 30,000 homes to help residents protect their equity wealth. Parker plans to issue $400 billion in housing bonds this year to finance the program.
Climate adaptation
Keepingly’s homeownership index highlights cities helping lower-income and first-time homeowners weather economic and climate shocks. In LA, some residents whose homes were destroyed from last year’s wildfires, have received up to $20,000 in mortgage support grants from the CalAssist Mortgage Fund.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom increased the CalAssist fund’s income limits in October last to expand access to higher-earning families rebuilding after the wildfires. California ranked No. 1 among states, followed by Massachusetts, Washington and Maryland.
Homeownership management
Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies estimates the homeowner repair and improvement market could grow by roughly $50 billion this year.
Keepingly is raising a $2 million pre-seed round to work alongside housing counselors and city and state government housing partners in the country to reach homeowners who might be leaving meaningful preservation wealth on the table.
Smith says Keepingly “has built the infrastructure layer: a neutral, persistent system of record that produces standardized snapshots, verified repair history, long term continuity, homeowner access and audit ready outputs that help protect and preserve generational wealth.”
