A Community Conversation: Life in the Lehigh Valley

Rent is outrageous.

Hopefully don't keep rising.

The property tax is very high.

How do we feel about where we live?

I think it's a nice melting pot.

The Lehigh Valley is very affordable.

Right now, it's very hard to get a nice house for under 250,000.

What do we say about the Lehigh Valley's quality of life?

Beautiful place to live with kids.

There's all kinds of people.

Traffic's a lot worse tonight.

Lehigh Valley News.com and PBS 39 present a special community conversation.

Life in the Lehigh Valley will examine how far the valley has come and how it's changing for better.

I'm optimistic or for worse.

Things aren't the way they were six or seven years ago.

Join us for the next hour as we touch on who we are.

The local economy, affordability and how we're all getting along.

Now here's your host, Brittany Sweeney.

Hello and welcome.

We in the Lehigh Valley have it better than most.

A growing area, a diverse local economy, a place attracting new business and people.

But for many, progress here is putting pressure on our traditional way of life.

Tonight, we'll explore that.

I'm Brittany Sweeney.

BBC 39 and Lehigh Valley News.com are proud to bring you this community conversation.

Life in the Lehigh Valley.

Live from the Universal Public Media Center in Bethlehem.

We have a lot to talk about and we've talked to many of you already about who we are as a region and where we're headed.

Spend just a little time out and about.

It's easy to find folks who appreciate life in the Valley.

Definitely getting a lot easier as time goes on and traffic's a lot longer.

Even five years ago.

I was here like a year or so before leaving New York, but we had the wolf here.

But my experience here, it's Bay.

Bay is the beautiful place to visit with kids because they have you know, they can go to play.

I'll say, though, how worries.

I loved it.

You know, I mean, here I went to school here, Miller College, this university, I work here.

This is the Lehigh Valley, and I live in the Valley.

Let's go through everything.

If I wanted to go to the city in New York, only an hour away, major airports.

And I said everything is great.

With New York City, an hour and a half away from Philly and the daily shows like an ideal situation.

And I you know, it it's so far away from everything.

I'm a student and I'm coming from China, so it's all of these sort of saving.

Air things aren't the way they were six or seven years ago.

I mean, especially with writing's definitely not the case.

I think it's pretty expensive living around here nowadays, so.

Last fall, we at Lehigh Valley Public Media commissioned a study through the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College.

We wanted to take the pulse of the Valley to mark the launch of our nonprofit local news website, Lehigh Valley News.com.

To fund it, we partnered with the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation and Lehigh Valley Partnership.

The findings revealed much about us, our opinions and outlook, our concerns and fears.

Our takes on the rising cost of living and race relations, all of which we'll dive into tonight.

Overall, the survey found 86% of Lehigh Valley residents rate our quality of life as excellent or good.

High marks for sure.

Those ratings were consistent with those over the past decade going back to 2011.

But while the large majority of us maintain positive views about life in the Lehigh Valley, we're divided on something else.

The future.

40% of those surveyed, four in ten people said they believe our region is headed in the wrong direction.

More people said that it's getting worse than getting better.

Many varying opinions.

Here to help break it all down is the author of that study, Christopher Borick.

He's a professor of political science at Muhlenberg College and director of the Institute of Public Opinion.

Professor Borick, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

You've done studies like this in the past.

These surveys, the ratings are always pretty strong.

Is that the same for this particular survey?

Yeah, generally we see those overall appraisals of quality of life in the Lehigh Valley, as positive as those numbers you were showing earlier.

Brittany, give us a sense that that overall people that live in the Valley see this as a good place to live.

Some of those comments that were just shared, I think are reflective of the general sense that the Lehigh Valley, Northampton and Lehigh Counties are positive environments to live.

They're not perfect.

There's challenges.

But on the whole, people are pretty satisfied with life here, and that's been consistent for a while.

Sure.

But then those numbers are good.

But then there's public outlook, which is a little bit different.

What was different this time around when I guess.

Compared to.

The last time we did a quality of life survey in the area five years ago.

There was a little bit more negative views about the direction of life in the Valley, a pretty divided group.

About 40% of Lehigh Valley residents said they think we're headed in the wrong direction, about 30 in the right and the remaining 30 about the same.

So for a plurality of individuals, there was more pessimism about the way where we're headed, and that's a little different.

There there's been times ten years ago when we did the survey, we had similar numbers.

So there's periods of time when you see that more negative outlook.

But in this particular want to call it a lot of attention.

Does that kind of show what's happening across the country as well as here in the Lehigh Valley?

It's a wonderful point.

It's a snapshot in time.

We're doing this poll as the country in the valley comes out of a pandemic.

A lot of stress across the country.

Polls nationally show a very negative outlook about the direction of the country, about the state.

You see those.

So we're we're not an outlier in that.

We're a little bit different than we were five years ago, but the country is in a different place.

So I think conditionally we have to consider what and when we were doing this, which was last year.

Let's talk about the survey as a whole, the methodology.

How was this information collected?

Yeah, So this is a survey of Lehigh Valley Adults.

It's a telephone survey primarily through cell phones.

As you can guess right now, if you're talking to people, it's going to be through cells.

We still do reach out to some landlines for households that rely on on landlines to to do that.

It was it was put in the field last fall.

So we're in the in the field in the fall of 2022.

That gave us a pretty long period to be out there trying to reach people and follow up and make those conversations.

And so it was conducted in that method.

And how people rated quality of life.

You broke that down, right?

Different demographics when it came to age, race, income.

How did you break that down?

Yeah, we do it by a variety of of demographic factors.

