■ City Council voted 4-3 to rezone the vacant Allentown State Hospital site, allowing City Center Investment Corp. to move forward with its development plans.
Action paves way for redevelopment of vacant land
Developers who want to turn the vacant Allentown State Hospital site into a vibrant new neighborhood just cleared a crucial hurdle.
Allentown City Council voted 4-3 Wednesday to rezone the land on Hanover Avenue from “institutional” to “mixed use overlay,” allowing City Center Investment Corp., a prominent local real estate developer that bought the site in January, to move forward with its plans for the 200-acre site. Members Cynthia Mota, Daryl Hendricks, Santo Napoli and Candida Affa voted in favor of the rezoning; Ed Zucal, Ce-Ce Gerlach and Natalie Santos voted against it.
The land is the former home of the psychiatric hospital, which closed in 2010 and has been vacant since the hospital building was demolished in 2020. The East Side property is seen by city and real estate officials as one of the biggest redevelopment opportunities for several generations in Allentown. It was sold directly to City Center by the state in early 2023 for $5.5 million after a failed competitive bidding process.
The development, which City Center has named Northridge, will bring housing, medical buildings, retail businesses, walking and biking trails and recreation space to the site.
Charles Schmehl, an architect for the project, said Northridge would “recreate some of the best features of older neighborhoods,” from wide sidewalks to ample street trees.
The new zoning designation does not outline exactly how the site will be built out, but developers already have presented some preliminary architectural renderings that show what they plan to build: a retail corridor near Hanover Avenue with shops and restaurants; a system of walking and biking trails near the Lehigh River; and a variety of housing types including townhomes, apartment buildings and single family homes in different sections of the planned neighborhood.
The developer also plans to conserve at least 42% of the land as either undeveloped open land or recreational space, and could add a senior living facility, health care provider buildings and a flex business space to the site.
During public comment, several criticized City Center’s plans and called on the developer to include designated affordable housing units as the city faces an affordable housing crisis and a growing homeless population.
“I’m just wondering, with the low income housing and you can’t do anything for that, which one of the [developer] families, the Butzes, the Jaindls, Mr. Reilly, who’s going to help the poor?” said Dan Blount, a pastor at Allentown’s Union Baptist Church. “Who’s going to cry for those people? Because those people need help. If you look around at the homeless, I mean, you can build something for them.”
Schmehl said City Center, as a private developer, could not develop low-income housing without “massive” public subsidies. The developer could, however, partner with a developer that specializes in low-income housing to build on the site.
Several council members and members of the public also said that, with thousands of new residents expected to move into the new master-planned community, the city could be on the hook for increased cost of policing and other public services to Northridge. Director of Construction Robert DiLorenzo said the new development would generate around $9.3 million in city, county and school taxes combined annually, which would offset the cost of increased services.
With the rezoning approved, City Center will go through several phases of approval applications with the city before construction can begin, with increasing levels of detail on the plans — a master plan, a tentative plan and detailed plans for individual buildings as they’re ready to be developed. City Center developers hope to begin construction on Northridge next year and complete the first phase in 2025. The exact text of the new zoning guidelines can be viewed on Allentown’s website at Allentownpa. legistar.com.
Before Wednesday’s vote, Allentown had only granted one mixed use overlay rezoning, in 2021, when it agreed to rezone a large swath of land near the Lehigh River. The zoning designation allowed Urban Residential Properties, another Allentown real estate developer, to move forward with a major redevelopment of that neighborhood, revitalizing several dilapidated buildings there including the former Neuweiler brewery.