MONEY CAN MAKE DOMINOES TUMBLE
Slate Belt Rising finances exterior rehabs in 4 boroughs in hopes of spurring neighborhood revitalizations
Jeff and Judy Travers have had little time — and money — to worry about the little things before they became big things.
Their home on Northampton Street in Bangor is the only house they ever bought together. In 1986, they were attracted to the charm of a nearly 100-year-old home. They had two kids already, and they would have two more.
So what if they were buying from a used car salesman? Interest rates weren't what they are now, and it felt like houses were going quickly enough that they needed to steal this one. It passed inspection.
While ripping up the bathroom floor a couple summers ago, Jeff — a career in construction behind him — discovered nightmare after nightmare. Asbestos in the heating system. Electrical wiring surrounding the plumbing system. Joists missing in the second floor.
“I guess if you had a big money pot, you'd just get these things taken care of,” Judy said. “But we raised our kids and just moved on.”
Outside, the framework beneath the porch was rotting, and wood-paneled walls facing the street were tearing apart at the bottom. But Jeff had retired, and Judy, since 2015, had been dealing with treatments for her stage 4 lung cancer.
“I just couldn't figure out a solution,” Jeff said.
“And then this came along.”
‘It brings up the standards’
On the surface, $8,000 worth of improvements to the exterior of the Travers' home may not seem like a solution, both for the home and for the neighborhood. But it is a catalyst — one that Slate Belt Rising, a six-year revitalization initiative that launched last year, hopes inspires other property owners to spruce up their own environs and turn the neighborhood into a more attractive, and thus economically viable, place to live.
Slate Belt Rising, a program of the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, secured the contractors
and the loan for facade work for the Traverses, forgivable after five years as long as they continue to live in the home.
Around them, the exteriors of several homes are surrendering to the elements, green overgrowth hiding the misshapen concrete steps that lead up to them. Facing newly constructed duplexes on one end of the street is an unoccupied duplex with boarded windows and chipped paneling.
“This is what a lot of people associate Bangor with,” said Stephen Reider, director of Slate Belt Rising, who grew up in neighboring Roseto.
The goal is to change that association with a simple domino effect: target residential and commercial properties for low-cost facade improvements and provide the incentive for others to follow. Officials acknowledge, though, that such a domino effect — in a low population-density region such as the Slate Belt — is not so simple. Definitions of success are difficult to pin down, and improvement will take time to measure.
In the short term, the Traverses say it seems to be working on their street.
“People are stopping — the landlord next door said, ‘You're making my front porch look terrible,'” Judy said.
“It brings up the standards a little bit,” Jeff added.
The CACLV has employed this theory in Allentown and Bethlehem, with notable success stories in Allentown's Seventh Street corridor and Hayes Street in Bethlehem.
Community development programs have injected a lot of money into testing the theory: Upside Allentown announced a starter pot of $190,000 for facade improvements this year; the Community Action Development Corporation of Bethlehem secured more than $71,000 for facade improvements on Hayes Street alone, not including several hundred thousand dollars of private and public financing for full rehabilitation work. Slate Belt Rising has $150,000 a year to spend in base operations across four boroughs — Bangor, Pen Argyl, Wind Gap and Portland — and five program tenets, of which housing and facades is just one.
The question is: How much is needed?
“In areas like the Slate Belt, where people are going to notice when someone paints the front of their house, so long as you have enough … then more people will jump on that bandwagon — that's where the power is,” said Karen Pooley, a political science professor at Lehigh University who teaches courses in community development and neighborhood revitalization.
“If you get 20 other people to paint their houses, then you're really on to something.”
The right candidates
Reider said his team looks for potential projects with high impact and high visibility for the money they have to work with, and for different neighborhoods, that can mean different things.
“It could be as easy as a coat of paint, or as difficult as a new porch,” he said.
The challenging part, Reider said, is finding the right candidates. Homeowners are only eligible to receive facade grants if their household income is not more than 80 percent of the median for their municipality, and if they are not behind on any taxes. Rental properties are not eligible for the facade program.
In Bangor, 61 percent of the homes were built before 1939. More than half the housing units are occupied by renters, according to the U.S. census, and about 35 percent of those who do own homes are considered “housing stressed,” meaning they pay at least 30 percent of their income toward the cost of housing.
“People are apprehensive to do it,” Reider said.
Since the Slate Belt Rising program launched in February 2017, Reider's team has completed one commercial facade in Bangor, two residential facades in Bangor, and two residential facades in Pen Argyl. His team is now securing five more commercial facades and two more residential facades, at least, to complete before the plan ends in 2022.
