On Friday morning, flanked by a concrete block stair tower rising into a clear blue sky, Tom Perez looked around at the construction activity under way at 213 College Ave., the site of HDC MidAtlantic’s “Apartments at College Avenue” affordable housing project.
“This is a model,” he said, of what the federal American Rescue Plan Act was meant to accomplish.
Perez is senior advisor to President Joe Biden and the director of the White House’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. On Friday, he visited Lancaster as part of the Biden administration’s fifth “Investing in America Tour,” highlighting projects made possible by the administration’s infrastructure and economic recovery bills: ARPA, the Inflation Reduction Act and so on.
In Lancaster, the focus was ARPA. The funding was essential to completing HDC MidAtlantic’s “capital stack” for The Apartments at College Avenue so the project could begin, Chief Operating Officer Tammie Fitzpatrick said.
The affordable housing project is one of a trio that HDC is pursuing on and around the former St. Joseph Hospital campus on Lancaster’s west side. It plans to renovate the former hospital’s “Delp Wing,” and to build apartments at 838 Marietta Ave. The three phases total 139 affordable units in all, Fitzpatrick said.
City government has provided $1.8 million in ARPA toward the effort: $1 million to buy the Marietta Avenue site; then $300,000 to support predevelopment work there and at the Delp Wing; and $500,000 for The Apartments at College Avenue. Separately, the latter project received $1.25 million in ARPA from Lancaster County government.
Slated for completion next spring, it will have 64 one- and two-bedroom apartments, of which a dozen will be fully handicap-accessible. It will serve low-income households earning between $10,000 and $45,000. Around 240 households have already expressed interest, testifying to the demand out there, Fitzpatrick said.
Magda Miltenberger lives in HDC MidAtlantic’s St. Peter Apartments in Columbia. Now 79, she explained how financial struggles after her husband’s death three decades ago led her to seek out affordable housing. It gives her financial security and peace of mind, she said.
“Many people are in my position, or even worse,” she said. “… This is why affordable housing matters.”
Every mayor in America will tell you ARPA was a godsend, Mayor Danene Sorace said. Amid the uncertainty of the pandemic, it allowed cities to maintain services while making critical community investments. In Lancaster’s case, $10 million of its $39.5 million ARPA allocation went to affordable housing, and another $5 million to community facilities.
Within broad parameters, the ARPA recipients could decide for themselves how to spend the money.
“That was the best part,” Sorace said.
“It was a statement of trust in local governments,” Perez said.
Housing used to be a “sleeper” issue, but it isn’t any more, he said. The country building more housing than ever before, but the demand is greater than ever before, too.
The Biden administration has ramped up its focus on housing, proposing a range of measures to increase supply and tamp down price increases. They include tax credits for first-time homebuyers, the expansion of the federal housing voucher program and, controversially, rent controls on landlords who use the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program. The administration wants to use “every tool in the toolbox,” Perez said Friday.
More broadly, the administration says its “Investing in America” agenda has created jobs, reinvigorated overlooked communities and leveraged billions of dollars in private-sector funding, including $4.4 billion in Pennsylvania alone.
Perez made two other stops during his visit Friday, both ARPA related. He toured Uni-Vision Childcare on West King Street, which received $250,000 in city ARPA funding for a renovation and expansion project; and visited a house renovated by Partners With Purpose, a nonprofit affiliate of the Lancaster City Housing Authority. The house was one of two three-bedroom townhouses that Partners With Purpose renovated using $900,000 in city ARPA.
