Unaffordable housing adding to Pennsylvania’s population woes

By Anthony Hennen | The Center Square

HARRISBURG. PA – As Pennsylvania’s population shrinks or stagnates in many areas, state lawmakers say they don’t want to leave housing policy up to local governments alone.

For Democrats in the House and Senate, that means focusing their efforts on renters, funds for affordable housing, and the health effects that older housing has on residents.

“There’s community redevelopment and stabilization, I think there’s actually generating more housing … and then there is the tenants’ rights landscape,” said Rep. Ismail Smith-Wade-El, D-Lancaster. “We’re seeing the most movement in the community reinvestment and in the tenants’ rights landscapes — which to be clear, are actually extremely important. We often treat tenants as second-class citizens.”

Smith-Wade-El pointed to programs like the Property Tax/Rent Rebate Program that gives larger subsidies to homeowners over renters.

“What we decided was the solution to housing challenges was to turn everybody into homeowners and not: ‘How do we protect renters?’ ‘How do we let renters develop the kind of tenure that makes them deeply invested in their community?’” he said. “We just decided the homeowner was not only the best, but also the moral thing to be.”

Smith-Wade-El was also optimistic about state lawmakers shifting attention to the plight of renters.
“We, as government, have largely not met our obligation to ensure that people can access a home,” he said. “I think we’re turning a corner on that in Pennsylvania politics. More and more, you’re seeing local and state-level candidates talk about the pressures of the housing crisis.”

A significant cause of rising housing prices and rents has been a lack of construction.

The state has a housing deficit of about 98,000 units, as The Center Square previously reported. Housing prices jumped 17% from 2020 to 2021, and rents by 10% in Philadelphia. In the Lehigh Valley, one-third of households spent at least 30% of their income to pay their rent or mortgage.

“Knowing what we know about the cost of housing, about the cost of construction and maintenance, with inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic — we have to increase our investment, we have to double down on programs like whole home repairs,” Wade-El-Smith said. “And, because we know it is a challenging market for folks who are trying to find housing, we have to do things to level the playing field for tenants.”

Multi-million dollar grants for building affordable housing has been one approach to encourage more building, on both the state and local level.

“In the (Democratic) caucus, there is a growing recognition that we need massive investments in developing affordable housing and/or providing rental assistance to renters,” Smith-Wade-El said. He saw a potential, too, in expanding public housing and improving its quality.

On the Senate side, information gathering is a part of the process. Sen. Jay Costa, D-Pittsburgh, introduced Senate Resolution 24, a resolution to study how housing quality affects health.

“What we’re trying to achieve is to get our arms around the impact that housing has – the lack of housing or conditions of housing – has on individuals,” Costa said. “We’re trying to determine what it is that we’re dealing with and the scope of the problem.”

Costa said the state has some of the oldest housing stock in the country. Issues like poor ventilation, lead paint, and aging infrastructure can harm health, along with adding stress when people can’t afford necessary repairs.
“It impacts a lot of folks and we need to have real data to help drive us in terms of what we want to do,” Costa said.

He noted other efforts, such as tax credits and grants to rehabilitate mixed-use buildings with housing and retail or using funds to allow people to stay where they already live. Working with developers for larger projects to build new housing matters, too.

“We have to make it feasible for developers to want to come into neighborhoods and communities and be able to do that,” Costa said. “One of the ways in which we can do that is, I believe, support for the infrastructure side of that equation.”

Instead of sending funds to developers to build, ensuring that public infrastructure – like roads and sewer systems – are available could draw organic interest.

Less hands-on approaches, such as legal reforms to give cities more flexibility on housing and taxation, are also in discussion. When cities can only rely on property taxes to fund services, the burden grows quickly, and residents flee.

“We’ve essentially trapped third class cities,” Wade-El-Smith said. “We severely restrict the way that municipalities can develop revenue, which creates an over-reliance on property taxes – which is something that impacts both homeowners and renters … regardless of income.”

By the time cities get flexibility, they’re already in financial distress.

“We don’t allow municipalities additional revenue options until they are in Act 47; (it) essentially forces them to make housing less affordable – I cannot think of a more clear example of a perverse incentive,” Wade El-Smith said. “We are forcing our communities to work against the interests of their citizens in order to provide the services that those citizens demand and deserve.”

When housing gets less affordable, the problems cascade.

“I feel that housing underpins all our other efforts: education, employment, community safety,” Wade-El-Smith said.