How to Transform PA’s Housing Action Plan into Local Action

In late 2025, Pennsylvania released its first-ever statewide Housing Action Plan, a ten-year framework covering 2026 through 2035. The plan lays out how the Commonwealth intends to address new residential construction, the rehabilitation of existing homes, affordable housing, and homelessness. For the first time, Pennsylvania has put a coordinated strategy — and a proposed billion-dollar investment — behind a challenge that communities across the state have largely been managing on their own.

For southwestern Pennsylvania, the plan matters on two levels. At the regional level, it sets demand targets and signals preferences that will shape which projects get built and where.  At the local level, it highlights the importance of home renovation for our older housing stock while also highlighting a low-hanging fruit for increasing the housing supply: downtown-centered, walkable, and mixed-use. That emphasis lines up closely with work already underway across our 12-county region.

CoHub has spent the past few months studying the plan and assessing what it could mean here. This post offers a plain-language recap of the plan, explores what it may mean for the housing challenges our region faces, and previews programming CoHub is developing to help communities turn a statewide framework into shovel-in-the-ground projects.

A Brief Recap

The Pennsylvania Housing Action Plan 2026–2035 is wide-ranging. It addresses new residential construction, rehabilitation of existing homes, affordable housing, and homelessness. The document covers policy proposals, funding mechanisms, regulatory changes, and recommendations for municipalities, land banks, developers, and state agencies. Rather than a single flagship program, the plan is a portfolio of tools. A few components stand out:

A $1 Billion Critical Infrastructure Investment Fund

The centerpiece of the plan is a proposed Critical Infrastructure Investment Fund that would offer grants, low-interest loans, and loan guarantees for three categories of residential development. 

• The first is residential site preparation, including land acquisition, roadway construction, and utility or infrastructure installation. 

• The second is office-to-residential conversion: commercial, industrial, and academic buildings repurposed as apartments or condominiums. 

• The third is mixed-use development and rehabilitation, and it includes specific language about refurbishing underutilized space above street-level storefronts into residential units.

Tax Credit and Financing Tools

The plan proposes a new Residential Reinvestment Tax Credit for markets where construction costs exceed market values — primarily rural counties and underinvested urban neighborhoods. It also proposes expanding and more intentionally structuring the State Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. The plan explicitly allows these credits to be used for infill development across scattered sites on vacant urban lots.

A Housing-Ready Community Designation

The plan proposes a designation for municipalities that modernize their zoning and land use practices. Designated communities would receive preference for state funding through programs such as the Department of Community and Economic Development’s Main Street Matters initiative and the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency’s PHARE fund. Municipalities are called on to allow accessory dwelling units, reduce parking minimums, permit manufactured homes in single-family zones, and enable opportunity-oriented development.

Stronger Land Banks

The plan devotes meaningful attention to strengthening the legal and financial footing of land banks. Proposals include waiving state inheritance tax liens on blighted vacant properties acquired by land banks, extending environmental liability protection currently available only to redevelopment authorities, opening additional DCED programs to land banks, and enabling county blight remediation fees to fund land bank operations at the discretion of county governing bodies.

Tangled Titles and Heirs’ Property Reform

Heirs’ property and tangled titles are a persistent drag on housing stability and blight remediation, particularly for lower-income owners. The plan proposes transfer-on-death deeds, reduced probate fees for low-income heirs, and expanded legal aid funding for title resolution.

Energy and Habitability

The plan supports home restoration for energy efficiency, including Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (R-PACE) financing for weatherization and clean energy upgrades. It also includes language requiring landlords to meet both minimum and maximum habitable temperature standards.

A Cautious Posture on Federal Funding

Given uncertainty about federal funding levels, the plan deliberately limits reliance on federal programs. The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is referenced, while other federal tools such as the New Markets Tax Credits are not directly addressed.

What It May Mean for Southwestern Pennsylvania

Southwestern Pennsylvania’s housing challenges do not look like those of Philadelphia, nor like those of faster-growing metropolitan regions elsewhere in the country. Our challenges are shaped by an older housing stock, by population patterns that shift from neighborhood to neighborhood within a single county, by a significant inventory of underused commercial buildings in small downtowns, and by local governments with limited capacity to lead complex development projects on their own. Several features of the Housing Action Plan map onto those realities:

Downtown and Mixed-Use Emphasis Fits the Region

Many of our counties have walkable main streets with vacant or underused upper floors above active retail. These are the buildings the plan’s Critical Infrastructure Investment Fund explicitly names. For a region with 66,415 estimated units of new residential construction demand by 2035, a strategy that knits refurbished or new units back into existing downtowns can expand housing supply while also strengthening the commercial corridors that anchor local economies.

