Impact Fee Sends $2.5 Million To Housing Efforts

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale boom has brought a lot of economic growth to rural regions sitting on top of gas deposits, but it has also increased the cost of housing.
Take Towanda, Bradford County, where the monthly rent for two-bedroom apartments has shot up from under $300 to more than $1,000 over the last five years, and the waiting list for public housing assistance has soared. (Check StateImpact Pennsylvania later this week for a much broader look at how drilling has affected Towanda.)
With that concern in mind, Pennsylvania’s Housing Finance Agency.is figuring out how to spend the $2.5 million it will receive from initial impact fee revenue. More from the Towanda Daily Review:

HARRISBURG – An initial outlay of revenue from gas drilling impact fees to address affordable housing needs in the Marcellus Shale region will be made next month by the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.
The agency’s governing board is scheduled to meet Dec. 13 to vote on proposals made by county and municipal officials to tap part of the $2.5 million collected for 2011 gas production, said spokesman Scott Elliott.
Under the 2012 impact fee law, affordable housing is identified as an impact of drilling because an influx of workers in small towns and rural areas has led to a scarcity of housing and increase in housing rents and prices. The issue was examined recently at a hearing of the Senate Urban Affairs and Housing Committee chaired by Sen. Gene Yaw, R-23, Williamsport.

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