So we asked people at the end of the survey to identify themselves in a variety of of of ways, how they identify their gender, how do I identify racially, ethnically, their educational attainment, their income level.

So those are self-report it and then we break out the findings of on questions like overall quality of life by those demographic areas.

And you could tell there are major divides, as you might expect, across different communities, different cohorts of Valley residents, and how they both appraise the overall quality of life here and the direction of quality of life.

Sure.

We're going to talk more about that as this program goes on.

And let's talk about why people said life was getting better or worse.

Those reasons.

Take a look at this.

First, the main reasons people say life is getting better.

There are some responses here that paint a very strong picture.

The main reason people say life is getting better.

More businesses are here.

23% of people who said life is getting better cited that also attractions and things to do cited 22% of the time job opportunities also with a strong showing, improved downtowns as well.

Have we seen this before in your experience, Chris?

Have you seen these same motivators for people to come here and stay?

Yeah, to a degree, but these things pop right out.

Well, interestingly enough, we asked people in their own words to report these and we broke them into categories.

Staff at the Institute of Public Opinion.

And in what is found is you hear in repeat things, repeat it like there are more businesses or the downtowns are much better.

Or I could find a job much easier than I used to.

So you see these things and over time we've seen periods, you know, about a decade ago when the downtowns really started to take off, and particularly Allentown, we saw people pointing to that in surveys as a change in positive life.

We've seen over time, when we've asked Lehigh Valley residents to report on the things to do in the valley, that's continuously increased.

We've been polling that those things back almost 20 years in the Lehigh Valley.

So there is a sense that there's lots of new, engaging and forward moving opportunities for people that live in the Valley.

Absolutely.

Now, let's take a look and see the main reasons people cited for life getting worse.

Here's what they had to say.

Crime and violence.

The number one answer cited 34% of the time, the cost of living coming in at number two.

Then we get into growth issues, the number of people moving here, overdevelopment and traffic congestion.

Do you find any of this surprising?

Any of this stick out as well?

Yeah, I mean, I think you anecdotally hear a lot when people talk about what the challenges are in the Lehigh Valley, things like traffic and overdevelopment of the region, loss of some open spaces, the issue of crime being most prominently listed.

It's an issue that permeates lots of the national discussion right now.

Little important point.

We were doing this survey in the middle of the fall election season.

A lot of ads were running about that issue, really bringing up the salience, I think, to it.

But we see this in a lot of areas of the country.

So I wasn't necessarily surprised that that would stand out.

The other issue that didn't surprise me at all and you've had it in your earlier discussions is housing and the affordability issues.

There's both national inflation, but in the region, the challenges of affordable housing and we'll talk about it a little bit later are significant.

And a lot of people, when they said in their own words, it was those housing stressors that were were on their minds.

Sure.

We talked about some of the different factors, the different age groups, the different races, the different income levels.

So when it came to younger people, they seem to be more optimistic about the Lehigh Valley than some of the older folks.

And so is that expected here in the Lehigh Valley at this point?

It's a fascinating divide.

Brittany, I think one of the things that I was most interested in testing in the survey and we asked a number of questions not only about age, but about how long you've lived in the valley.

And we see this divide where older, longer term residents of the Lehigh Valley are a little bit more pessimistic about where we're headed now.

And I think some of that could be nostalgia for the past, remembering some of the good things, maybe not as much some of the bad things, but being a little bit concerned about that.

Well, a lot of younger residents that have that either moved to the valley or younger generations that are here are pretty positive about the valley.

They like a lot of the things and pointed out some of the things we talked about before.

An opportunity is economically, recreationally, entertainment wise.

And so that was pretty stark.

And you could see it almost in every age group.

As we went up and looked at this, that you saw a little more pessimism as you got older.

Sure.

We talked about what people think has gotten worse, what people think have gotten better.

Let's talk about the timing and the factors that time, that type of thing.

When you conducted this survey, the time of year it was conducted, could that have an impact on people answering and what they answered and how they answered?

It's a great point and it really does.

It's the old adage, probably overused cliche is surveys are a snapshot in time.

They represent when we're talking to people, when we're trying to do the interviews and we're doing this in the fall.

Right.

Inflation, of course, was still very, very high.

It's still it still is will come down a little bit, but that's part of the picture.

The election season, as I mentioned before, anybody that lives in Pennsylvania during election time knows that we're inundated with ads.

And those ads are often negative.

They're negative ads are focusing on issues.

They're trying to bring attention for partizan reasons and electoral reasons to issues.

So you might see an issue like crime that was really highly covered in that be elevated and concerns.

That doesn't mean that that's the only thing driving people's concerns, but those are the factors that could shape every survey we could talk about this at different points has limitations, right?

And first thing we have to do is recognize those limitations.

Sure.

So it kind of depends on the type of time of year that you're conducting these survey.

Absolutely.

Okay.

So we're going to be talking about housing affordability and race relations throughout this program.

But what were some of your big takeaways about housing and how affordable it is here in the Lehigh Valley?

Yeah, I mean, so like in so many things, we're measuring perceptions.

There are a lot of people that can measure other indicators, measures of things like affordability, and they could talk much better than I can to this issue.

But of course, housing affordability is is a challenge in many parts of the country.

You know, I've done a bunch of focus groups and studies over the last few years before the pandemic.

That issue of affordable housing comes up over and over again.

People are challenged by it.

And the reality is that that a lot of people that may have come to the Valley see it still is relatively affordable.

Others that might live here that want to move from one housing situation to another might find it more difficult than they did at one time.

And that's the stress of housing is enormous stress on life.

