State College Receives More Than $1 Million for Affordable Housing Initiative

State College Borough has been awarded more than $1 million in funding through the Commonwealth for its two nonprofit partners to acquire and renovate townhouses on Old Boalsburg Road for use as affordable rental units.

“All Pennsylvanians deserve access to affordable, safe, and livable spaces in their communities,” Gov. Tom Wolf said in a statement on Thursday. “This investment will support State College’s efforts to ensure that residents have affordable housing options in close proximity to the borough’s commercial corridors, downtown and Penn State University for work, school and shopping needs.”

The funds — which come from the Department of Community and Economic Development’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program — include $945,000 to purchase and rehabilitate eight three-bedroom townhouses on one parcel at 803-817 Old Boalsburg Road.

Three units will be rented to individuals and families with less than 50 percent of the area median income and five units will be rented to those at less than 80 percent of the area median income. 

State College Community Land Trust will own the land, ensuring that it will remain used for affordable housing in perpetuity. The Home Foundation, formerly the Temporary Housing Foundation, will own the building and improvements and will manage the units. THF also received $88,501 from the HOME program — which provides federal funding to municipalities to assist with expanding affordable housing for low-income individuals — to support its acquisition and improvements to the units.

Colleen Ritter, SCCLT executive director, said closing on the property is scheduled for Friday.

The need for affordable housing in the borough has been a growing issue for years, as demand for rental units among students, professionals and visitors drives up prices, leaving the housing supply for lower income individuals at a shortage and forcing them to locate further away.

Morgan Wasikonis, executive director of Housing Transitions, the parent organization of THF, said the Old Boalsburg Road project has been a “remarkable collaboration” among organizations, with the borough’s recognition of a need for more affordable housing within State College.

“The importance of that is that those kinds of properties are located close to jobs within walking distance, to transportation, to schools,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to really be able to provide more socioeconomic diversity within the borough. We tend to have students and then we tend to have the professionals that live in the area, or the homeowners. There’s just not a lot of rental properties for people in between.”

THF and SCCLT will be rehabilitating the townhomes “with energy performance in mind,” Ritter said. They are working with the borough’s Energy+ Initiative and the effort is the design project for this year’s Penn State Solar Decathlon team.

“We started to work with the students and they’re going to be working on a design that would suggest renovations to make it a very highly energy- efficient building, taking into consideration the comfort of the residents there as well as the curb appeal and looking at the property as a whole and what purposes we think it should serve the community and the people who live there,” Wasikonis said.

While SCCLT and THF work closely together on affordable housing issues in State College, the Old Boalsburg Road initiative will be the first collaboration of its kind between the two.

“We already work closely with THF, in that both organizations rehab single family homes for purchase by first-time homebuyers, and THF does the homebuyer education and budget counseling for homebuyers in our program,” Ritter said in an email. “In recent years, both organizations have established strategic goals to grow our collaborations.”

Ritter added that while SCCLT has focused on affordable homes for first-time buyers, working on a rental initiative also is a natural fit for the organization.

“Homeownership is often talked about as being the first rung on the economic security ladder, but if rents are too high, or debt-to-income ratios too high, many people can’t even reach the first rung of the ladder,” she said. “Additionally, homeownership is not for everyone, but everyone should have access to safe, stable housing that allows them to have economic security. Therefore, we feel it is within our organization’s mission and values to use the land trust model, where we own the land, to help preserve a variety of affordable housing options for our community in this way.”

Both Wasikonis and Ritter lauded the current owner of the Old Boalsburg Road property — listed in county records as SFG Real Estate —for their patience while the organizations acquired the needed funding to purchase it.

“The acquisition is… the culmination of a years-long collaboration between THF, us and the Borough, as well as the seller to secure these townhomes as permanently affordable housing for our community,” Ritter said. “The seller was really patient, and demonstrated a sincere commitment to preserving these units, as it took a long time to assemble the necessary funding sources.”

Though the HOME funding is the largest piece, Ritter said seven agencies contributed funds to make the deal happen, including Centre County Government, State College Borough and the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, which awarded PHARE funding to the project.

“This collaboration is a real testament to how much of a priority affordable housing is in our region,” Ritter said. “This announcement and purchase of the property on Friday is just the beginning of what we hope will be a fruitful partnership across all agencies to improve the housing landscape in our region.”

Added Wasikonis, “It’s a really big collaborative effort. We’re excited about the collaboration that’s making it possible and really making it so that we can do something long-term for the community.”