Pennsylvania’s golden opportunity to address rising housing costs
The prized possession of Pennsylvania swung Republican this election — and residents from Allentown to Zelienople can expect another barrage of campaign ads in 2028 for their trouble.
While Democratic incumbent Bob Casey essentially had to be pushed into conceding to Republican challenger Dave McCormick in the U.S. Senate race, the commonwealth will again have one Republican and one Democrat representing them. Meanwhile, the GOP took a bevy of statewide races, while the General Assembly didn’t change much — Republicans kept control of the Senate and Democrats scraped by with a thin lead in the House.
Some may cheer the bipartisan composition. With a split, compromise is inevitable. Usually, though, the result is less of a compromise and more of a logjam. Voting law reforms have been proposed for years now, along with marijuana legalization, gambling expansion, and permitting reform (a problem bandied about for decades now).
A blockbuster deal on something like permitting reform probably won’t happen. But its staying power points to one way Pennsylvania could grab an advantage and stave off population loss while boosting its economy: making it easier to build homes and apartments statewide.
Like most places, Pennsylvania defers to local governments to set housing regulations, even though the General Assembly has the authority to pass laws that would override the decisions of city councilmen and county commissioners. The result has been de facto bans on duplexes, small apartment buildings, and anything approaching affordable new-builds.
The commonwealth is full of walkable downtowns and cities big and small with beautiful places to live — that would be illegal to build today.
Republicans have heard horror stories from developers. A renovation that, due to an old staircase not being 6 inches wider, would kill the project without a zoning variance. Housing developments that must build fewer homes so a retention pond could be bigger. Approval delays that slow projects by years, not just months.
Even as populations shift and shrink in and out of Pennsylvania, housing availability gives urban, suburban, and rural residents headaches. They have fewer more expensive options.
Democrats, too, are disturbed. State Rep. Josh Siegel of Allentown has been a vocal leader to pass “gentle density” laws and let the free market build more homes while Rep. Mike Sturla warned that jobs won’t get filled unless home prices drop.
Pennsylvania has a golden opportunity.
The suburbs of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg are growing. Allentown and northeast Pennsylvania have seen an influx of Hispanic immigrants mostly via New York City. Reading, too, has joined the growing Latino belt. The sublime glories of the Pennsylvania Wilds and the rural towns of southwest and central Pennsylvania offer a great quality of life for those left cold by urban cacophonies.
But population loss and economic stagnation lurk in the future. An aging population, too, may be a silver tsunami that drives government spending without the tax revenues to keep up.
If the state’s leaders want to keep young people around, and maybe peel off ambitious residents from Ohio, New Jersey, and New York, they could offer what those states don’t: housing abundance. Follow the lead of cities like Austin, where rents have dropped thanks to a housing boom, and Pennsylvania may stave off stagnation that leads to an exodus. Otherwise, the U-haul parade will continue.
The bleak future that elected leaders could slow walk the state into, though, isn’t set in stone. Pennsylvania’s American dream is vanishing, but if leaders set “housing abundance” as a goal, the state could become a beacon of opportunity.
The Keystone State can’t compete with the warm weather of the Sun Belt — but maybe it could if the selling point to young people is “great cities and towns, beautiful scenery, and a home or apartment in your 20s.”
The problem at hand is one that’s slow to grow and slow to fix. Pennsylvania has a 100,000-unit undersupply of housing. Rents in places like central Pennsylvania grew by 40 percent since 2017. When renters can’t afford a place, they don’t organize and lobby legislators — they leave. If rural Pennsylvania’s leaders want to revitalize their regions, they’ll need to build more homes so workers who fill open jobs can actually live nearby.
In some ways, high-cost states have a head start because affording rent in cities or buying a home in the suburbs is extraordinarily difficult for so many people. There’s actually momentum for reform. Whereas, in places like Pennsylvania, the crisis hasn’t yet hit. Thus, more-ambitious reforms are implemented or being debated in Minnesota, Montana, and California ahead of lower-cost places in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest.
But the canary is singing. A place that makes it impossible to build a duplex in a walkable neighborhood is a place pushing out its youth in a dozen other ways. Only elderly grandparents have memories of a commonwealth that served as a magnet. Take Edward Nicastro, a resident of Farrell, a small border town 70 miles north of Pittsburgh, reflecting on the borough when he was a boy:
In them days, they either got a job in one of the mills, furniture movers, anything that they could get a hold of to feed the family. The mill was what they primarily came here for. When their relatives wrote a letter to Italy they said, come on over, we got a job for you in the mill. And that’s what made these mills, these people like — you take the Italians, they brought them over and they ended up mostly in mills, the Croatians, the Serbians; they ended up in the mills, Polish mills and coal miners. And that’s the kind of people they were: hard working people. That’s why this country got to be what it was, what it is, rather, on account of them kinds of people. They’d get any kind of a job possible to put food on the table.
America leaves behind ghost towns out west and rust towns back east. These places don’t become museums — they fall into disarray. Pennsylvania’s 5,000 opioid overdose deaths every year serve as a grim reminder.
Lower rents won’t fix all problems, of course. But tackling the overbearing rules and bureaucracy that hold back Pennsylvanians from flourishing would reveal that the vanishing American dream is a policy choice, not an unstoppable force. There’s a competitive advantage here, and leaders have the chance to reaffirm that the American spirit can thrive, no matter the challenges that pop up.
Anthony Hennen is managing editor of the Mansfield (OH) News Journal and a resident of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
