APOA | Colin Allen
Retrofitting America’s aging housing stock is no longer a niche sustainability issue or reaction to housing changes driven by COVID – it is a central economic and policy challenge. The median age of U.S. homes has reached roughly 44 years, and more than half of all homes are now over 40 years old, reflecting decades of underbuilding and prolonged asset life cycles. Many new buyers are choosing the path of the fixer-upper because a new home either isn’t available or isn’t within their price range. For policymakers, this means the nation’s housing strategy must include a significant retrofit component.
The scale of the opportunity – and risk – is significant. As also noted in the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University’s 2025 “Improving America’s Housing” report, Americans spent an estimated $140 billion on energy-related home improvements in 2023 alone, yet much of the stock still requires “extensive retrofits” to meet modern efficiency and resilience standards. At the same time, federal policy is beginning to align: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has already driven uptake, with more than 3.4 million households claiming clean energy tax credits in its first full year, and $8.8 billion allocated for home energy rebate programs.
Public funding alone is insufficient – and increasingly uncertain amid shifting federal priorities and rescissions of unspent retrofit funds. A durable retrofit strategy will need private sector resources. Standardization of retrofit measures, better data infrastructure, and de-risking mechanisms that enable large scale investment would help move from today’s fragmented, small-project market to a scalable market where retrofitting approaches meet the specific needs of neighborhoods, communities and states.
The path forward is a coordinated public–private delivery model: government can establish standards and provide incentives as may be needed; the private sector delivers innovation, workforce capacity, and financing. The alternative – continued underinvestment – will exacerbate affordability pressures, community investment challenges, and overall housing disparities. Retrofitting is not simply about modernizing homes; it is about modernizing the nation’s housing policy framework to best serve homeowners and potential homeowners working to realize their American Dream.