While it’s well documented that regulatory friction is gumming up the new-construction pipeline, a new report offers a rare look at how local bureaucracy may also be affecting the homes already standing.

The analysis from the Common Sense Institute (CSI) reviewed 2.8 million building permit records across Arizona and found that obtaining a permit adds roughly 23 days to residential project completion timelines on average—a burden that can turn even routine work into a long and expensive process.

It’s a particularly troubling finding given the state of the nation’s housing stock. The median owner-occupied home is now 42 years old, up from 31 in 2005, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

As homes age, maintenance becomes more essential to keeping homes habitable and less about chasing trends. That shift is already visible—nearly 49 million US households reported at least one needed repair in the latest American Housing Survey, and the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank estimates the current repair backlog for occupied homes at $198.4 billion.

While CSI’s analysis is limited to one state, it raises a question with national implications: As America’s housing stock gets older, are local permitting systems making it harder to maintain?

These aren’t HGTV upgrades—they’re the repairs that keep homes livable

Remodeling may conjure to mind images of home improvement shows, but these projects are increasingly devoted to necessary fixes, according to Sophia Wedeen, senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

In 2023, nearly half of all home improvement spending (49%, or $197 billion) went toward replacements that affect a home’s safety and function—like roofing, windows, HVAC, and other core components, according to the center.

“When people think of remodeling, kitchen and bath might come to mind,” Wedeen tells Realtor.com®.

“But a lot of these investments are homeowners investing in basic maintenance, replacing [critical] systems and equipment … and are all essential upgrades that are part of what keep a house in safe and livable conditions.”

And the older the home, the more that spending shifts from optional upgrades to necessary replacements. 

Wedeen notes that owners of homes built before 1940 spent about half their remodeling dollars on replacements of core structural components, systems, and equipment, compared with 37% for homes built in the 2010s and 9% for homes built in 2020 or later.

“So we really see that as homes age the focus of homeowner spending on those homes shifts toward necessary replacements,” Wedeen says. “It does have a big impact on the market.”

Arizona shows how permits can add time and money to necessary repairs

As more of America’s spending moves toward necessary repairs, the findings from Arizona suggest that regulatory burdens may be adding time and expense to that process.

“Permitting and regulatory approval processes play a sometimes outsized role in shaping the cost, timing, and feasibility of construction and infrastructure projects,” write the report’s authors, Glenn Farley, director of policy & research at CSI, and Thomas Young, senior economist at CSI. 

“Indeed, academic and policy research suggests that complex or inefficient permitting requirements can substantially increase overall project costs,” they add.

To their point, the report’s findings cite a wide range of requirements across Arizona’s 106 building-regulating and permit-issuing jurisdictions. Each of those jurisdictions has its own codes, procedures, and approval timelines, and fees—ranging from $200 to more than $600 depending on the project and jurisdiction.

To understand how that variation can impact an essential repair, it helps to follow the timeline of an HVAC repair or replacement across the state—a project that would doubtless be considered essential given Arizona’s climate.

While 91% of jurisdictions require a permit for this type of project, the time to get that permit can range from as little as six days to more than 17 days, depending on where a homeowner is located in the state. The fees for such a permit can also vary widely—ranging from as little as $126 to almost $300, depending on the size of the system and how the jurisdiction calculates fees, according to CSI’s research.

“These costs arise not only through direct regulatory compliance expenditures, but also through delays, administrative uncertainty, and fragmented approval processes across multiple jurisdictions,” Farley and Young add.

For homeowners with money, that may be frustrating. For homeowners already struggling to afford repairs, it can make or break an essential repair.

Where else this is showing up

Arizona is one of the few places where researchers have quantified how permitting delays affect ordinary home improvements. Elsewhere, the evidence is more fragmented—but the same basic tension is showing up in different ways.

In California, for example, permitting delays have been blamed for stalling Los Angeles’ recovery from the devastating wildfires that destroyed more than 12,000 homes in early 2025. 

In New York — the state with the oldest housing stock with a median age of 64 years, according to the NAHB — New York City has an estimated 50,000 ghost apartments because the cost of updating those units exceeds the potential revenue from rent that they would be able to generate.

Part of the issue, according to landlords, is restrictive rent control regulations that cap how much a landlord can raise rent after spending the capital to improve these homes. But by the same math, so too is the prohibitive cost of making these improvements. 

Lead paint is a good example. Removing lead paint from a two-bedroom apartment can cost as much as $20,000, while compliance-related inspections and testing can add hundreds or thousands more before any broader renovation work begins.

Again, it’s worth noting how necessary these types of improvements are. Lead paint and lead-contaminated dust poses serious health risks for residents, including the possibility of lead poisoning if not managed properly.

Added costs hit low-income homeowners hardest

The added time and cost of regulatory friction matter most for the homeowners with the least room to absorb them.

Home improvement spending is already sharply divided by income. In 2023, homeowners in the lowest income quintile spent less than a third as much on improvements and maintenance as homeowners in the highest income quintile, according to Harvard’s JCHS.

“Home improvements and repairs are critical to maintaining decent conditions,” Wedeen says, noting that basic investments can be important for both financial stability and living in a safe home.

The result is a cycle that is difficult to break: Households with fewer resources are more likely to live in homes with serious repair needs, yet they are also the least able to pay for the work that could keep those problems from getting worse.

The housing crisis isn’t just about building more homes—it’s about fixing the ones we have

The housing shortage currently sits at 4.03 million homes—accelerating from a year before as housing starts slowed and household formations sped up, according to the most recent research from Realtor.com.

That makes new construction urgent, but it also makes the homes America already has more important than ever.

As the housing stock ages, preserving existing homes will require millions of routine but essential repairs. Some of that work will be discretionary, but much of it won’t be, and that means the policy response has to work on two tracks.

The first is money. Home repair assistance remains fragmented and underfunded, even as repair needs are widespread and concentrated among households least able to pay for them.

Wedeen points to growing momentum around programs such as Pennsylvania’s Whole Home Repairs Program and the bipartisan Whole Home Repairs Act, but said the current system remains a patchwork of federal, local, public, and civil-sector programs where access often depends on where a homeowner lives and whether they qualify.

The second is process. CSI’s findings suggest that some permitting systems can move faster without changing safety standards.

Routine, repeatable projects may be an easy way to fast-track some requests, allowing for more resources to be devoted to the timely review of complex work.

They’re the types of solutions that will become increasingly important in the coming decades. As cities work to speed up new construction to keep housing affordable, they’ll have to also ask whether local rules are making it too hard—or too expensive—for homeowners to keep existing homes safe, livable, and on the market.