Coming into town along Columbia Avenue or sometimes Marietta Pike, I’m struck by the number of big, stately homes for sale in the School Lane Hills area.
Some of them have been on the market for quite some time. And I don’t know that I attribute that to the general economic downturn, the fact that all houses everywhere are having a tougher time selling than they once did.
I suspect, frankly, these homes’ proximity to the city is another factor.
People who have that kind of money to spend on housing, for the most part, are taking it out to the suburbs. And so you get a situation where a home might be worth, in theory, $400,000 or more - but the number of takers is small. And maybe shrinking.
And it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming years. How many homes in School Lane Hills will become rental units - perhaps several rental units in what are now single-family homes. There’s a home on Columbia Avenue that’s already done this; it’s unlikely to be a popular move within the School Lane Hills neighborhood, where neighbors will say - and maybe correctly - that it will drive their own property values down.
I’ve done some reading on the issue of “inner-ring” suburbs, and at one point was going to put together a piece on it for the newspaper. “Inner-ring” being older suburbs, generally the first ones built - School Lane Hills and much of Lancaster Township falls into that category, as does portions of Manheim Township, East Hempfield and Manor townships. Neighborhoods that at one point were the places to be, but over time have changed as more, bigger, more expensive housing is built on the outer rim, places like Stonehenge (it still cracks me up that there’s actually a development called “Stonehenge” in Lancaster County).
There’s downward pressure on the price of housing in the inner ring, then; more of the homes do indeed become rental units, the neighborhoods become more diverse. In one respect that’s a good thing. But the reality is that schools in those inner ring start to see new challenges. There is a correlation between the number of lower-income residents and the number of single-parent families and test scores; there simply is. I’ve had discussions with officials in both the Manheim Township School District and the Hempfield School District; the elementary schools you would guess as being the lowest-scoring are the lowest-scoring. And that simple reality actually increases flight from those neighborhoods.
School Lane Hills is different, though, for the sheer size and expense of the housing. You ain’t buying those homes for under $200,000 any time soon; but if people aren’t buying them at what they’re theoretically worth, either - then what happens?
There’s a school of thought that says these neighborhoods are the ones that states/counties/municipalities should be investing in; rather than fostering more new growth in the outer rings, work to increase both the value and livability of housing in these inner rings. Infill, for example - empty lots could be developed, not with more housing, but perhaps with restaurants or small stores that people in the neighborhood could walk to. Stuff like that. Were Lancaster County ever to get serious about mass transportation - not with a streetcar line designed to be fun/nifty for the convention center crowd but something that served legitimate local transportation needs - these neighborhoods would be among the first to get service - making them more convenient and livable.
People will say, there are needs far greater than this. And there are! But as we talk about the revitalization of the urban core in places like Lancaster, as we talk about curtailing development out on the fringes, we will need to be talking about places like Grandview Chase, Hamilton Park - even School Lane Hills.
