Many Americans Can’t Afford to Move, but Staying in Their Aging Homes Is Getting Costlier Too

Homeowners who locked in mortgages near 2 or 3 percent won a long argument with the housing market, and now they cannot leave. Angi co-founder Angie Hicks, who also serves as the company’s chief customer officer, says owners are living in their houses roughly five years longer than they intended, because no refinance will ever match what they already hold. The follow-up plan was supposed to be renovation. Instead of moving up, improve what you have. That plan is failing on arithmetic. Borrowing against a house has grown expensive enough that Angi data shows 60 percent of consumers have postponed projects and switched to maintenance.

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Record home equity is not buying anything

Americans hold more home equity than at any point on record, which sounds like a renovation fund waiting to be spent. The spending is not happening. Home equity loans and HELOCs, which are revolving credit lines secured by a house, have grown costly enough that the equity sits on paper. Equity lending did rise nearly 20 percent between the first and second quarters. That looks like a construction boom until you ask where the money went. Lending specialists quoted in the original reporting say much of it covers ordinary bills rather than new decks and finished basements. Owners are borrowing against the house to stay afloat in it.

Why a 3 percent loan behaves like an anchor

The mechanism is straightforward once you see both sides of the ledger. A mortgage signed at 2 or 3 percent is an asset the borrower owns, not just a bill they pay. Selling the house ends that loan permanently. The replacement, at mortgage rates above 7 percent and near a three-year high, costs far more every month for the same amount borrowed. Hicks puts it plainly: owners will hold a 2 or 3 percent loan as long as they can, because that range is not returning. She describes 6 to 7 percent as the new normal. The gap between what someone pays and what they would pay is the anchor.

A $700 shower fell four times harder than a $147 faucet

Datavations, a retail analytics firm that tracks point-of-sale data, measured the pullback by price tag and found a clean pattern. Shower stalls and kits, averaging around $700, fell 21 percent. Bathtubs, averaging roughly $309, fell 10 percent. Pull-down kitchen faucets, at about $147, dropped only around 3 percent. Line those three up and the curve is obvious. The more a purchase costs, the sharper the decline. Across big-ticket renovation categories at Home Depot and Lowe’s, Datavations recorded drops between 10 and 28 percent from September 2025 through August 2026 against the prior year.

A Tulane professor who studies equity is also waiting

Mark Ratchford teaches at Tulane University’s business school and studies home equity as part of his research. He is also postponing his own kitchen. “I need to remodel my kitchen, but when I look at the price and the interest rates, I can’t afford that. I’ll just wait,” Ratchford said. His position matters because he is not reacting to a headline. He studies the instrument people use to pay for exactly this kind of project, and he reached the same conclusion as everyone running the numbers at a kitchen table. House flipping has cooled over the same stretch, which suggests the math is unfavorable for professionals too.

Replacing a cabinet door costs less than the cabinet

The substitutions owners are making follow a consistent logic. Hicks describes a furnace tune-up standing in for a kitchen remodel. In kitchens specifically, owners swap cabinet handles or repaint rather than order new cabinets, which are typically the single largest line item in a kitchen budget. The pattern is worth copying deliberately rather than by accident. Before deferring anything, separate the list into work that protects the structure and work that changes how a room looks. A furnace service visit, a gutter clearing, a caulk line around a tub: these are small costs that prevent large ones. New countertops are not.

Roofs, windows and furnaces ignore interest rates

Andre Kazimierski, co-owner and president of HomeHero Roofing, says customers have long reached for home equity when a roof, a window run, or a heating system failed. That financing route is now expensive, and the work does not become optional because borrowing got harder. Kazimierski warns that postponed structural work could leave homes “even more vulnerable to increasingly volatile weather.” The error here is treating a roof like a renovation. A kitchen deferred is a kitchen you still have. A roof deferred admits water, and water finds framing, insulation, and drywall before anyone opens a loan application.

The faucet aisle shows what did not get cut

The 3 percent decline in pull-down kitchen faucets is the most revealing number in the Datavations set, precisely because it is so small. Something still sold. Philip Odelfelt, chief executive of Datavations, drew the same line. “Homeowners aren’t pulling back on maintenance, but the bigger renovation projects are getting deferred,” he said. Elsewhere he described a consumer “staying in their home but deferring major projects.” That is not a household that stopped spending. It is one that redrew the boundary around what counts as necessary, and a faucet that leaks landed inside the line while a shower that works landed outside it.

Fewer sales and fewer renovations at the same time

Two markets usually move in opposite directions. When people stop selling, they tend to improve instead, which is why renovation spending often rises during slow sales periods. That trade is not happening here, because the same rate environment restricts both doors. Specialists cited in the original reporting expect the combination to produce fewer transactions, fewer renovations, and a housing stock aging without the maintenance it needs. Hicks frames the shift at the household level: a house bought as a stop along the way is becoming a forever home by default, carrying wear it was never expected to accumulate.

The cost did not disappear, it moved

Nothing about the lock-in made repairs cheaper. A furnace nearing the end of its service life, a roof past twenty years, a window seal that failed: each of those bills exists whether or not anyone writes a check this year. Deferral moves the expense forward and usually enlarges it, because water damage and emergency replacement cost more than scheduled work. That is the uncomfortable part of a very good mortgage. Owners who locked in at 2 or 3 percent genuinely won. The win covered the monthly payment and nothing else, and the house kept aging on its own schedule. One useful step: price the deferred repairs now, so the number is known rather than feared.