City of Erie Comprehensive Housing Plan Update - Dec 11, 2025
City of Erie Comprehensive Housing Plan Update - Dec 11, 2025
On December 11, 2025, the Erie City Council received an initial project update from Bill Wazileski of Mullin and Lonegan Associates regarding the newly commissioned Comprehensive Housing Plan. The presentation outlined the necessity of the study, noting that Erie has never previously adopted such a plan, while highlighting critical local challenges including an aging housing stock, a 7,479 resident population loss since 2012, and a significant disconnect between rising housing costs and stagnant wages. The consultant detailed their data-driven methodology, including gap analyses, neighborhood-level demographic profiling, and a feasibility study for the Erie Heights affordable housing development. The session concluded with a discussion on outreach strategies and the council's strong desire for robust community engagement to ensure the plan addresses the needs of low-to-moderate-income residents.
Consent Calendar
- [No items mentioned; the session was a direct presentation and discussion.]
Public Comments & Testimony
- Council Member (Unidentified): Expressed concern that community involvement might be insufficient if residents are not informed early enough; emphasized the need to notify neighborhood watch groups, food pantries, and the school district to avoid relying on the same small group of participants. Expressed support for a process that ensures adequate lead time and diverse location representation.
- Council Member (Unidentified): Shared a personal narrative of purchasing a home at age 25 with a 35-year mortgage and $499 down payment in 1987, noting that current economic conditions make this unattainable for young adults today. Expressed strong support for addressing the "missing middle" housing market and highlighted a successful $10,000 down payment grant program from "Erie Black Wall Street" that helped a resident qualify for a home despite a $40,000 salary.
- Council Member (Unidentified): Highlighted the issue of loan eligibility barriers, specifically the impact of arrest records and child support arrears preventing residents from securing mortgages. Expressed curiosity about whether data collection would reveal patterns of redlining or discrimination in rental versus homeownership opportunities.
- Council Member (Unidentified): Voiced fear regarding gentrification, noting that while Erie is currently affordable, the local job market does not match housing costs, potentially leading to wealthy remote workers displacing long-term residents. Expressed support for gathering data to help local colleges and schools prepare residents to remain in the city.
- Council Member (Unidentified): Expressed concern about the impact of student loan debt on housing ability, noting that graduates with high debt loads are effectively priced out of the market. Expressed support for first-time homebuyer programs and closing cost assistance.
- Council Member (Unidentified): Noted the presence of out-of-town investors purchasing poor-condition properties without rental registration, negatively impacting the immigrant and refugee populations. Agreed that out-of-town investors are a significant issue affecting housing conditions.
- Bill Wazileski (Consultant): Clarified that the study covers all market segments (market rate, affordable, rental, and for-sale) and confirmed that data analysis will specifically include Airbnb conversion impacts and the examination of outdated zoning codes.
Discussion Items
- Project Scope and Analysis Methodology: The consultant described the plan as an objective, data-driven analysis of current housing conditions, specifically looking at cost burden (households paying over 30% of income on housing), blight clusters, and housing gaps by income and tenure (renter vs. owner). The methodology includes a "gap analysis" to identify mismatches between household income and available housing units.
- Data Sources and Findings: The consultant cited ACS data, Board of Realtors data, and city department data. Key findings presented include a median home sales price of $158,361 in 2025 (a 34% increase since 2018), a median gross rent of $836 in 2023 (likely higher currently), and a rental vacancy rate of 7.6% compared to a 5% state average. The consultant noted a very low owner-occupied vacancy rate of less than 1%.
- Outreach Strategy: The consultant outlined a schedule of in-person stakeholder sessions (completed for the week), 10 virtual sessions planned for January/February, and neighborhood meetings likely scheduled for late February or early March. A "budgeting exercise" using fake dollars was discussed as a method to gauge community priorities regarding rental vs. affordable housing needs.
- Erie Heights Feasibility Study: A specific component of the assignment involves a feasibility study for the Erie Heights development on the west side, including schematics for rehabilitation and expansion of affordable units, with an architect involved.
- Zoning and Policy Recommendations: Discussion focused on the need to update antiquated zoning codes, potentially adopting form-based codes to encourage mixed-use and "missing middle" housing. The concept of an affordable housing overlay district requiring a percentage of affordable units or a contribution to a trust fund was explored.
- Financial Barriers and Solutions: The group discussed the difficulty of securing mortgages due to debt-to-income ratios, specifically for residents with student loans. The consultant noted that 1980s income levels could have supported a home of $140,000, whereas today's median home prices exceed $200,000, making ownership difficult without down payment and closing cost assistance programs.
