Drilling Boom Still Stressing Housing Market

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.

April 5, 2012 | 12:00 PM

As the Sun-Gazette reports,northeastern Pennsylvania’s housing market is still being crunched by the natural gas drilling boom:

The problem of housing shortages, hiked rents and homelessness as a result of activities by the Marcellus Shale gas drilling industry didn’t happen overnight, and it won’t be solved in short order.
Complicated elements that paint a gloomy picture – unaffordable, skyrocketing rents, lack of affordable housing, devastation caused by the flood in September – were put under the microscope during a day-long housing summit Tuesday at Lycoming College.
“If you’re not being hit now, you may be,” said Dr. Jonathan Williamson, chairman of the department of political science at Lycoming College and director of the college’s Center for the Study of Community and the Economy. The center sponsored the summit along with the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.