The White House Promotes Housing Affordability: An All-of-the-Above Approach (courtesy of Desegregate Connecticut)

Today I got an email from one of my favorite housing affordability organizations, Desegregate Connecticut, telling me about the Biden administration’s new proposals “to ease the burden of housing costs.” The email explains the proposals well, so I thought I’d let DesegregateCT do the heavy lifting for the Affordable Swarthmore blog this week.

As a bonus, I get to introduce you to a wonderful organization. Sign up for their mailing list! Watch the recordings of their excellent webinars! Read their Playbook for Advocates!

Here in Pennsylvania, we have just a small hodgepodge of municipalities working toward more affordability in housing. It’s exciting to think about what a statewide organization might do.

Biden Administration Unveils Affordable Housing Push 

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What Is “Affordable” Anyway?

Photo courtesy of San Jose Library

When I got to the council room to set up for the affordability task force meeting, it was occupied by children and dogs. “What’s going on?” I asked the man outside the door, whom I recognized as Swarthmore’s children’s librarian. 

PAWS for Reading, the popular program in which children practice their skills by reading aloud to a therapy dog, was just finishing up, he explained.

PAWS for Reading is all about learning and support. It’s about progress and words. So is the Swarthmore Task Force on Development and Affordability.

Right now, in the second month of our one-year assignment, those of us on the task force are learning about what kind of housing we have in our town and what other communities are doing to address rapidly rising housing costs. We hope the preservation and expansion of reasonably priced housing in Swarthmore will support our residents and shape our town’s future in a positive way. At tonight’s meeting, we hope to get our minds around a slippery, tricky word: affordability.

Affordability is right there in the name of our task force, but what does it actually mean? Also, affordable for whom? 

After the dogs and children cleared the room, we began to wrestle with these questions. 

“I think allowing people who have been living here the ability to stay is important,” one task member said. “But,” he added, “I wouldn’t limit it to that.”

“Does staying in Swarthmore mean being able to stay in your house?” another asked. “Or does it mean being able to stay in town?”

A third wondered which Swarthmore properties might fit the zoning code’s criteria for conversion to cooperative senior housing. Seniors were definitely on our minds, but so were families with children, multigenerational families, and single people. How did affordability apply?

Dueling Definitions

As I talk to people in town about my concerns that the rising cost of housing is rapidly pushing the price of entry to our community beyond the reach of many—and changing the nature of the town in the process—I’m alert to what they hear when I say affordability. Some immediately picture public housing apartment buildings for people with low incomes. Others see condominiums selling for between $125K and $300K, or one-bedroom apartments renting for less than $1,000 a month. Still others imagine single-family houses selling for less than half a million dollars—an increasing rarity around here.

According to the department of Housing and Urban Development, households should spend no more than 30% of their income on housing costs: rent or mortgage payments, insurance, taxes, and utilities. If you spend more than 30% of your income on housing, HUD considers you “cost burdened.” If you spend more than 50%, you are “very cost burdened.” 

This table shows specific dollar amounts for that 30% depending on how much someone earns:

According to an assessment done by Local Housing Solutions of New York University’s Furman Center, 51% of Swarthmore renters were moderately or severely cost burdened in 2019. This was up from 38% in 2014. For owner households, the percentages were 23% in 2014 and 21% in 2019.

It’s clear that many of my neighbors are struggling to afford to keep living here.

Other Words and Terms 

I’ve contacted other communities that are trying to do something about the affordability crisis. In talking to town planners and council members in places like Mansfield, Connecticut, Norwich, Vermont, Leavenworth, Washington, and Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts. I’ve heard various words and terms for what Swarthmore (and America) doesn’t have enough of. 

Attainable housing is defined by the nonprofit Urban Land Institute as “nonsubsidized, for-sale housing that households earning between 80 and 120 percent of the area median income can afford.”

But this framing raises questions too. If we’re talking about making it possible for families earning “area median income” to live in Swarthmore, what area are we talking about? Swarthmore only? The Wallingford-Swarthmore School District? Delaware County?

Workforce housing nods to the idea that people who work in a community should be able to live there. 

Of course, in any community, there is a wide range of occupations. People who work in the borough are small merchants and restaurant wait staff, elementary school teachers and Swarthmore College professors. With the housing market in its current state, few if any of these folks can afford to buy a home in town unless they have family money or a spouse who earns a lot. Renting is cheaper, but rents too are rising fast. 

Community housing is a term I ran across when learning about Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, an affluent town about the size of Swarthmore that built an award-winning multi-family mixed-used complex back in the early 2000s. (Now they’re trying to figure out how to follow up on that success.) According to resident Chris Olney, community housing means “homes that are well designed and priced to address the broad needs and aspirations of the whole community of Manchester, not just those wealthy enough to pay for stately new residences.” 

A Work in Progress

Back in the council room, our talk circled around retirees on fixed incomes, opportunities for newcomers to gain a foothold in our housing market, and recent changes in the Historically Black Neighborhood of Swarthmore, where few of the families who lived there for generations are left. We jotted ideas, definitions, and questions on big pieces of paper stuck on the council room wall. 

“I don’t feel we need to have one all-encompassing definition of affordability,” someone said. “It could be helpful to have multiple definitions, some more ambitious than others.” 

Someone else volunteered to assemble a working list of definitions to bring to the next meeting. 

Knowing we’d revisit the topic again and again, we agreed to set it aside for the evening. 

I’m guessing the early readers didn’t perfect their literacy skills in one afternoon with a therapy dog either.

If you have thoughts on the question or definition of “affordability,” please share them in the comments section below. 