I know you'll talk with some folks later on that have studied this for years, but it certainly is a topic that was on people's mind.

Absolutely.

What stuck out to you about race relations in this survey?

You know.

Overall, and we're going to talk about this later, the positive generally positive views about race relations in the Valley.

We only weren't able to go very deep on the topic.

Love to be able to do that more down the road.

But from the questions that we asked, a generally positive view.

And what's fascinating again is the divide.

Younger residents of the valley, younger residents of the Valley, more optimistic about race relations than older residents.

And that brings up some interesting questions for people.

The Valley has become more diverse in a lot of ways for individuals that once lived in a place that was less diverse.

How do they acknowledge that?

How did they bring that into their conclusions about race relations?

It's a very complicated area to talk about, but important to to look at.

Sure.

Professor Brook, we're going to have you stay right where you are because we're going to bring you into this conversation as we invite some more guests on this evening.

So we want you to stick around.

We have a lot more to cover.

And one of the Lehigh Valley success stories in recent years is the revival of the cities.

I spent some time in Easton in Bethlehem, talking with people about the economy, the cost of living and affordability.

It depends on what area you go to because now the rent is outrageous.

I'm trying to move, trying to buy and or rent, and it's like I can either purchase a house and pay $2,000 mortgage, which is not in my room at the moment, or 1900 dollars for renting, which I also can't do.

So right now it's a little bit tough with renting and buying because the market has gone up since the pandemic.

More jobs.

It's always better, more jobs, better pay, more options.

Having lived in Chicago and New York City, the Lehigh Valley is very affordable.

One of the reasons I decided to come back and I started my business and my family here in the Valley because it's very affordable.

I think the difficulty is the demand is is high because it's a nice place to live.

And that's why there's not enough housing and there's not enough before, especially enough affordable housing.

And we're going to talk more about that.

Joining us now is our next guest, Don Cunningham.

He's a former Bethlehem mayor, county executive, and for the past 12 years has headed the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation, marketing the Lehigh Valley and recruiting businesses to come to this area.

Don, thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure to be here.

It's great to have you.

Lehigh Valley 20 years ago versus now, Which one are you picking today?

Yeah, I've lived here my entire life.

And for those of us who did grow up here, if you if you kind of set aside the nostalgia and think of the reality for those of us who grew up, particularly in Bethlehem, the air was dirty, the river was dirty.

If you woke up and better me smelled the rat and sulfur the coke plant, and if you didn't want to swim in the river.

And when I graduated high school in the early 1980s, most of my class had to leave.

And what we were focused on as a community throughout the eighties and nineties was what was called brain drain.

It was young people leaving here for lack of opportunity.

Today, it's the exact opposite.

We have a tremendous inflow of young people were the fastest growing market in Pennsylvania for young folks and they now make up more than 50% of our workforce.

And you build an economy for young people and for tomorrow, you don't build it around yesterday.

And we're absolutely going to talk a little bit more about that.

But first, I want to ask you, what are your takeaways as someone who your job is to promote and bring people here to the Lehigh Valley?

What are your takeaways from this survey?

Well, we don't only promote we are a coalition that works on economic strategy, so we work on factors and targets.

And we're not just a promotional organization.

It is true that in select areas that we do recruit companies.

My take away from the survey is much like Professor Borick said, really no surprises there.

I mean, if you've lived in the Valley and if you've you've been paying attention to things, you know where there are some pressure points.

I would say just in general, whenever you have change, whenever you have growth, you have pain.

When you're a kid and you and your legs are growing, you grow, have growing pains, and your mom or your grandma tell you to rub out those muscles because that's because your bones are growing.

Pain comes with change and growth.

And that's what we're in the midst of right now.

You're seeing some of those pain points.

We're also caught up in some very significant national and international cycles.

This issue of housing affordability, which is very real in the Valley, is a nationally issue.

It came out of the we know nine and what happened with the recession in the housing market and every growing metropolitan market across this country is experiencing the exact same pain points.

Does it make it any easier here?

But it's really not a Lehigh Valley created condition, although we have to work on solutions.

Sure, as someone who's led a city, led a county, what are the what's the upside and the downside to that rapidly growing housing market, whether it comes to buying house or renting?

Well, I think one of the folks you interviewed said it really well.

When you have a nice area, people want to go there.

Right.

It's the old Yogi Berra comment about this place is so crowded.

No, it's got so crowded.

Nobody goes there anymore.

It's a head scratcher.

Right.

So when Realtor.com has the 18 or 17 and 1818 zip codes and their top ten desirable zip codes in the country, you know, that happens because people want to want to be there.

Right.

So the housing situation, the biggest way to solve it, quite frankly, becomes supply.

You know, if you without getting into the weeds too much, not enough single family housing has been built at the Affordable level since.

Well, we know nine people have hung on to their houses.

You haven't had that normal cycle of people leaving them because they've clung to them.

So the younger folks don't have them.

And we need more.

We need more supply.

Sure.

When it comes to you mention you grew up in the Lehigh Valley.

When it comes to change, as you mentioned, where are you seeing that change?

Well, the biggest change, I think, has been economic and population growth and economic growth.

You know, the one thing we have today that we didn't have when I was growing up here in the eighties or when my dad was a steel worker in the sixties, is any real balance to the economy today?

We have we have life sciences, we have medtech, we have health care that's abundant.

And we also have a manufacturing economy that is the largest part of our economy.

In the Lehigh Valley.

Again, today, we have 750 manufacturers making every product under the sun, and our largest employment sector is in the industrial sector again.

And people have opportunity.

