With a 4-2 vote, State College Borough Council approved Monday an inclusionary-housing ordinance, meant to encourage the development of working-class-oriented homes.
Council members Tom Daubert, Don Hahn, Theresa Lafer and Peter Morris voted for the measure, arguing that that it should strengthen local housing access for people across economic classes.
‘Our job basically is to regulate and make the borough into the sort of place we want it to be,’ Morris said before the vote. ‘That’s what we were elected to do.’
Council President Ron Filippelli and member Jim Rosenberger cast the dissenting votes, saying they fear that the effort — while well-intentioned — will likely stifle development in the borough. Council member Silvi Lawrence was absent.
The ordinance, to take effect in about a week, will require that new housing developments of at least six units include a 10 percent allocation of workforce-oriented — that is, ‘inclusionary’ — housing. Under the ordinance language, the inclusionary housing must be within financial reach of those in the middle, low or very low economic classes. (More specific nuances of the policy are spelled out in the ordinance, which is available on the borough website.)
Developers may avoid building the inclusionary housing if they pay the borough a comparable-in-value in-lieu fee. Revenue from that fee will be put toward current borough-led efforts in affordable housing, such as the State College Community Land Trust.
Ordinance advocates have pointed to research suggesting that the Centre Region — with inflated housing prices driven largely by Penn State students’ presence — lacks adequate housing for middle- and lower-income workers and their families. The area should be more accessible to people of all income categories, and not necessarily force lower-income workers to commute long distances for the jobs available in the State College community, advocates have said.
‘I think that this gives us an opportunity to provide mid-level housing for working men and women who live in this community — or who want to,’ Lafer said Monday. ‘ … I think that, over time, this will be far more positive than negative.’
Similarly, Hahn said that while the ordinance may not be perfect, and he’d like to see it undergo some revisions soon, the effort ‘has a lot of symbolic importance.’
‘I think it’s important that we take a step — even if it’s a flawed step — and then correct it later,’ Hahn said.
But while Filippelli called the ordinance’s goals ‘laudatory,’ he also said that ‘I don’t think it’ll work.’
He underscored that a majority of the borough Planning Commission declined to endorse the ordinance. Several borough developers have publicly expressed concern that the measure will prevent future development in town and make it tougher to grow the borough’s already-stressed tax base.
‘I think this ordinance will provide a disincentive to do any development,’ Filippelli said. ‘ … To my mind, this puts an end to … any kind of multi-family, non-student housing in the borough. I think that’s something that’s unfortunate.’
Meanwhile, Rosenberger said any type of inclusionary-housing mandate should be done on a regional level, in concert with the townships surrounding the borough.
‘I think it’s a kind of social engineering to pass a law to create workforce or inclusionary housing just where we want it’ — that is, in the borough, Rosenberger said.
One person spoke Monday during a public hearing on the subject. Joanne Tosti-Vasey, the president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Organization for Women, applauded the inclusionary-housing effort. She called it ‘greatly needed’ and appreciated.
Any housing-development plans submitted to the borough before the inclusionary-housing-ordinance hearing was advertised in early August will be exempt from the new requirements. Current plans exempt from the new requirements include an HFL Corporation vision for a new student apartment building at the northwest corner of West Beaver Avenue and Hetzel Street.
In other news Monday night:
- Council members voted 5-1 to award a contract to Tyler Technologies, of Falmouth, Mass., which will provide and implement a new enterprise-resource planning system. The ERP system project, to cost no more than $855,000 in all, will bring up to date and streamline many of the borough’s internal computing systems, some of which are more than two decades old. The effort should ultimately help the borough to better collect and process data, enabling more effective decision-making processes and more efficient work flows, assistant borough Manager Roger Dunlap has said. Council member Tom Daubert, who cast the sole vote against the Tyler contract, expressed concern with nuances of the contract language.
- Council members vote 6-0 to execute funding cuts of 11.5 percent to 16.5 percent for several federally assisted municipal efforts and nonprofit agencies. The cuts were necessitated by reductions in federal funding, borough officials said. Morris said the council didn’t ‘really have a choice but to pass’ the reductions. But ‘my personal feelings about this are that it’s an extremely sad thing to have to do,’ he added. Details about the cuts are included in this earlier report.
- Council members voted 6-0 to adopt a resolution naming Centre LifeLink as the borough’s primary emergency-medical-services provider. The move will designate Centre LifeLink as the preferred EMS provider for at least five years.
- Council members scheduled for Oct. 3 a public hearing on a proposed residential-office-overlay zoning area. The zoning would be applied on the south side of East Beaver Avenue in the Garner Street-Locust Lane area. Specifics of the zoning proposal are outlined on the borough website. In general terms, they would set 55 feet as the maximum building height in that area, along with other standards.
Earlier coverage
