ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The Allentown Planning Commission has given conditional approval for two apartment building projects. They would be mixed use.<\/p>\n
A seven-story more than 240-unit one would go on Riverside Drive.<\/p>\n
The other, a 16-story 360-unit project is slated for North Front Street.<\/p>\n
“Allentown is the third largest city in Pennsylvania. I think the quality of living and bang for the buck in the city is incredible,” said John Palumbo, project developer.<\/p>\n
Palumbo said he thinks Allentown has the most potential among mid-major cities in the northeast.<\/p>\n
“I mean you have good proximity to other markets with a lot of people who want to move here, you have a really strong economy, you have a good job market, you have a lot of colleges,” said Palumbo.<\/p>\n
“The buildings are popping up because they know people want to be in Allentown, they want to be in the Lehigh Valley,” said Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk.<\/p>\n
The mayor said demand keeps going up.<\/p>\n
“I just got back from a trip from Puerto Rico and know that we have a nice, strong connection to the island. People, they’re leaving places like Puerto Rico and they want to be in places like Allentown,” said Mayor Tuerk.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Councilwoman Ce-Ce Gerlach said she feels these apartments are pricing people out.<\/p>\n
“We need to focus on the communities and make sure development that is actually happening is benefiting the community and not a burden on the community and from what I’ve seen, that hasn’t happened,” said Gerlach.<\/p>\n
Palumbo said affordable housing projects normally get tax incentive programs to be financially feasible.<\/p>\n
He said these ones are privately financed.<\/p>\n
“What I will say is we revised our plan. We did a lot of smaller units so a lot more studio, so they are more financially attainable,” said Palumbo.<\/p>\n
Palumbo said he will be working to make the necessary adjustments for the other two projects that were tabled and he expects them to be back on the agenda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – The Allentown Planning Commission has given conditional approval for two apartment building projects. They would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,2983,2750,62357,157,2459,28],"class_list":["post-135854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-planning-commission","tag-ce-ce-gerlach","tag-john-palumbo","tag-lehigh-valley","tag-matt-tuerk","tag-pennsylvania"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}