They don't have to just be stuck with an employer.

They can move elsewhere.

They're making more than $20 an hour for non skilled.

While that doesn't get you a fortune, if you have a high school diploma or less than a high school diploma and you can make $22 an hour to start with benefits, you're at least have a fighting chance.

I'm not saying that inflation still doesn't hurt and housing costs don't hurt, but look at a lot of other markets, particularly in Pennsylvania.

You can't go get that.

Sure.

A highlight earlier this week, Don, the governor was in town.

He was addressing the EDC annual meeting.

He was praising the Lehigh Valley for things like the local economy, the diversity.

And so he really sang the praises and said that Lehigh Valley was the model for the rest of the state.

So how has that happened?

Was that did that ring true ten, 20 years ago.

That overnight success that happened in 20 years?

Right.

So governorship.

PIRRO We have the benefit.

I've known him a long time.

Others have known him.

He comes from Montgomery County.

He's very familiar with the Lehigh Valley.

What's unusual is somebody actually holding us up as a model.

We've quietly been doing what we've been doing in the Lehigh Valley.

And I always say to folks, we're suburb in nowhere.

We're not a satellite.

We're not dependent on New York or New Jersey.

It's nice that we have that proximity.

But we've built a community that's authentic, a culture that's our own, an economy that's balanced and real for our own folks right here.

And the key now, and this survey reflects that is to maintain what's made this place so great, its quality of life, its community aspect, its charm while still having us be discovered.

You know, you look at the markets that have been discovered over the last decades, you look at Austin and Boston and San Francisco and the tech centers, and you don't want your success to blow you up, right?

So and that's really the balance.

It's nice for Governor SHAPIRO to hold us up as a model.

We are a model.

We make things you know, we have we have low unemployment.

Our median family incomes going up $10,000 in five years.

And that's that's significant.

Our poverty rate from the last census to this census did not go up.

It's 10%.

It's below the national average.

It's below the state average.

We'd love to see ap0, but it not going up is a sign when poverty is not increasing, a median family income is.

That's creating opportunity for regular folks.

And that's really what economic development is about.

We can't do a lot about the inflationary pressures.

They're national, they're international.

They'll cycle back down.

All we can do is keep letting our folks have opportunity to carve out their piece of the American dream in a special place, which is the Lehigh Valley.

Sure.

And that life in the Lehigh Valley Survey had sited busy downtowns, and they said that young people are optimistic about living here.

You mentioned brain drain from years ago.

Now, people, you know, this was the area people graduated and they left.

That's not the case anymore.

So what do you think changed?

Well, I mean, it's tough in a 32nd answer to tell you what's changed.

I think a lot of good people doing a lot of smart things for a long time.

And then we're fortunate, right?

I mean, you take advantage your fortune.

Our location is great.

We can reach one third of the consumers in the United States on the East Coast in a one day drive.

And there are factors that we've capital has on.

We have great education, health care and those things we've capital.

That's not to say everything is perfect, but we've done a pretty darn good job of an area that was decimated by the loss of steel, the loss of textiles, the loss of heavy industries just back in the 1990s.

Fast forward 2025 years to have built up a new economy that's growing and population growing and job opportunities and growing and income levels in 20 years is pretty good.

The growing pains that come with that, though, are change.

And particularly, look, I'm 57, right?

I'm not quite in the retirement age yet, but as you get older, things changing and not being the way they once were.

The shows on TV, the drive to the supermarket, baseball's different.

It takes three and a half hours.

It just people don't like it.

You know, it doesn't surprise me that Chris is Survey says older folks are.

I talked to my dad in Florida almost every day, 77.

He's cranky.

You know, you get older, you just get a little bit like things bother you more and it's completely legitimate.

But you have to a community has to evolve for the next generation, for our children and our grandchildren.

And I want to bring in Professor Borick here, this optimistic view from young people is not what you've seen in surveys past.

Correct.

Now, John brings up some great points about that.

I mean, that's one of the evolutions, as someone that studied over two decades, public opinion in the Lehigh Valley 20 years ago, we're looking at that.

You didn't see that, right?

You saw the pressures for brain drain that were still very much part of the valley experience, people looking elsewhere.

That optimism is is an artifact, I think, of this particular poll that's really notable.

You know, I graduated from high school in Bethlehem in 1983, and for the next ten, 15 years of my life, I hardly ever saw any of my classmates.

They've slowly come back, they've returned.

And when they come back and they realize, I say, Wow, this place is different and we want to move back, that's to me, the greatest measure of success.

Let's move on to distribution centers, warehouses.

They are popping up all over the valley or they're on the drawing boards to pop up in the valley.

Is that helping or hurting the quality of life?

Well, manufacturing is we are a top 50 manufacturing market in the country.

We put out 8.4 billion in GDP.

People want things to be made in America again.

We are an outlier.

18% of our economy is manufacturing.

It's only 12% across the country.

All those buildings that people generically call warehouses, a lot of them house manufacturers, a lot of them.

How's the distribution of those manufacturers?

We love Crayola crayons.

We love Martin guitar.

We love just born candies.

They have buildings that they make things in.

They have buildings that they move things from.

We throw that in with this pejorative term warehouse and kind of cast it all in some negative aspersion.

The reality is that is the manufacturing economy of the Lehigh Valley.

Now, that said, there are places that are too far off the beaten path, that are too big and are driving trucks into rural roads that can't handle it.

So you need smart planning, but you can't have an economy where you want to make things where skilled manufacturers can make 30, 40, $50 an hour and at the same time say we don't want in the proper terms industrial buildings.

There's actually very little traditional warehousing.

