> It sounds like your community's affordable-housing problem is fighting the ravages of nature and entropy to build and maintain habitable structures.
Welcome to Detroit[0]. $20,000 can get you a huge old house in an unsafe neighborhood with an outstanding liability to the water department. The area I live costs about $225,000 for 1,500 sq. ft. in a nice, zero-crime, residential neighborhood.
Back when I was doing this frequently, the work was mostly centered around making homes livable/saleable that had problems the home-owners couldn't deal with (many, many cancer patients with weakened immune systems who couldn't live at home due to environmental toxins). We never touched the dangerous stuff, but after the folks in HAZMAT suits clear out, you're going to be hanging a lot of drywall, at a minimum. Often houses with these kinds of problems had several others that weren't found until the obvious problems were removed.
Reading over my responses, I'm a little disappointed at how frustrated some of them sound. While I am frustrated at folks who choose to complain rather than doing something. There's this thinking that "If I complain, then I'm putting myself outside of the group that's 'causing' the problem"...meanwhile the sentence often ends with "...in America!", where the person complaining is often located.
And, frankly, where I live -- charity, and government dollars would be better spent elsewhere.
[0] Like most who are "from Detroit", I live outside the city limits.
