Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.] 

 

Yesterday we saw that that infamous minority, ’some’ residents of Indiana, PA, want to keep ‘those people’ (in this case, students) away from their nice residential area. 

 

“It’s a nice area — that’s what bothers me,” Shirley Hoover said. “When you look at the houses, you know which ones are college kids’.”

 

The issues — noise, parties at all hours and garbage — resonate with other college towns.

 

Two out of three ain’t bad

 

Bruce Large, California Borough zoning officer, is keeping tabs on the debate in Indiana with interest.  With California University of Pennsylvania in his town, Large said, there is a 50-50 mix between off-campus student housing and single-family units.

 

CUP has 6,600 students, of whom 75% or live off campus [Dorms hold 1,500], or about 80% of the borough of 6,000 people.

 

Wouldn’t want her living in your town, would you?

 

Another town doing well out of its local university.

 

Several years ago, officials implemented a 400-foot rule — keeping student rentals in neighborhoods at least 400 feet apart.

 

Yes, when they cluster, and run in packs, who knows what will happen?

 

Pizza!

 

As you would expect, any anti-concentration ordinance produced what we may call ’student sprawl.’

 

Gabler said that’s only spread students further into residential neighborhoods.

 

Dude, where’s my apartment?

 

Last year, the borough added an overlay zone to attract high-density student housing around campus.

 

Finally a pro-active move — rather than try to ban those noxious students where you do not want them, why not make it possible to house more of them where you do want them?  Zoning is destiny, albeit perhaps a bit more slowly than some might wish: 

 

One development has been built in that district, and other developers have expressed interest, he said.

 

Attracting housing to an area to bring more students into higher-density living closer to campus makes better sense from every perspective — students, university, town, neighbors. 

 

“It will stop the further spread of investment properties that buy up normal family housing and convert it over to student housing,” Gabler said.

 

Notice how Mr. Gabler wants to depersonalize it as ‘properties’ that buy up normal family housing, and cannot bring himself to say ‘our neighbors’ or, even worse, those evil developers, giving people what they will pay for.

 

The proposed ordinance is the next step to bring students closer to campus. Gabler said “functional families” would be considered an individual or a group of people and their offspring, who have a “permanent and distinct character with a demonstrable bond.”

 

We have a permanent and distinct character with a demonstrable bond

 

Now we see why they’re using the awkward term ‘functional’; they’re trying to describe groups that are families de facto even if not de jure. 

 

“It doesn’t necessarily mean people who are married but people who have a long-term relationship with each other that are considered a family,” Gabler said. “It may not be perfect, and we realize there’s interpretation involved here and discretion on the part of our code officers.”

 

Interpretation is only required, sir, if you plan to discriminate against a class of renters.  But as one starts to write a definition of ‘those people’, one runs into difficulties:

 

The ordinance would not affect group homes for people with disabilities.

 

Previously I commented about regulating behavior rather than status.  Had the town adopted an anti-noise, anti-party, anti-nocturnal ordinance, it would have no worries about upsetting the oldsters.

 

None of that allowed here.

 

Then there’s the problem of grandfathering:

 

You really are a problem

 

Current student rentals in the residential areas could continue operating.

 

Several Indiana landlords declined to speak publicly about the proposed ordinance, saying they feared retribution from borough officials. Others did not return messages.

 

Ken Hallenbeck and his mother, Carol Perrott, bought a house a block from campus three years ago so Ken, now 24, could live there while attending IUP. He lived there and rented to another student to pay the mortgage. Both he and his roommate are moving this summer. The plan was to rent to students until Perrott, 59, of Philadelphia, would move into the home when she retired. “I love the fact it’s a university town,” she said.

 

Hallenbeck said there’s not enough student housing now. “The university is encouraging students to move off, and the town is encouraging students to stay on campus,” Hallenbeck said.

 

While it sounds as if nobody wants ‘those people,’ the university’s position is a bit more defensible.  IUP has concluded the university is in the education business, not the housing business.  This general trend — toward functional specialization and away from directly providing housing — echoes that of military housing.  The service branches are in the force projection business, not the housing business.  Housing is an adjunct to its mission, not a core competency, and hence is ripe for privatization. 

 

IUP senior Joe Kochinski, 23, a geography major from Windber, Somerset County, suggests the town be divided into grids, with a certain percentage of student rentals allowed in each area.

“Both sides could work with that instead of both sides hating each other,” he said.

 

 

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