When people use that term warehouse, they're really talking about industrial buildings and they'd be surprised what goes on in those industrial buildings.

A lot of products being made in those industrial buildings.

Don, finding solutions to that housing crisis, What role do developers and business leaders play, if any?

Well, I think first it starts with recognition.

You know, your program talking about at the polls.

I think every public leader elected, I hear them talk about it.

And the reason there's more talk than change is because it's very difficult for the public sector to drive a solution to it.

The best solution becomes market based and market based needs.

If you need more supply, if there's more supply, it meets the demand.

It should bring pricing down.

We're not used to the price points we're at.

We want to see them come down.

But unless the federal government's going to put forward an infusion of billions of dollars into subsidizing, you're probably not going to get a government driven solution to this.

And every market in the country is dealing with the same situation.

People are commuting a little farther out up there living in a sleepout or carbon county and driving in.

We didn't have that happen before, but hopefully we can get to some market change that will drive those costs down.

Sure.

Some great points made tonight.

Don Cunningham from LV EDC, thank you so much for your insights tonight.

You're welcome.

We really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

And we continue this community conversation.

Life in the Lehigh Valley on PBS 39 and streaming on the Web at Lehigh Valley News.com.

I should mention you can find the complete Lehigh Valley Quality of Life survey along with interactive graphics and reporting from our team of local journalists at Lehigh Valley News.com.

Just search life in the Lehigh Valley.

Additional reporting is in the works on topics like crime, the environment and so much more.

And something that came up again and again in the survey, the lack and the need for affordable housing.

The pandemic only magnified the extent of the crisis.

Community Action.

Lehigh Valley has helped hundreds of individuals and families stay in their homes.

Now, programs like the one it administered through the American Rescue Plan are ending or running out of money.

I paid a visit to see what happens next.

Good morning.

This is the way I'm happy to be here.

I would say daily I get like 10 to 15 calls inquiring about rental assistance.

Suing Carraro is the administrator for the Lehigh County Emergency Rental Assistance Program.

The first thing I ask them is, do you have an application with us?

And if they don't, then I have to let them know, you know, we're not able to assist you with rental.

But we can provide you with a resource list.

So we kind of try to help them with that.

Just needs you to provide me with your email.

The program, run by Lehigh County and Community Action Lehigh Valley, covers paths to rent to those who make under a certain amount and suffered a hardship during the pandemic.

People lost their jobs due to COVID.

They were let go.

The a lot of them had health concerns and they weren't able to work because of it.

And so they fell behind on rent on that.

That and rent has gone up.

But money for the statewide program is running out.

Our program is currently closed.

We're not accepting any new application funds because of lack of funding.

Is this one of the new ones that you just got a more?

Inman oversees the Bethlehem based operation.

The pandemic definitely didn't make things better.

People weren't able to pay their rent because they weren't working.

Some people weren't able to work, and some people since they weren't able to pay rent.

Some landlords depended on that rent and if they didn't get it, sometimes they ended up going into foreclosure.

So people were out of their homes as well.

Inman says her office receives about 50 calls per week from people needing help paying their rent or utilities.

She says the people calling are not just those classified in the low income group, but from all backgrounds.

The people who are contacting us are people who lived here, and they've lived here for quite some time.

They're starting to feel like they can't stay here.

I would say the demographic is it's wide, it's diverse.

I'm getting calls from younger people, older people, anyone.

The program coordinator says of the $16 million allocated last year, about $2 million is left to aid people who applied through August just before they stopped taking applications September 1st.

Those who called after that date are referred to a list of other resources.

They could also try to make a payment plan with their landlord, and they can try to supplement their food and their hygiene products using other nonprofits that provide those things.

We have the Second Harvest Food Bank.

Those are some of the options that we try to provide.

She says the hope is that more funding will come through, but there's no guarantee if more money isn't allocated, the office shuts down.

Inman and her coworkers are out of jobs, and renters will have to find some other way to pay rent or face homelessness.

I think there is a lack of affordable housing absolutely everywhere.

Everywhere in deed or so it seems.

In fact, a majority of Valley residents rate housing negatively.

53% describe housing as not so good or poor.

That's larger than any previous survey and significantly higher than the last time the question was asked in 2018, when only 19% described it that way.

Our next guest spent a career advocating for access to affordable housing and economic opportunity.

Allen Jennings retired two years ago after 40 years leading the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley.

The battle for affordable housing is not new, but it seems to be different now.

So we welcome Allen here.

And Allen, I ask you, what's changed?

Well, I think what's happening is that the problem is getting into higher income groups.

As Don said, this is a supply and demand issue.

And the supply, especially in housing, is always very slow to respond to demand.

You have permitting processes and you've got to wait for loans.

And and, you know, it's very difficult to make money as landlord in a market at least as a fair and honest landlord.

And so without in the absence of of public subsidies, there are troubles out there.

And so if you've got middle class people that are experiencing problems, you can only imagine how bad it is for people down the line.

Sure.

Allen, We've heard Tribune to the Lehigh Valley economy, how we've rebounded from their industrial roots.

Now, is this just the price we pay for that success story?

Well, it is the price we pay, but it's not an acceptable price anyway.

You know, the the reality is that that builders can't build housing that's affordable to people with incomes below about 80% of the median or, say, $60,000 household income.

So if they can't build it, how do we make it happen?

Well, you can let housing quality decline, have substandard housing that you know, and the more dense urban neighborhoods where the housing is older and they can't do as much aggressive code enforcement and so on.

So there's a substandard element to the housing stock that's that's also challenging.

So, you know, this is this is a disaster.

