High home costs, job impacts & more: 5 takeaways from Centre County housing summit

Centre County Government held its first housing summit last week, where local and state officials, developers and others gathered to discuss the county’s current affordable and workforce housing needs.

The summit, held Wednesday at the county’s Community Services Building, was organized in collaboration with the Chamber of Business and Industry in Centre County and the county’s housing task force.

One of the key issues discussed was housing affordability, which longtime Centre County commissioner Steve Dershem said is a problem the area has been trying to tackle for years.

“About 20 years ago, the county commissioned an affordable housing study, and at that time, people really didn’t understand what affordable housing truly was, what the dynamics were, what the causes were, what some of the issues were at that time — we’ve come a long way since then,” Dershem said. “The problem has remained just as dynamic, just as diverse and just as troublesome as it was back then.”

Below are five takeaways from the two-hour summit.

The rising cost of a Centre County home

As outlined by Centre County commissioner Mark Higgins at the summit, buying a home in Centre County today is much easier said than done.

According to a presentation from Higgins, from 2019 to 2025, the median price of a home in Centre County jumped from $269,000 to $375,000. In that same time frame, the average interest rate rose from 4% to roughly 6.7%, monthly mortgage payments rose from $1,400 to $2,300, a median down payment rose from $54,000 to $76,000 and median total interest rose from $155,000 to $400,000.

These hikes without an increase in available housing have made it “almost an untenable housing market” for those looking to purchase their first home, Higgins said.

“The issues become urgent because the changes in home values and interest rates have outpaced wage growth over the past six years — wages in Centre County have gone up a bit, but housing prices have gone up substantially,” Higgins said. “A household should not be spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Households are severely cost-burdened if the cost exceeds 50% of income.”

Higgins added that teachers starting their careers in the county are estimated to face a 56% housing burden, and construction workers are estimated to face a 59% housing burden.

“You just can’t swing that,” the commissioner said, adding that the high costs have contributed to a “critical” affordable and workforce housing shortage in the area.

High costs, shortage affect local economy, job retention

The home-buying climate in Centre County and lack of affordable and workforce housing has made it difficult for area businesses to recruit and retain employees, as more and more workers commute into the county from a cheaper neighboring county, Higgins said.

“Workers are commuting farther and farther, which hurts household stability and quality of life, and our local economy loses momentum because the region can’t grow if people can’t live here,” Higgins said.

Mount Nittany Health Talent Acquisition and Compensation Director Michael Fry used the health system as a prime example. Of Mount Nittany’s about 3,000 employees, roughly one third live outside Centre County, he said.

And recently, Fry said many of Mount Nittany’s prospective employees have turned down job offers in favor of a more “close to home” option, even though the closer option pays less.

“We have to get really creative in the way that we incent [employees] to come join us, as opposed to some of our neighboring counties’ hospitals,” Fry said. “We love investing in our employees, don’t get me wrong, but we have a lot of other things that we would love to invest in as well. So it creates that dynamic challenge and that dynamic imbalance.”

PA’s Housing Action Plan

To help with the workforce housing shortage in Centre County, and the commonwealth, the state Department of Community and Economic Development recently unveiled its first Housing Action Plan. It includes a proposed investment of $1 billion into critical infrastructure in Governor Josh Shapiro’s proposed 2026-2027 budget, with much of it going toward housing construction and retention.

According to state Department of Community and Economic Development Assistant Secretary Morgan Boyd, the plan has five major goals: build and preserve housing stock, expand housing opportunity and homeownership, strengthen housing stabilization and homelessness prevention, modernize state and local development regulations and improve coordination, data and program efficiency across agencies.

Through the plan’s potential implementation, affordable and workforce housing construction in Centre County would increase by around 70% through 2035, Boyd said, which is projected to lead to the creation of roughly 22,000 new housing units. If housing construction continues at its current rate, it’s estimated that there will be a statewide shortfall of roughly 185,000 units in the same time frame.

Some of the other proposed actions and goals include restoring and repairing aging homes, encouraging homeowners and landlords to make their own repairs, bolstering support for the homeless statewide, implementing a “deed transfer on death” program, encouraging the reuse of abandoned buildings and more.

“The need for intervention is significant, and the interventions that we deploy have to be significant,” Boyd said.

Using state and local tools

Outside of the proposed Housing Action Plan, there are already a number of state- and local-level tools that people can use to help build, finance, purchase and renovate a home.

According to former Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency CEO Brian Hudson, two of the main state-level tools a developer looking to construct affordable or workforce housing can use are Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs) of 4% and 9%.

In addition to the tax credit programs, Hudson discussed the Pennsylvania Housing Affordability and Rehabilitation Enhancement Fund, or flexible funding that can be used to pay for smaller housing projects, and the HOME Investments Partnership Program, which provides municipalities with grant and loan assistance to expand and preserve decent and affordable housing.

On the county level, funds from Act 137 of 1992, also known as the Optional Affordable Housing Funds Act, contribute toward first-time homebuyer loans of up to $10,000 per household.

“We’ve seen as high as 22 applicants a year [for homebuyer loans],” county Planning & Community Development Director Ray Stolinas, Jr. said. “That translates into $220,000 dedicated towards getting people into their homes.”

Additionally, Act 137 monies fund the Construction and Acquisition/Rehabilitation for Sustainable Housing (CASH) Grant Program, which developers can use to fund the rehabilitation of existing properties, new affordable housing construction and land acquisition for future housing projects.

Some of the organizations that have utilized the CASH Program include Habitat for Humanity, the Centre County Housing and Land Trust and the State College Community Land Trust.

Local housing projects, zoning changes and retention efforts

While there will be considerable effort over the next decade to bring more workforce housing to the county and state, there are already some local efforts ongoing to build, retain and encourage the construction of more workforce housing.

In College Township, for example, developer Burkentine is close to breaking ground on the first phase of its 629-unit Crew 814 housing development, which will include 62 affordable housing units when completed.

The township is also in the midst of a major zoning change in the Dale Summit area, from traditional zoning code to form-based code. This change will allow developers to build more-dense housing developments, but in exchange, a certain percentage of the units must be workforce housing.

“If you want to develop a certain number of units on an acre, once you get above five [units] in College Township, you start on a sliding scale of percentage of your development that has to be developed as affordable, and the numbers match,” College Township assistant manager Mike Bloom said. “If you’re at five units per acre, you’re doing 5% of your development in affordable. Six units per acre? Six affordable, and it goes up to 10, where we cap out.”

Elsewhere in the county, a Centre Region-wide effort to preserve the affordable housing status of Sylvan View Estates, a Ferguson Township neighborhood containing 49 affordable housing units.

The effort is being led by PrimeCore Properties LLC developer Ara Kervandjian, who has prior experience developing affordable housing across the county, and is interested in purchasing the development and renovating it using funds from the PFHA.

Kervandjian, who spoke at the summit, did not share any new information regarding his efforts to preserve Sylvan View Estates, but noted that greater cooperation between municipalities and developers, the freeing-up of space for future housing developments and more could be carried out to help bring, and retain, affordable housing in the area.