Barrier Busting

What's true in most American communities is certainly true in Centre County, Pennsylvania - it's somewhere between "hard" and "almost impossible" to find an affordable house to buy, or an affordable apartment to rent.

That's true for butchers, bakers and candle-stick makers. And for carpenters, bookkeepers and home health aides. And for preschool teachers, licensed practical nurses and landscapers. And the list goes on and on.

The birthplace of Memorial Day and home to the Penn State Nittany Lions, Centre County is a middle-class, mostly rural area located, befitting its name, almost smack dab in the middle of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The average wage for a renter in Centre County is what sounds like a pretty healthy $7.81 an hour. But that's the problem. To afford a two bedroom apartment at that hourly wage, a family would have to work 73 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. To afford to buy the average-priced home - slightly more than $200,000 in 2006 - that family would have to work more than twice as long, and earn twice as much.

And that's the problem - what to do to produce affordable housing in a community that - hundreds of miles from the multi-million dollar homes on Philadelphia's Main Line - has the look, the feel, the ethos of what is supposed to be an affordable community? But isn't. .

When the people of Centre County face a problem, they don't throw up their hands, but roll up their sleeves and get to work - together - to find solutions. That attitude is what's behind the 43-page Homes Within Reach Toolkit recently published by the Centre County Affordable Housing Coalition and posted on HUD's Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse.

"There are many reasons that it is difficult to fulfill the demand for homes in Centre County," the Coalition writes. "If barriers to affordable housing were removed, more public money could be used to assist additional families at lower ends of the communities' income bracket. In addition, developers may fulfill housing needs more regularly without the assistance of local government."

And identifying those barriers - and the specific steps to be taken to remove or reduce them - is at the very heart of the Toolkit. It suggests, for example, a wide range of planning tools to help increase housing affordability, such as reducing lot size and setback requirements, and encouraging a variety of housing types, such as accessory dwelling units, manufactured, and modular housing. It identifies obstacles to affordable housing, including lack of community support, lengthy approval processes, excessive permitting fees, and development requirements. It discusses ways to alleviate restrictive development requirements such as allowing increased densities in areas that enforce open space requirements, adopting a fast-track approval process, and allowing more flexibility with impervious surface, landscape, and parking requirements. And, looking beyond the borders of Centre County, it offers examples of other approaches that encourage mixed-income development, including plans for a traditional neighborhood development that incorporate commercial and retail development, and the establishment of overlay zones to require affordable housing.

Some of the ideas are just common sense and others well outside the box. And nothing is cast in concrete. The Toolkit, says the Coalition, "was created as a place to begin a dialogue between stakeholders, and more specifically, developers and municipal officials" that will spark "new ideas, new collaborations, and new success stories" about eliminating the barriers to and expanding the supply of housing affordable for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and everyone else who has the privilege of calling Centre County, Pennsylvania their home.

The Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse is an element of HUD's Affordable American Communities created by Secretary Alphonso Jackson as an on-line data base of successful efforts by communities across the country to identify and reduce the regulatory barriers to affordable housing.

• Visit HUD's Regulatory Barriers Clearinghouse (www.huduser.org/rbc/index.asp).
• Read Centre County's Homes Within Reach Toolkit (www.co.centre.pa.us/planning/housing/homes_within_reach_toolkit.pdf)

# # #