I mean, I used to call it a crisis.

I think disaster is a better word now.

And, you know, the only way to deal with it is with reality, is with with government intervention.

It's just a just the fact.

Sure.

We're going to talk more about that.

But let's take a look at some of the housing numbers right now.

First up is the median home prices in the Lehigh Valley.

Look at those numbers.

Last year, the median sale price was just under $275,000.

Now, go back to 2009 and the median price in the Lehigh Valley was just under $180,000.

That's a 51% increase in 13 years.

Now, here's the rent situation.

These are numbers from the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission.

The median monthly rent in the Lehigh Valley in 2021 was 1200 dollars.

That was up 40% from the $850 it cost in rent in 2010.

So, Alan, are these increases on par with what you've seen over the years?

Well, you know, there are so, you know, housing costs.

The housing market is very local.

You know, you could say that downtown's housing market is very different from Bethlehem's.

And even within Beth on the north side is very different from the south side, even within the south side.

The housing that's closer to the university is very different from the housing a few blocks away.

So it's hard to make some kind of a sweeping comment on why that's going on.

But the reality is, you know, we spend as a as a country about $108 billion a year subsidizing people's mortgages.

And yet if you're poor and you have the least ability to afford anything, people wait in line and there is no entitlement to the subsidy like there is in the mortgage interest deduction.

So, you know, if you can't build housing because it doesn't work financially, you know, we can, you know, let people go live on a street, which is what's happened in far too much or you can fix it and you want to fix it.

It requires the will of the people to spend some some government funding to do it.

That's a simple fact.

It's no other option.

Sure.

You're talking about solutions here when it comes to affordable housing, it's not easy.

So where do you even start for that?

Well, you start by moving in with your friends.

There's a lot of what we call couch surfing.

And, you know, that's that's not a tenable situation.

You're violating the lease that puts the host family at risk.

The family doesn't have the stability of that A family should have.

And that affects health.

That affects school performance.

I mean, this is a problem that we all have.

And we need to understand that this is everybody's problem.

Alan, the survey, it showed a significant drop in the decline, the public's rating of housing even in the past five years.

Is this because of the pandemic or is there more to it than that?

Well, it's a multiplicity of issues.

The pandemic certainly can't, you know, complicated things.

I felt terrible for the landlords that weren't getting paid.

I don't know how they survive the way they did.

But there's there's all kinds of issues here.

There are single parent households continues to be a major issue.

You know, as I said, the quality of the housing stock, you know, and it goes on and on and on, and the inability of a builder to to build housing that's affordable just it's very high.

And we can't we can't nibble at the edges.

We tried to do that.

We had a design competition among architects.

We have nonprofits trying to build housing.

We've got all kinds of things that we try to nibble at the edges.

But the reality is it's a very expensive problem to solve.

We know how to do it if we just like the will.

That's that's just the fact.

Sure.

You mentioned landlords.

There's a lot of out-of-state landlords who don't maintain their properties.

Then these properties are the rent is just going up, aren't they?

Beneficiaries in this?

Well, the big thing is that New York and New Jersey's affordable housing program is called Pennsylvania.

You know, there's a large number of people moving in here.

I was very frustrated in my 42 years.

I was able to do more for for the low income population, but we couldn't build a wall.

You know, and that's you know, that's a major part of the problem, is that there's an ongoing flow of people into the Lehigh Valley because Dan's doing too good a job making Lehigh Valley a better place to live.

And that makes the cost of housing go up.

And, you know, yeah, you can say it's a great place to live if you've got a home.

If you don't, you're in deep trouble.

Sure.

It seems inventory is an issue here to affordable housing and the number of places that are affordable.

So who's responsible to fix that problem?

Well, we all are.

You know, again, this requires subsidies, but it also requires some loosening up of the restrictions.

I mean, Don likes to defend the warehouses, but the reality is we have warehouses now that are big enough to be whole subdivisions.

And instead of building housing subdivisions that would add to the housing stock that they're warehouses, you know, So, I mean, you could put neighborhoods in those those warehouses, you know, So, I mean, there's another side to that equation.

Sure.

So you mentioned both of these, but is it an issue of land availability or is it an issue of public will to do this?

All of the above.

All of the above.

We don't have enough.

I mean, the good thing is that that this is affecting a higher income population that's the good news, because those people are more likely to vote.

Those people are more likely to contribute to people running for office.

And those people are more likely to be paying attention to what it takes to solve the problem.

So, you know, I mean, I welcome them into the ranks, but that just, you know, creates all the more trouble to try to solve.

Professor Borick, I want to bring you into this.

Is this something you've seen throughout the years?

Has this been a growing problem or is it all of a sudden pandemic hits?

This is a big issue.

Yeah, it's a growing problem.

You know, I met Allen almost a quarter of a century ago, and he was talking about these issues by my friend.

And they've been present.

Right.

And over time, we see them come to kind of inflection points.

Right.

And I think in the current moment, you just look I mean, five years ago, a majority of people said it was it was at least when they rated housing.

I don't think the housing situation per se, per se has changed all that dramatic, the stock and other things.

It's their perception right now.

And then we overlay that with our question about concern.

That's where it really popped.

We ask about a lot of concerns.

This issue is off the charts.

And that's not only among lower socioeconomic folks who are really pushed to the edge, but this is middle income individuals, other individuals that are trying to find a lot of those times it's moving from rental to a first house or moving from a first house to a second house.

So it expands across the group and it is a regional challenge.

One of the complications is that municipalities would rather not have a high density, low cost housing and I mean disparities, you know, because with that comes more police protection and more, you know, snow clearing, all that kind of stuff.