Expanded Land Bank Tools Could Materially Increase Local Capacity

Blighted properties, tangled titles, and vacant lots are familiar problems across the region. The plan’s proposals to open additional DCED programs to land banks, extend environmental liability protection, and enable locally controlled blight remediation fees would give county-level actors more flexibility to assemble sites and move properties back into productive use. Whether a given reform requires legislation or can be executed by departmental action is not always clear in the plan and will need to be tracked as implementation unfolds.

An Open Question About Geography

There is a need to investigate two of the challenges that the plan surfaces from a geographical point of view. The plan indicates the Commonwealth’s interest in addressing institutional investors,noting that in 2024, private investors accounted for roughly 13% of all single-family home sales nationwide. Addressing this is an important component of ensuring housing availability and affordability; at the same time, local leaders will need to understand exactly how this plays out in their own communities to make appropriate local policy.

Another trend that would benefit from a place-based analysis is that of tangled titles, legal situations in which homes or properties deeds are not updated when the owner passes away. Tangled titles are often associated with urban contexts, but they may also appear in rural places, for example, where mixed-use properties have passed informally through generations. A clearer picture of where tangled titles concentrate across the region will be useful as the state moves toward implementation of its title reform proposals.

What Does This Mean for Local Leaders in SWPA?

Several of the plan’s tools — the Housing-Ready Community designation, county blight fees, revised zoning — depend on local action across dozens of municipalities. Even with state encouragement, changes to local policies often move slowly.

The bottom line for our region is that the plan’s direction is favorable. The work of translating that direction into concrete local results will be the harder part, and it is where CoHub intends to concentrate its effort.

Previewing What CoHub is Doing About the Plan

With the Housing Action Plan now in hand, CoHub is developing a program of work focused on helping Southwestern Pennsylvania communities translate the plan into projects on the ground.

Several elements are in development. None of the specifics below are final; they are previewed here to give communities and partners an early look at what to expect.

A Regional Webinar to Orient Practitioners

CoHub is will host a webinar to educate local leaders and surface the practical questions that matter for implementation:

• How the Critical Infrastructure Investment Fund is likely to be administered,

• How tax credits and loan products can be combined, what municipal steps position a project for state support

• Where the real disconnects lie between state policy and local practice

The webinar is being designed to reach a broad cross-section of county and municipal staff, economic development professionals, land bank leaders, small developers, and nonprofit housing organizations. The webinar will tentatively take place from 12 to 1:30PM on Thursday, July 16th. More details will be announced soon.

Engagement Across SWPA Counties

CoHub is joining civic groups such as Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce and other organizations to spread the word about the housing plan. Not only will this provide information, but it gives us a chance to hear from community members about the housing challenges they face and what they would like to see.

Dedicated Technical Assistance for Housing Projects

CoHub is also developing a dedicated technical assistance track for housing projects. The intent is to move from education to hands-on support for specific projects, including pre-development analysis, financing structure, coordination across funding sources, navigation of state programs, and connection to experienced practitioners from elsewhere in the Commonwealth and beyond.

Taken together, these three components — a regional webinar to orient the field, education and investigation, and project-level technical assistance to help efforts move forward — are intended to function as a continuum rather than as stand-alone events.

Looking Ahead

The Pennsylvania Housing Action Plan is a significant step. It is also, by its own design, a ten-year framework rather than a finished program. How well it ultimately serves southwestern Pennsylvania will depend as much on what communities, counties, and regional partners do in the coming months as on what the Commonwealth does in Harrisburg.

CoHub's position is that this is a moment to meet the plan’s direction with matching local effort: to look hard at the specific downtown buildings, underused lots, and small-scale projects that could be early demonstrations of the plan’s stated preferences; to bring municipal, private, and state actors into the same room; and to ensure that when funding and policy tools come online, Southwestern Pennsylvania has candidate projects ready to make use of them.