- Comparison to Other Markets: The consultant compared Erie's situation to Pittsburgh, noting that Pittsburgh faces even more extreme affordability issues, with some areas seeing costs 400% relative to income.
Key Outcomes
- Project Authorization: The City Council has authorized the procurement of a comprehensive housing plan by Mullin and Lonegan Associates, acknowledging the lack of a previous housing plan.
- Timeline Commitment: The consultant committed to finalizing stakeholder outreach lists by sending current invite lists to the Council and coordinating with the new administration's chief of staff to ensure broad community participation before neighborhood meetings in late February.
- Data Collection Directives: The Council directed the consultant to include specific data on out-of-town investor activity, Airbnb conversions, and barriers to lending (records, child support) in the final analysis.
- Document Review Process: The consultant agreed to present a final draft to the Mayor and City Council for review and comment before public release, with a promise to include a "missing middle" analysis and actionable strategies for the next five years.
- Collaboration Acknowledgement: The consultant confirmed communication with the Land Bank, Housing Authority, and previous study authors (including Inverness Erie and Infinite Erie reports) to ensure the plan builds on existing data without duplicating services.
Meeting Transcript
Sam, we can go ahead and get us all started here. And will Mike pass immediately over to you. Great, thank you. So thank you all for having me again, Bill Wazileski with Mullin and Lonegan Associates. And here just to kind of share our overview. We're kicking off. You all hired us to do a comprehensive housing plan. And so we just wanted to kind of update you on that, just give you a little bit of sense of what it's going to be, why we do it, how we're doing it, and then just to have an opportunity for you all to answer questions. And so I can just let you know that we're here doing in-person stakeholder sessions this week. And so we have meetings this morning and this afternoon, all the way through Thursday in person. So we're meeting with all the key agencies. We're gonna have more outreach after the first of the year. We're gonna do some virtual stuff, but we really want to do some neighborhood meetings coming up to get citizen participation at various locations within the city. We haven't really thought through how that and when that's gonna happen. Um January, they said is really not obviously a good time to do it. So it'll probably be most likely end of February to be able to do that. And so we're we're thinking through how we're gonna do that and get the word out to get again citizen participation uh related to this plan and get input on this plan. But I just wanted to kind of go through what we're doing, how we do it, why we do it, and just give you all opportunity to ask questions as you see fit. So I just have a brief PowerPoint here. These are what we've been using during our stakeholder sessions uh for our trip here. So again, what is a comprehensive housing plan? It's uh it's a plan that does really two things, right? It analyzes your current housing. Um it talks about uh thing and these bullet points that you see there, that was what the city really put in their RFP. These are real questions that they wanted answered uh as it relates to housing in the city of Erie. So they really we you all really want to know who needs housing, uh, what are the factors uh impacting housing affordability? Uh how is blight impacting your city city's housing stock, uh, who is paying more for housing than they can afford, what are the substandard housing found in clusters and high clusters within the city, um, what are housing gaps in needs by income level? And I'll talk a little bit about that a little bit more detail and why we do that and why it's so important. Uh and then finally, uh, what is the projected housing need by type and income over the next five years? And we use projection data for that. These are all data-driven kind of things. We're looking at uh ACS data, demographic data. We got data from the Board of Realtors, uh, and so and we're gonna buy projection data. So um it's really to look objectively at what the data and the numbers are saying. We've gotten a lot of data from your city departments in terms of housing, uh, in terms of things such as blight, such as housing um availability, that sort of thing, zoning issues. Um so the idea is to really get at that objective view of what the data is saying. Uh, we're also again using stakeholders as a secondary source to kind of not vet it, but really get input from citizens and stakeholders to see really if that makes sense, if the data is matching up with what people are seeing in the field. And so we're doing that currently. And then more importantly, the second part of it is really to create and develop a strategic solutions-based recommendation that could be implemented to enhance housing opportunities across the city of Erie uh over the next five years. And I'll talk a little bit about that as we go on. Why is this study needed? And this is a again a big question that uh we always uh ask uh before we enter into these engagements. And I think the first one is the most important. Uh the city has never had a comprehensive housing plan, if you can believe that. You've had comprehensive plans, you've had how um you know economic development studies, you had how your studies for your federal resources, but you didn't have a real comprehensive housing plan. Uh and it is important given the affordability crisis we're in in this country to have that. So I think should get be given credit for choosing to do that. I think it's really important to do that. It could all we talked uh also today, it could be part of if you choose to do a comprehensive plan moving forward, it could be the housing piece of your comprehensive plan moving forward, so it's really important. The city is also experiencing various housing challenges, including an aging housing stock and lack of available housing units at various income ranges.
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