And so they restrict zoning to make it hard for, you know, basically to be excluded, exclusionary.

And so if you can afford a half acre lot, great luck to you.

If you you can't you're in trouble.

You know, and that's that's a local government thing that also can be addressed.

But nobody is.

Yeah.

I want to ask you more about local municipalities.

Can't they require these developers to include affordable housing in their development and their plans?

The Pennsylvania Municipal is planning code requires every municipality to provide land for the variety of uses, but they only say high density and low density housing.

They don't say affordable.

So if you're a low McKenzie township and you build, quote, high density housing, you're going to have $400,000 condominiums.

That's not going to solve any of the problem.

So, you know, if we just changed a couple of words and put in there low income, we'd have a much different situation, I think.

Over the past week, the city of Philadelphia brought up possibly capping rent in certain neighborhoods.

Do you see maybe that being a solution here in the Lehigh Valley?

Do you see them even considering it?

Yeah.

I be shot in the street before that will ever happen.

I mean, I think that there's there's got to be a way to do it.

That's fair.

You know, if you raise the rent by X amount, you know, we're going to control it.

Your ability to raise it again or something that allows some flexibility in the marketplace so landlords can make some money but not enable them to to gouge.

And I mean, the investors that are buying properties in the cities are driving up their rents and they're doing it because they can they're not doing it.

They're not displacing anybody.

And it's not like, you know, people with money and and different color skin are moving in.

It's that it's that they're just raising the ransom, gouging people, the marketplace.

And it seems people are renting these places.

They're paying it.

Right.

They're paying it.

So is there any other solution?

Is there any part of the state or the country that is doing it better?

Who has had a solution that is fixing this problem?

What can we do here?

Right.

The higher the quality of life, the more the housing prices are going to be.

Housing affordability is a factor and the places that are that have the most robust economies.

Denver.

Portland.

San Francisco.

Washington.

Boston.

And the Lehigh Valley is showing that little, you know, small ways, but not I mean, I agree it is more affordable than those other communities I used to kind of mock our economic development pitch that we've said we're near where you want to live.

I mean, Don's doing a great job, but we've got a place now where people want to live and we have Valley.

That's great, but it stinks at the same time because of these these issues, you know, they contort the market in ways that that require, you know, you know, contortion that it's not easy to do.

Alan, after your decades of experience, what do you want people to know?

What is their take away from this?

We this is we're all in this together.

You Know, if this is a community that means we are commune, right?

I mean, we all we're all in this together.

You cannot walk away.

You can't turn a blind eye.

These things catch up to people and that's what I think Chris found, is that, you know, you get higher and higher income people who are saying, yeah, this is a problem.

Absolutely.

Alan Jennings, thank you so much for your input tonight.

We really value your opinion here.

Thank you.

And one of the biggest changes in the Lehigh Valley.

It's the way we look, a key element of quality of life is strong relations across racial groups.

I asked people what they made of race relations in the Valley.

Here's what they said.

The Lehigh Valley have been very welcoming to me.

You know, I'm from another country originally, Dominican Republic.

And I feel very comfortable living here in the Valley.

So it's okay.

Although I say it's okay because you could you could still get by with somebody don't like you couldn't get skin color.

It it could be better out.

I think they're good.

But of course, I'm coming from a privileged place, so it's in a unique spot where there's a lot of diversity, especially like growing up was kind of new somebody or of a different culture or race than you.

So I think it's a nice melting pot really here.

I think there's a lot of all different types of races and it's great.

Like daughters go to school with a lot of different cultures.

Nearly three out of four Lehigh Valley residents, 72% rate race relations positively either excellent or good.

Younger residents were more likely to give a better grade than older ones, according to this survey.

So here to discuss that now is the racial and ethnic justice community organizer for Community Action, Lehigh Valley, Candace Moody.

Candace also leads the agency's color Outside the Lines initiative.

Candace, thank you so much for joining us this evening.

So at first glance, three out of four sounds pretty good, right, on paper.

But what's your take of that?

It does sound very optimistic and very good.

And I believe, you know, since 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, many of us will hopefully like to see improvements in race relations.

That's, you know, the optimism that we're seeing in the survey.

However, the results from this survey don't necessarily match what our initiative is receiving from the community or from our partners in the community as well.

And even from the videos that you just showed, it's this confusion of what race relations actually means.

Many individuals in our communities tend to make the comparison of being diverse to being the same thing as race relations.

And essentially, those are not the same thing.

You know, diversity does play a key role in our race relations.

However, when we're talking about this term, it's essentially defined as how we view people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds that are different from our own and how we feel about those individuals, how we interact with them on a day to day basis as well.

So in your job, what are you hearing from folks?

Yeah, that the primary concerns that we're hearing is that the race relations are not necessarily where we would like them to be.

You know, there have been improvements over the last five to or about 2 to 5 years and the diversity that's been offered and, you know, the housing, the education system, some of the recreation things that have been provided in the community.

But there's just so much more work that needs to be done as far as cultural awareness and humility when it comes to working with one another in the community.

Can, as you mentioned, George Floyd did, that meant that that changed anything around here in the Lehigh Valley?

Did you see a shift at all?

Yeah, I think I woke people up.

You know, I believe that many of us would like to hope that we have reached a point where these conversations don't need to be had.

But we've seen a huge shift since 2018 to now 2023 in which more organizations and individuals and agencies are now wanting to bring folks in to have discussions around race and to have more discussions around what it means to be culturally aware and humble.

This might sound like just a simple question, but explain why race are so important and for an important part for people to understand.

