In “Lancaster County should be ready for shift to apartment life,” columnist Jeff Hawks writes:
…“The good news, said Scott Provanzo of the Building Association of Lancaster County, is that lenders recognize the opportunity, making apartment complexes one of the easier projects right now to get financed.
“Another benefit of apartment complexes is they increase the stock of affordable housing while taking pressure off outlying farmland and minimizing the extension of costly infrastructure.
“More apartments would seem a perfect fit for Lancaster County.
“So what’s the bad news? Many in the general public and some municipal officials associate multifamily housing with trouble. The complaints include traffic congestion and greater stress on schools. The public also harbors a negative perception of apartment dwellers. Provanzo, a panelist, was blunt about that latter point.”…
WATCHDOG: The really bad news is that multi-family rental housing has become so expensive to develop as to be almost economically prohibitive. When it is developed without extravagant government subsidies, it must by necessity be aimed a the most affluent sector of the market place. Unless by some ‘trickle down’ effect, this will not add to “the stock of affordable housing.”
There are several reasons for soaring costs, many of which apply to all forms of housing construction. But not the least is the immense expense involved in obtaining subdivision approval for projects, even when the zoning is in place. It used to be that engineering costs were a small fraction of the cost of land acquisition per unit. Today it is likely to equal or even far exceed land cost, adding say $25,000 to $40,000 cost per unit.
There are so many environmental and other approvals required that often by the time the last one is achieved, the early ones have expired… and new regulations are in effect!
The first section of the first apartment complex developed by The Manor Group cost $6,800 per unit. That was back in 1967. To develop the same unit today would likely cost 20 times that amount.
