Roughly 6.5 million low-income homeowners across the United States live in housing classified by HUD as having moderate to severe physical deficiencies — leaking roofs, failing foundations, deteriorating electrical systems. Most of them are not in a position to fix those problems on their own. And a significant number of them, as I’ve been reporting for the past year, have no idea what government programs exist to help — or whether those programs have anything left to give.
I first encountered Andre Dillard in the comments section of a piece I wrote last spring about SSDI processing delays in Maryland. He had left a short, measured paragraph — not a rant, not a plea — just a description of what his life looked like after disability forced him from the workforce. I messaged him the same day. Three weeks later, I drove to Baltimore and sat down with him at his kitchen table.
The kitchen was warm. The ceiling above it, however, showed a brownish water stain the size of a dinner plate. Andre saw me notice it. “That’s the polite one,” he said. “The one in the bedroom is worse.”
Thirty Years of Work, and Then a Back That Gave Out
Andre Dillard, 55, has been a licensed plumber since he was 24 years old. He worked primarily in commercial construction throughout the Baltimore and Washington corridor, pulling long shifts, crawling through tight spaces, carrying equipment that added up to the kind of cumulative physical toll that doesn’t announce itself until it’s already done the damage.
In the spring of 2022, he herniated two discs during a job in Rockville. Surgery followed. Then physical therapy. Then a second surgery in early 2023 when the first one didn’t hold. By mid-2023, his doctors had made clear that returning to plumbing — or any physically demanding work — was not a realistic option.
His wife, Renata, had stepped back from her administrative job years earlier when their youngest child was born with significant health needs. She hasn’t returned to the workforce. The household runs on Andre’s SSDI check and, since late 2024, a small amount of SNAP assistance the family qualified for after their income dropped.
Andre told me he filed for Social Security Disability Insurance in September 2022. He was approved in November 2023 — fourteen months later, during which time the family burned through savings and borrowed from relatives. “I knew the system was slow,” he said. “I didn’t know it was going to be that slow when you’ve got a mortgage due every month.”
What the House Needed — and What It Was Going to Cost
The Dillard home is a rowhouse in East Baltimore, purchased in 2009. Andre bought it with the intention of maintaining it himself — a plumber who owns a house is, theoretically, well-equipped to manage most repairs. But the back injury changed that calculus entirely. For two years, while he was fighting the Social Security Administration and managing surgeries, the house deteriorated.
When I asked him to walk me through what needed fixing, he produced a handwritten list, the kind a person makes when they’ve been thinking about a problem long enough that they stop being upset about it and start treating it like logistics.
- Roof replacement: two contractors quoted between $10,500 and $12,000
- Foundation crack sealing along the rear exterior wall: estimated at $4,800
- Electrical panel upgrade (the current panel is undersized for the load): $1,400
- Bathroom subfloor repair from a slow leak he caught too late: approximately $900
Total, using mid-range estimates: roughly $18,200. On a monthly income of $1,440, after mortgage, utilities, groceries, and medication costs for his youngest child, that number is not just out of reach — it’s from a different conversation entirely.
Searching for Programs — and Hitting Walls
Andre is not the type to wait passively. As he explained it, he spent the better part of six months in late 2024 and early 2025 researching what was available. He found, as many low-income homeowners do, that the landscape of housing repair assistance is fragmented, underfunded, and riddled with age and income requirements that don’t always align with who actually needs help.
His first serious lead was the USDA Section 504 Home Repair Program, which offers loans of up to $40,000 for very low-income homeowners and grants of up to $10,000 for those 62 or older. Andre is 55. He does not qualify for the grant component. He applied for the loan portion — only to learn that his area of Baltimore falls outside the USDA’s eligible rural and suburban service zones. The program, designed for rural communities, had nothing for him.
Next, he turned to Baltimore City’s own housing assistance infrastructure. The city’s Department of Housing and Community Development administers an Emergency Repair Program funded in part by federal Community Development Block Grant dollars. Andre applied in February 2025.
He was placed on a waitlist. As of the time of our conversation in March 2026, he had not yet received a determination or a contractor visit. “I understand they’ve got more people than money,” Andre told me. “I get it. I’m just one of a lot of people in a line.”
A Partial Break — and What It Actually Covered
The turning point in Andre’s story came not through a government program but through a nonprofit referral that grew out of a government program. A caseworker at Baltimore’s Department of Social Services, whom Andre had contacted about a separate matter related to his son’s medical coverage, mentioned a local organization that coordinates with HUD’s CDBG funding to provide emergency home repair assistance to low-income homeowners.
The organization — a housing stabilization nonprofit operating in Baltimore City — assessed Andre’s property in October 2025. After income verification and a home inspection, they approved his case for partial assistance.
The total value of work completed came to approximately $5,600. It wasn’t what he needed. It was, he said, more than he expected to get.
Where Things Stand Now — and What’s Still Unresolved
When I spoke with Andre in late March 2026, the foundation crack along his rear wall had widened slightly over the winter. He’d taken photos and submitted them to Baltimore City’s housing inspection request line. He was told an inspector would follow up within sixty days.
The electrical panel remains unchanged. Andre, who spent decades as a licensed tradesman, knows precisely what the risk profile of an undersized panel looks like. He’s managed it by reducing load on that circuit — unplugging what he doesn’t need, avoiding running multiple high-draw appliances simultaneously. “I know what I’m doing,” he said. “But I shouldn’t have to manage it. It should be fixed.”
According to HUD’s CDBG formula allocations, Baltimore City received approximately $9.1 million in CDBG funding for fiscal year 2024. That sounds significant until you consider the scale of housing need across a city where roughly 28 percent of owner-occupied homes were built before 1940.
Andre understands the macro picture. He’s not naive about where federal dollars go and how many people are competing for them. What frustrates him — and what came through in everything he said during our conversation — is the gap between what disability income is supposed to represent and what it actually provides for.
What Andre’s Story Reveals About a Systemic Gap
There is a version of Andre Dillard’s story that ends cleanly — a program found, an application approved, a house restored. That version doesn’t exist here. What exists instead is a partial resolution, an ongoing waitlist, and a man who has adapted to chronic instability with a kind of quiet competence that shouldn’t be necessary.
He told me at the end of our conversation that he doesn’t regret buying the house. He regrets that the injury happened when it did, before he’d had time to build the kind of savings buffer that would have made the last three years survivable without the stress. “Ten more years of work and I’d have been fine,” he said. “I didn’t get ten more years.”
What strikes me most about Andre’s situation — and I’ve reported on dozens of cases like his over the past four years — is not the failure of any single program. It’s the cumulative effect of multiple programs each designed to solve a slightly different slice of the problem, none of them with enough funding or flexibility to meet the full reality of what low-income homeownership on disability income actually looks like.
He walked me to the door when I left. The front step had a crack in it too — a small one, he noted, not structural. He’d been meaning to seal it with mortar before it got worse. “I’ve got the materials,” he said. “Just need a day where my back cooperates.”
Some things, at least, he can still fix himself.
Related: After an $8,400 Medical Emergency, This Milwaukee Woman Discovered Medicare Won’t Help Her for 12 More Years
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