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
Beyond Zoning Changes: How Housing Trusts Promote Affordability
In communities like Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, funding to build affordable housing is funneled through a housing trust, which is often a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping lower- and middle-income people find and stay in homes.
When residents in Lower Merion were being priced out of their community in the early 1990s, several of the town commissioners took steps to keep their community affordable. “They wanted to make sure the township had an economically diverse population,” Mike Leibowitz told me recently.
Mike is the chair of Lower Merion’s housing trust, Lower Merion Affordable Housing (LMAH). (He’s also the president of his local fire company, Station 28.) He, as much as anybody, is responsible for the township continuing the work it started 30 years ago. Mike and his colleagues are still trying to keep the community affordable to a wide variety of people.
Lower Merion is an affluent suburban Philadelphia township with a high-performing public school system often compared to Swarthmore’s. But it’s only recently that housing prices in Swarthmore have started to rise to comparable heights. Lower Merion has a few decades of experience strategizing about how to maintain an economically diverse population—something that our borough is just starting to wrestle with now.
Of course, Lower Merion is about 10 times as big as Swarthmore, and it has a lot more land. What works there would not necessarily work here. But it was inspiring to talk to Mike and hear what LMAH has accomplished over the last 30 years.
A More Direct Approach to Affordability
Most of the posts on this blog have been about zoning. Specifically, they’ve looked at how changes to zoning laws can help make housing more affordable in towns like Swarthmore.
But there are more direct ways to make housing affordable than by changing zoning laws and hoping that builders and homeowners will take advantage of the changes.
For example, you can create housing units available only to people whose household income falls below a certain threshold. Indeed, this “income-qualified” housing is what most people think of when they hear “affordable housing.” (That’s part of the reason I often use language like “reasonably priced housing” and “attainable housing”—to encourage us all to think more expansively.)
Building income-qualified housing can be very expensive. Sale prices and rents do not necessarily make them appear like worthwhile investments. But developers can get subsidies to build income-qualified housing, with the money coming from federal or state governments, or from philanthropic giving from foundations, businesses, and individuals. The Lower Merion housing trust Leibowitz leads brings in money from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Pennsylvania Community Development Block Grants, county affordable-housing funds from real estate transfer taxes, some of the township’s American Rescue Act funds, community money from local banks, and board fundraising.
In many communities, this funding is funneled through a housing trust, which is often a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping lower- and middle-income people find and stay in homes. That’s how it works in Lower Merion.
Lower Merion Affordable Housing helps first-time home buyers purchase houses in their community. Photo courtesy of LMAF
Lower Merion Affordable Housing
The housing trust in Lower Merion does four main things, Leibowitz told me.
1. They develop one large affordable housing project every five or six years. Each one is a major undertaking.
One example is Ardmore Crossing, where apartments and townhomes are available to a combination of low- and moderate-income renters and market-rate purchasers. The award-winning project is located on a former brownfield, which was rehabilitated to create the mixed-income project. At another project, 13 St Asaph’s, in Bala Cynwyd, LMAH is working to add seven new units of income-qualified units to an older, six-unit site.
2. They buy and rehabilitate single-family homes, then help first-time, low-to-moderate income buyers purchase them. The homes are sold at market rates, but LMAH gives qualified first-time home buyers a zero-interest second mortgage plus help with closing costs. The mortgage is 75% forgivable if the buyer stays in the house for 20 years. People who work for the township, like school teachers and volunteer firefighters, get first dibs.
“A trash collector for Lower Merion bought the last house,” Leibowitz told me. “He was so happy to be able to live in the community.”
3. They host free financial literacy workshops, including a session on home-buying. Offered in collaboration with the nonprofit Genesis Housing, these workshops provide information that helps people better manage their finances with a focus on getting in a position to buy a home. Anyone who completes all three sessions is eligible for a year of individualized financial counseling.
4. They advocate for changes to support affordable housing in the township and beyond.
“We’re lucky to have strong support from Lower Merion Township,” Leibowitz says.
Beyond Lower Merion
Lots of communities have housing trusts. The one in Falmouth, Massachusetts, has rehabilitated many single-family homes and sold them to first-time buyers. Bend, Oregon, also uses its affordable housing funds to construct and rehabilitate deed-restricted, income-qualified housing. Some of its funding comes from the city’s fee on building permits of one-third of 1%. Mountainland Community Housing Trust in Park City, Utah (population 8,400), has helped create over 900 affordable housing units over the last 30 years and is currently establishing a housing advocacy center.