Yeah, So when we're talking about race relations, especially in a community like the Valley, which is so diverse, a healthy community takes care of one another.

And in order to have a healthy community, you have to have that cultural awareness.

And in order to have that awareness, we have to be able to understand one another.

And that also includes, you know, being able to improve the innovation in our area through different mindsets and different cultural backgrounds.

It helps increase the economic development here as well as just on the individual level.

Being able to learn about someone different from your own background can also increase your own growth.

So in this survey that we conducted, many of the answers were similar, whether it come from someone of color or a white person, does that surprise you at all?

So the I have some critiques with the manner in which the survey was done.

Our team, you know, when we went through the survey together, we would really like to see more representation and the pool of people who were considered people of color.

So that's one of the critiques that we had for this particular survey.

And then also just providing that definition of what race relations actually is, because, you know, even from the videos that you showcase before, most people seem to think of it as, oh, diversity, this melting pot and even being able to transition from this idea of a melting pot to more of a tossed salad and which we don't have to get rid of our individual identity in order to be a part of the community.

Chris, I'd like to bring you into this conversation.

Is this something you've studied in past surveys?

Yeah, we've.

Looked at it occasionally.

And Candice, this critique is really fair.

You know, the sample of our survey is basically proportional to the demographics of the Lehigh Valley.

And so individuals that might identify as black or Latin Acts or Asian are a smaller portion as proportion of the valley.

And so both the way we ask the question is very broad, very general, and it's only one item.

It's much more nuanced, much more worthy of deeper dives over time.

And it would also be wonderful to be able to to look more intensely at people of color, of different, different ethnic groups in the Lehigh Valley with a larger sample size.

So there are clear limitations to how much we can take from the survey.

We have looked at it at points of time and generally that sense again, this is one metric where there's a general sense that race relations are good.

There was even in that question, though, still a significant subgroup, that that wasn't necessarily feeling the same thing as the majority of Lehigh Valley residents.

Sure.

As I mentioned earlier, the way the Lehigh Valley looks these days is very different than it has in decades past.

And so, Candace, I ask you this.

This area has changed so dramatically, especially in places like Allentown and Bethlehem, where the Latino population is the majority now.

And so I ask you, what does that mean for people in positions like your own?

Yeah.

So because I work for a nonprofit that provides a plethora of social services, one of the huge things that we're seeing not just in our organization, but other in the Lehigh Valley, is the lack and individuals who are bilingual were able to really relate to the cultural background of these individuals who are migrating to the Lehigh Valley.

And if you can imagine, if you're trying to give a process and work through somebody who is trying to get a first time home and they don't understand any of the financial terms and English, and then you're trying to explain those in Spanish, it adds an extra barrier.

On top of it.

What would you say that's a growing issue across the country, just here in the Lehigh Valley?

I would say it's definitely a growing issue across the entire United States.

But with the Lehigh Valley specifically, if we look at demographically, the Lehigh Valley is expected to reach a demographic of people of color by 2028, as opposed to the rest of the country, which is supposed to reach that demographic by 2040.

And majority of that demo is the Latin community.

So when we're seeing the shift, we need to ensure that the jobs that are being provided are one accessible for those who are bilingual and then to making sure that those who are bilingual are able to actually assist the community at large.

Candice, you're part of a program called Color Outside the Lines, part of Community Action.

Tell us what that program is.

It launched about a year ago.

Yeah, so it's actually our initiative.

It's a 5 to 7 year initiative that was launched just last year.

We actually started discussion about this back in 2018 when a group of stakeholders in the community came together to really discuss, you know, the race relations and the Lehigh Valley and where we need to go.

So through this initiative, we are essentially looking to tackle racial and ethnic disparities here in the Valley and about five key areas of life, which include education, criminal justice, housing, economic opportunity, as well as quality of life.

And our quality of life component is actually made up of four subcomponents that include mental health, health, recreation and arts and culture.

And through this initiative, we are looking primarily to tackle these disparities for the Bipoc community.

So black indigenous people of color.

And on top of what we do through that, we also through the racial and ethnic Justice Department, it provide racial conversations and cultural humility, engagement trainings in the community.

And so what does success look like for this program?

So I would say success can be measured in so many different ways.

Our initiative is just so huge.

So in each industry, there are so many different metrics that we could use to measure our success.

But personally, I would just say to have a thriving community that is inclusive and those who are a part of the community actually have ownership within the community, have a sense of feeling safe, and also a sense of feeling like they belong without having to give up any parts of their identity, or.

Who are the people that are part of this program.

And if people want to get involved who should get involved and how do they do so?

Yeah.

So I can't list all of our partners because we have over 300 stakeholders in our initiative.

But just to list a few of the primary people that are involved, the Chamber of Commerce, people, Afros and Nature promise neighborhoods, the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission, even Habitat for Humanity as well.

So there are just a few names that are really, really involved and invested in this initiative.

But for those who want to get involved, even if you're just an individual who wants to learn how to volunteer or advocate, maybe you're part of a school district and you want to bring us in for anything they can reach out to us at Community Action l.v dot org and you can find our color outside the lines initiative information up there and we have a contact form on our website as well, and somebody from our team will get them connected.

Wonderful.

Some really great information.

Candace Moody, thank you so much for joining us.

And that will wrap up our community conversation.

Life in the Lehigh Valley.

We want to thank our guests for their time and insight tonight and our studio audience for being here in person.

And thank you for joining us at home and online.

From all of us here at PBS 39 and Lehigh Valley News.com.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Brittany Sweeney.

Have a good night.