Affordable Swarthmore:
Housing, Zoning, and Community
Photo: Andy Shelter
About Affordable Swarthmore: What This Blog Is and Is Not
Last summer, startled by the alarming rise of housing prices in Swarthmore, a group of neighbors started meeting to talk about the problem. Of course, it isn’t just our problem. Housing affordability (or lack of affordability) is a nationwide crisis. But once you start to think about that, you can get dizzy and want to go back to bed.
One advantage of living in a small town is that it seems possible to solve local problems—or at least to have a fighting chance of solving them. So we decided not to hide our heads under our pillows but instead to go out into the community and see what we could do.
In October, we circulated a petition. It read in part:
As residents of Swarthmore, we are concerned about the future of development and the issue of affordability. We believe now is the time to take stock of our town’s values and ensure that our planning, zoning, and land-use ordinances align with those values….We ask Borough Council to take steps to maintain a diversity of housing and retail space in Swarthmore, and to seek ways to keep the borough affordable and welcoming to a wide range of people.
Within a couple of weeks, over 300 people had signed. We presented the petition to our borough council, and in December they authorized a task force with the mission of recommending strategies to “preserve and expand reasonably priced housing in Swarthmore.”
I don’t know how to do that, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot for the last eight months. I’ve read books and articles, had coffee with many neighbors, gone to webinars, and called up strangers on the phone. Lots of ideas are swirling in my head. I’m a writer by profession, and my instinct when it comes to swirling thoughts is to try to make sense of them by organizing them into sentences and paragraphs, then sharing them with others.
The affordability task force started meeting in March. I am its chair, but this blog is not its mouthpiece. Rather, it is a record of my explorations, wonderings, and ponderings.
This is a chronicle of one woman’s effort to learn more about housing affordability and to contemplate what we might change to make our community more affordable and welcoming.
Scroll down to start reading!
-April 1, 2022
Robert Venturi, the Covid Pandemic, and ADUs
ADUs are permitted in 98 of the 350 towns in the Philadelphia area. With a narrow exception for caregivers, Swarthmore is not one of them.
What do you do if you live in an iconic, 1,800-square-foot gem of a house and your grown children want to move back in with you because there’s a pandemic? If you’re David Lockhard and your Robert Venturi house in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood has been featured on a postage stamp, you’re not going to build an addition.
Image courtesy of the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
You might, though, consider erecting another small building somewhere out of the way on your property. According to a February 4 column by Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron, that’s exactly what Lockhard did.
Lockhard bought the house (which the architect had designed for his mother) when his youngest child left for college. Lockhard’s wife had died, and he pictured himself living there alone. But by the height of the pandemic lockdowns, six family members had joined him.
Eventually they left again. But Lockhard knew there would be other times when he would have visitors and want more space. His mother was 94 years old and probably wouldn’t remain in her New Hampshire house much longer, and he had had hopes for grandchildren. So he hired architects Juliet Fajardo and Donna Lisle, who designed a low, wooden, Japanese-inspired house for the far corner of his acre lot.
That was the easy part.
ADUs: Benefits and Barriers
In zoning language, Lockhard’s backyard house would be an “ADU”—an accessory dwelling unit. A small house or apartment on the grounds of a larger home, ADUs—which can also be garage apartments, tiny houses, or attic flats—have many benefits, Saffron says:
With more multigenerational families, more blended families, and more boomerang kids, the basic single-family home no longer suits everyone. Many believe ADUs can make it easier for older people to stay with their families and age in place.
She adds that ADUs have a role in addressing the affordable housing shortage by increasing low-cost rentals, especially in suburban areas where new large apartment buildings may not fit in.
Philadelphia legalized ADUs in 2012. But Saffron reports that not a single one has been approved for construction. She attributes this to “maddeningly complex” laws and the requirement that an applicant go through many rounds of review.
But obstacles to ADUs are bigger than Philadelphia. Architectural scholar and law professor Sara Bronin points out that with its plenitude of size constraints, minimum lot size requirements, parking stipulations, and regulations about who can live in ADUs, our entire zoning system erects barriers to adding even low-impact density to the housing mix. Lockhard promised the Chestnut Hill Community Association not to list his on Airbnb—and he had a lot of money to spend—but he’s still jumping through regulatory hoops.
ADUs in Swarthmore?
ADUs are permitted in 98 of the 350 towns in the Philadelphia area, according to the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission.
With a narrow exception for caregivers, Swarthmore is not one of them.
This town does have them, though. Before the 1970s, when our zoning code was written, residents built them legally, and people are still permitted to live in those. A friend of mine lives in a former carriage house, and other residents make their homes in apartments over garages. I’m not sure many people notice them, let alone mind them.
Swarthmore’s comprehensive and thoughtful Aging-in-Place Task Force report (2015) called for the borough to re-legalize ADUs, both to provide income streams to make it easier for seniors to stay in their homes and as small dwellings for a caregiver or an elderly relative. In response, the borough legalized ADUs in the form of “caregiver suites” by special exception to the zoning code. So far, one has been built.
The last time the ADU issue was formally discussed in the Swarthmore Planning Commission was 2018. Since then, the affordability problem has only gotten worse. It might be time to reconsider whether they could benefit our town more broadly, offering relatively affordable rental options for some and income for others.
Saffron’s column shows that legalizing ADUs isn’t enough to get them built. And zoning regulations would need to be thoughtfully designed to provide safeguards but not barricades. But if the town decides it wants them, legalization would be a place to start.
The Affordable Swarthmore blog is taking a vacation in August. See you in September!