Slate Belt Rising, like Upside Allentown, is a Neighborhood Partnership Program through the Pennsylvania De-
partment of Community and Economic Development, funded by private partners receiving state tax credits. The programs are supported in part by federal funding, and Northampton County is also a donor to Slate Belt Rising.
Slate Belt Rising is the only multi municipality Neighborhood Partnership Program in the state, and part of its mission embraces that specific challenge: addressing the economic needs of four separate boroughs while advancing a collective regional identity that is the “Slate Belt.”
The appeal of facade programs is that they are one of the cheapest ways to improve neighborhoods, Pooley said. The real impact, she said, is the generation of neighborhood-wide excitement and pride.
The spillover argument worked for Charleston, S.C, in the 1980s — an early example of the concept, said Todd Watkins, economics professor at Lehigh.
But this example, and the example of Historic Bethlehem, took decades of sustained attention — a steady, concentrated approach to several blocks at a time.
“Given the investment levels, you can’t hope for much beyond a slow evolution,” Watkins said of the efforts in the Slate Belt.
With a lot less money, much broader goals and massively greater coverage area geographically, CACLV director Alan Jennings knows it’s simply a different story in the region.
So why do it?
“Because we can,” Jennings said.
‘It’s that darn mountain’
The Slate Belt towns were built around an entirely different story — one of assured survival, ushered by the discovery of slate early in the 19th century.
The industry picked up speed after the Civil War, “and then it exploded like wildfire,” said Melissa Hough, president of the Slate Belt Heritage Center in Bangor.
The Slate Belt would grow to account for half of the state’s slate production. Then it lost workers to World War I. The textile industry — another mainstay — moved south by the 1970s.
“The 1980s were not kind to this area,” Hough said.
Other than a slight reprieve in the 1990s, she said, the area never really recovered.
On Broadway in Wind Gap today — where a hardware story recently closed, where the Cafe on Broadway recently applied for a commercial facade grant, and where Reider plans to discuss a similar path for the aging Gap Theatre — cars whiz by in a constant hum of traffic.
“The problem is, you need to give people a reason to stop,” Reider said.
Macro-level improvements require macro budgets, and municipal governments are rarely privy to those.
Alicia Karner, former economic development administrator for Northampton County and now Bethlehem’s economic development director, remembers several big community meetings with many interested volunteers during an early 2000s push for Main Street status in Bangor. The plan fizzled after the borough couldn’t secure enough money over five years to land the designation.
“It’s that darn mountain,” which former state Rep. Rich Grucela says separates the Slate Belt from state money — and attention. “The Slate Belt is completely forgotten.”
Jennings would agree, and that’s why the reasonable goal is to just get something started.
“All we’re doing is starting to get the ball rolling,” Jennings said. “Even if you produce people more invested in their community, that’s something.”
Karner said she’s seen an obvious increase in interest and activity in downtown Bangor. Linking the four boroughs is unified signage that can be seen from utility poles along the major roads.
Slate Belt Rising has organized regional events, like a Road Rally scavenger hunt in September that drew about 80 people from multiple municipalities. The HUB, a community youth center in Bangor, received a major upgrade from Slate Belt Rising money, including new computer workstations and intergenerational programming.
Across from Duckloe’s Furniture Store in Portland — a town besieged several years in a row by devastating flooding, keeping it from turning into the quintessential river town Reider knows it could be — the historic Portland Railroad building is slated for a commercial facade grant.
The Duckloes, who have been in business since 1859 and still manufacture in Portland, have watched businesses around them leave and buildings remain empty.
“Anything is better than what we have,” Barbara Duckloe Townsend said.
Qualitative measures of neighborhood pride aside, there are a range of quantitative measures that can be used to assess the success of a facade program: homeownership rates, vacancy rates, property values, foot traffic, occupancy turnover.
Property value is key, ideally, but it is expensive to measure through appraisals, Jennings said. Vacancy rate is easier to measure, and that’s what the CACLV does in Allentown and Bethlehem.
Encouraging more homeownership is a stated goal of Slate Belt Rising — the idea behind the forgivable loans.
But the rules of basic statistics must apply: A smattering of a dozen commercial and residential facades, give or take, is not enough data to judge quantitative success.
So a program like Slate Belt Rising — the first intermunicipal program with this kind of funding to touch the region — must take what it can get: a metaphor.
“It might be a mustard seed,” Jennings said. “But you know what mustard seeds create: big ol’ trees.”