West Philadelphia Collaborative Explores how Home Repairs Affect Health

The Urban Health Collaborative is working with the Home Preservation Initiative (HPI), a collaborative effort that aims to provide high quality and cost-effective home repairs, to demonstrate the health effects of their home repair programs in four neighborhoods in West Philadelphia.

Residents identified home preservation and repairs as one of the critical needs during a comprehensive neighborhood planning process. The HPI planning process and service delivery model for home repair and weatherization involves a consortium of community partners, Local Initiatives Support Corporation Philadelphia, Rebuilding Together Philadelphia, Mt. Vernon Manor CDC, the People’s Emergency Center (PEC), Habitat for Humanity and representatives from Drexel University.

Teams of UHC public health research assistants and trained community members conducted 40 interviews with residents about their perceived health benefits from the home repairs. With a grant from the Knight Foundation, UHC and the Home Preservation Initiative will conduct a Community Workshop to share results from the interviews with neighborhood residents and weave those community perspectives into the interpretation of the data and identify community priorities based on the results. In addition, the findings will inform the development of a quantitative study to collect pre‐ and post‐ data on health status to evaluate impact.