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Why I Love This Town but Worry About Its Future

Photo: Andy Shelter

Whenever I drive into Swarthmore, a peacefulness settles over me. Turning onto Juniata Avenue (or Swarthmore Avenue, or Hilldale, or Drew), I feel a sense of relief, like letting out a long-held breath. 

Partly it’s the trees. This is true in any season, whether they’re wearing their summer green or autumn gold, or standing bare-branched in winter, straight and gray and solemn as the Quakers who founded this town.

Partly, too, it’s the houses that calm me. I love the way the styles are jumbled together: brick colonial sitting companionably next to turreted Victorian, stucco bungalow next to shingled twin with porches facing politely in opposite directions. As you approach the center of town, small apartment complexes spread across grassy lots or rise up, four stories tall, close to the train station. One of my regular walks takes me past the large stone houses of Swarthmore Hills, another down along a winding road where clapboard houses hide in the woods, a third past a row of narrow twins in the historically Black neighborhood.

But mostly, of course, it’s the people who make the town what it is. 

As a newcomer 20 years ago, I first met locals while waiting on the corner for my older daughter’s school bus. I met them at the playground across the street, watching my younger daughter slide down the slide, and at our street’s annual block party. My near neighbors include a biologist, a computer-systems saleswoman, an EPA administrator, a high school English teacher, a county transportation administrator, and a social worker, along with stay-at-home parents and retirees. 

One of the things I’ve most loved about Swarthmore is the mix of people: Co-op cashiers, piano teachers, emergency room doctors, electricians, small business owners, young political staffers, post-doctoral fellows, travel agents, college professors, and all kinds of writers: novelists, journalists, children’s book authors, historians, and more than our fair share of poets.

But over the two decades I’ve lived here, I’ve seen the balance of people change. As prices in the real estate listings have grown ever more eye-popping, the cars beneath our street trees are more often BMWs than Toyotas. 

A College Town Without College Professors?

I loved this town even before I moved here. At the tail end of the twentieth century, my young family was living in a perfectly decent suburban house on a cul-de-sac in Delaware, where the streets were all named after towns in Connecticut. I knew we were lucky to live there, but I hated the sameness of the houses, their undersized windows punched into the vinyl siding, the excessive lawns with the occasional quick-growing Bradford pear. 

We had friends who lived in Swarthmore—45 minutes away—and we used to drive up sometimes and visit them in their small stone house. I was always sad to go home.

Then, Swarthmore College hired my husband, David, as an assistant professor. Thrilled, we bought a smallish house on a street at the edge of the town and began to settle in. We met other young faculty members and their families. We enrolled our girls in school and joined the swim club. Nostalgic for my Quaker high school days, I started attending the Friends meeting.

But if we had moved more recently, I doubt we would have been able to afford a house in Swarthmore.

Since the year 2000, when David joined the college faculty, only one new professor in his department has settled in Swarthmore. More recently, three new hires all bought houses elsewhere, commuting to the campus each day rather than becoming part of the community. The rising cost of real estate here wasn’t the only reason, but it was a hefty part. The town’s lack of diversity played a role too. Of course, given our country’s wealth gap (caused by decades of segregation), Swarthmore’s racial homogeneity (we’re about 85% White) is related to its cost.

Each time one of David’s colleagues bought a house in a different town, I felt sad. Not so much for them: there are lots of great places to live in the area. But for me—that they wouldn’t be my neighbors. For my community. A college town where college professors can’t or don’t want to live is troubling. 

The Pandemic Accelerator

Around that time, a friend who had rented an apartment in town for a dozen years started house hunting. Her family had long outgrown their two-and-a-half bedroom apartment. They’d been saving money and decided that 2020 would be the year they could afford to buy a place in town. 

Then the pandemic hit. Prices spiked. Bidding wars for houses became frenzies. 

“We waited too long,” my friend lamented. Despite strong family ties to the borough, she and her husband moved away, deciding to try their luck in a different state. They’ve been gone nine months now, and I miss her all the time. 

It wasn’t long before I heard another story like my friend’s. Then another. If apartment living works for you, Swarthmore has some reasonably priced rental options. But if you want to own your own place—build some equity, have a yard for your kids to run around in—that’s pretty tough. As I watched people I cared about move away—less affluent people who had brought their energy and creativity to our civic life—I felt as though I were witnessing the draining of some of Swarthmore’s quintessence.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying that rich people are any less interesting or less civically engaged or make less good neighbors than non-rich people. I don’t mean that.

But I do mean that I’d rather live among people who do a lot of different kinds of jobs, including the ones that don’t pay that much—who are of a range of races and live in a variety of family constellations—than to drift in a comfortable homogenous sea.

So I’ve decided to stop drifting and try to do something about it.

Doing Something

I know that the lack of reasonably priced housing is not just a Swarthmore problem. There’s an affordability crisis all over this country: you can find articles about it in the newspaper nearly every day. 

Mostly that’s terrible news. But it does mean that many communities are wrestling with the same problem and experimenting with a variety of approaches and solutions. There’s a lot to be learned from them. 

Over the last few months, I’ve helped organize a Task Force on Development and Affordability authorized by Swarthmore Borough Council, which will make recommendations to the council early next year. We’ll be talking to neighbors about their ideas, needs, and concerns, and delving into the trials and successes of other towns. I’ve already begun meeting with zoning experts and town planners in places where some approaches have been tried. 

I’m hopeful that—if we search—we can come up with ideas that will work here in Swarthmore, with our particular community, history, buildings, and people. 

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