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County trying to tackle housing issues

6 min read
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Talk to a Greene County commissioner, or the directors of the county’s human services and economic development departments, and the conclusions will be the same: The housing market dynamics in Greene County are complex.

And what makes the housing market so complex is up for debate, considering the various factors that can affect available and affordable housing for Greene County residents. In order to get a professional perspective on this issue, the county contracted in 2013 with Delta Development Group, a community and economic development consulting firm headquartered in Mechanicsburg, to conduct an assessment.

Several significant conclusions were reached in the report. First, the availability of adequate housing has been an ongoing issue in Greene County, and the growth of the natural gas industry has magnified the issue. Yet, the report said even with increased pressure on demand for housing with the emergence of the natural gas industry, there was a steady decline in the annual number of new homes built in Greene County between 2005 and 2013.

While there may be a negative perception about how those in the natural gas industry have affected housing in Greene, Barry Crumrine, president of the Washington-Greene County Realtors Association, said oil and gas has been a positive for housing, at least in Washington County.

“In Washington, the housing inventory is low, and that’s a good thing for Realtors,” he said. “The prime range of houses priced between $110,000 and $160,000 sell quick. Those houses are not on the market for long.

“The influx of people working in the oil and gas industry has been good for the real estate market. If these workers are staying around here for a while, they will no longer rent; they will purchase,” Crumrine said.

The housing market in Greene, however, has not benefited from the drilling purchasing power. The problem, Greene County Commissioner Blair Zimmerman said, is with rental units.

Many available rental units are being filled by natural gas workers, and the increase in demand for rental housing encouraged landlords to increase rental rates.

“What may have rented for $500 to $600 a month are now going for $1,000 a month,” Zimmerman said. “The landlords know they can charge that much, and that leaves a lot of our residents out of the loop.”

But Zimmerman said there is a more serious issue that needs to be addressed when it comes to creating available, and affordable, housing.

“Yes, rental property is important, but the lack of public infrastructure, specifically water and sewer infrastructure, is one of the greatest challenges to housing development in Greene County,” he said.

He pointed out available properties within the county are not attractive to developers because of the lack of public infrastructure. “I don’t know of any place within the borough of Waynesburg that has space where home building can occur. There are developments in Franklin Township, but many are at the high-priced end,” he said.

“Most of the western portion of the county does not have access to public water and sewer,” he said. “And without that, we will never see any housing development take place there.”

Zimmerman and the Delta report both recognize most of the existing water and sewer infrastructure that exists in the county is old and in need of repair.

But Karen Bennett, executive director of the county’s Human Services Department, said there is another significant disconnect with being able to obtain housing. “I call it workforce housing,” she said.

“One of the greatest needs for housing in Greene County is quality market-rate housing at prices that are aligned with household incomes,” Bennett said.

“There needs to be housing at prices that are affordable to the county’s workforce who earn low to moderate incomes,” she said.

Consider:

• The median household income in Greene County in 2012 was $42,837.

• Assuming that households spend 30 percent of their income on housing, the average household in Greene County could afford a monthly mortgage payment (including escrow) of approximately $1,000, the Delta report concluded.

• An affordable home for the average resident in Greene County would range from $150,000 and $200,000, the Delta report said. Only six houses within that price range were listed for sale in Greene County in June 2014.

But Bennett pointed out all is not bleak on the housing front.

PIRHL Development LLC of Warrensville Heights, Ohio, plans to construct a four-story apartment building for seniors at the corner of High and East streets in Waynesburg.

The building will contain 52 one- and two-bedroom apartments and a large community room. It will be for independent seniors, ages 62 or older, whose income is about 60 percent or less of the medium income for the county.

The apartment building will be called Gateway Senior Housing. The company purchased four lots and will demolish existing buildings at the site, including storage units, a single-family house and a house previously used as offices by the late Dr. Stanley Fowler.

Bennett said work on the project is expected to begin in early May, with completion scheduled for August 2016. The complex should be in full capacity by December 2016.

Secondly, Accessible Dreams, together with Greene County Housing Authority, will develop four living units on Jefferson Road in Jefferson Borough. The four-unit structure will contain two fully accessible two-bedroom units on the ground floor for people with mobility requirements, and two additional two-bedroom units on the second floor for people needing affordable rental housing.

Finally, the county’s redevelopment authority, considered part of the Greene County Housing Team, along with the commissioners, human services, aging and adult services, economic development and the housing authority, rehabilitated an abandoned house in Bobtown using free labor provided by inmates in the State Correctional Institution at Greene’s Community Works Program.

For at least nine years, nobody had lived in it nor bothered to pay the long overdue property taxes. As expected, gradual deterioration became evident.

It was the first house to be completed under the authority’s housing program.

The authority’s housing program is funded by a $600,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, $525,000 from the county’s Marcellus Shale impact fee allocations and $83,000 from municipalities in which properties have been targeted.

The goal of the authority’s housing program is to restore blighted properties and to sell them, making a small profit to allow the authority to complete additional homes and to generate operating income for the authority.

“There are some positives, but we still have a long way to go,” Zimmerman said. “I want to see some municipalities step up and look seriously at possible development opportunities within their borders. And most of all, I want to see politics kept out of it.”

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