Could such an organization exist in Swarthmore? If so, how could it be funded and what would the money go for?
Land prices are so high here—and we’re blessed with so little blight—that buying even a rundown property would be a major undertaking. We have next to no vacant land. But maybe a housing trust could offer assistance to someone struggling to keep up with rapidly rising rents or to afford repairs to an old house they’d like to keep living in. If Swarthmore combined a housing trust with targeted zoning changes, it could help a homeowner on a fixed income build an accessory dwelling unit (like a garage apartment) to rent out to help pay their real estate taxes.
Given the high cost of land here and the generally good upkeep of our properties, it would be hard for Swarthmore to successfully compete for government funding for income-qualified building projects. Could a housing trust be funded in part by a percentage of the borough’s fee on building permits (or something else)? Could it raise money privately? Would local businesses, including Swarthmore College, consider contributing to a fund aimed at keeping Swarthmore accessible to people with a range of incomes? Would you?
A Planning Commission member in Norwich, Vermont, who helped me understand housing trusts better, said, “Writing a check for $50 gives people who care about the issue something to do.”
As we think creatively about maintaining economic diversity in our town, it would be a mistake to ignore what is so often the crucial piece of any difficult puzzle: money.
A Different Kind of College Town
The town planner from Mansfield, Connecticut, told me that professors at the University of Connecticut tend not to live in their college town because the houses are so run down.
I was surprised. Here in Swarthmore, when college professors don’t live in town, it’s often because the houses are so expensive.
I’d called the Mansfield planner, Linda Painter, because I wanted to hear about the town’s Affordable Housing Plan, passed last year. What kind of response did they get from residents? How did the plan’s proponents persuade the town to support it? How did the town council respond to the kinds of concerns I’ve heard in Swarthmore, for instance that permitting single-family houses to be converted to duplexes, or legalizing garage apartments (i.e., accessory dwelling units, or ADUs), might hurt property values or cause unwelcome noise or congestion?
But Linda reported that the residents of Mansfield didn’t have many objections. Their questions tended to be less about money than about logistics. “Sometimes people would call and ask how a project would affect their getting in and out of their driveway, if they lived opposite a building,” Linda said. “Technical things like that.”
She must have seen my startled look through the Zoom screen. “We’re a very progressive community,” she explained.
Campus of the University of Connecticut in Mansfield
I got Linda’s name from DesegregateCT, an organization that campaigns for zoning reform across Connecticut in order to “make communities more equitable, affordable, and environmentally sustainable.” They have created a zoning atlas of their state and an easy-to-understand playbook for advocates of zoning reform anywhere.
Hearing that I was interested in learning from a community that was addressing the affordability crisis, the staff at DesegregateCT recommended Mansfield because it’s also a college town. That’s true, but what a different kind of college town! Unlike Swarthmore with its modest population of 1,400 undergraduates, Mansfield’s UConn has 12,000 students and Division I sports.
Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)
Still, the concern of some Swarthmoreans that permitting, for example, ADUs would spread noisy, disorderly college students throughout the town is a very real worry in Mansfield. To address this concern, Linda told me, the town requires that either the main dwelling or the ADU be occupied by the owner. This owner-occupancy requirement helps ensure that the renters won’t be too noisy or make too much of a mess.
The bottom line about ADUs in Mansfield, according to Linda? “They allow people to stay in their homes.”
For townspeople having trouble paying their mortgage or taxes—possibly because of an illness, job loss, or retirement—the rental income makes it possible for them to remain where they are.
Beyond Zoning Changes
Mansfield also has an Affordable Housing Trust, created last November. Money from the trust will help income-eligible residents with down payments, make repairs that will allow them to stay in their houses, and create accessible homes for people with disabilities. Although the money from the trust isn’t available yet, the town’s new Affordable Housing Committee is tossing around ideas to fund it. These include small fees for building permit fees and proceeds from the payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) the town gets from the university. (As a non-profit, the university is tax exempt, so it makes non-tax payments to its home municipality instead.)
Swarthmore College, too, pays a PILOT, largely to support the police, fire, and ambulance services the borough provides. These days, the amount of the PILOT is about $350,000. The college also pays property taxes on the hundred-plus houses and apartments it rents to faculty and staff.
That’s a substantial contribution. Still, I find myself wondering whether the college board and administration might consider some further creative partnership to help keep the borough more equitable, affordable, and environmentally sustainable—what it would be worth to them.
I wonder what it’s worth to all of us.