Allentown wants to promote development of workforce affordable housing

Allentown City Council’s Community and Economic Development Committee met Wednesday to discuss a proposed bill to amend the city code by adding a chapter on workforce housing to promote the development of workforce affordable housing.

The proposed bill would require certain multifamily housing projects benefiting from public funding or tax incentives to include housing units affordable to moderate-income households.

Frank Pintabone, a member of Easton City Council, made a presentation to the committee to share similar legislation that was passed in Easton.

Pintabone said Easton started the program with a Local Revitalization Tax Assistance.

A LERTA is a standard tax abatement program to help incentivize economic development. It usually exempts a portion of the assessment attributed to construction or improvements on sliding scale for a 10-year period.

We're pro-development in Easton, and a LERTA has been a great incentive to get developers to take on harder projects and develop, which strengthens our property tax base as well as our earned income tax revenue,” Pintabone said. “The workforce housing policy applies to new multifamily developments with 10 or more units that use public funding and requires at least 25% of the units to be workforce housing distributed proportionally.”

Councilmember Ce-Ce Gerlach, chair of the committee, said she removed the proposed bill from the regular Allentown City Council meeting agenda held later Wednesday night.

“I took it off so that we can fine tune some numbers,” Gerlach said. “We can have some meetings with various developers and make sure that this will work. This will be passed at the latest by December.” 

Vicky Kistler, director of community and economic development, said Allentown is not approaching a LERTA in any form similar to Easton.

“Easton has site-specific LERTAs for any development,” Kistler said. “We're looking at a LERTA specifically to incentivize affordable housing.” 

She added, “We were never thinking of offering LERTAs to any project that did not have an already built-in affordable housing component.”

“I look forward to sitting down and crafting something, using proformas provided to us by developers to ask, under these tremendous constraints of the cost of doing business right now, can we make this work?” Kistler said. “I believe we can.” 

Gerlach said the proposed bill will be more effective with a LERTA, but that there are other funding mechanisms to support the plan.

“I do think it's important that we figure out all the fine details; all of the specific numbers for Allentown,” Gerlach said. 

Source: WFMZ