Community Priorities Poll

Every five years the City puts together a plan that helps determine how over $9,000,000 gets used in our community. We want these dollars to help our community where its needs are greatest. You helped us to learn what those needs by taking the Community Priority Poll. Thank you so much! Take a look at the results, learn how we’re using them, and let us know what you think! 

Background 

*Psst - scroll to the bottom for the Community Priority Poll results and the Plan overview 

This plan (formerly titled the Five Year Consolidated Action Pan) describes how the City of Lancaster will use two important grants given to the City from the Federal Government (through the Department of Housing and Urban Development - HUD). A grant is a sum of money given to a community to fulfill specific goals. The two grants are called - 

(1) The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) is an annual grant with a goal to help communities provide decent housing, positive living environment, and economic opportunities to its community (in particular community members with lower incomes). 

(2) and The Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) is an annual grant with the goal of helping community members struggling in homelessness. 

These dollars are given to the City every year. We are estimating the following amounts in funding over the next five years (2021 - 2025): 

Because there are different ways to spend these dollars, we are asked to research our community and find out what are our community's priority needs. We do this by analyzing census data, talking to community stakeholders, service providers, and experts, AND by gathering critical community feedback (that's you!). 

Our previous plan outline date following priority needs: 

*For more information on how these priorities were reached, please feel free to review the previous 5-Year Plan attached below. 

The two grants we receive must fit into one of the priority needs identified in the plan. Below is a chart that breaks down the amount of funding put into each priority need each year (2016 - 2020). 

Thanks to the funding, we were able to accomplish the following! 

Community Needs Poll 

We started our research for the 2021 – 2025 five year plan by asking you what you felt were our community’s priorities. We are so grateful that 322 community residents took the poll. Below are the top results for each category: 

Top 5 Housing Priority Needs 

Top 3 Homelessness Priority Needs 

Top 3 Public Service Priority Needs 

Top 3 Public Spaces and Infrastructure Needs 

We dug into these results over the past month, looked at a lot of data, spoke to a lot of experts, and discussed how we can use our CDBG and ESG grant money over the next five years to serve our community. Below is a summary of what we came up with (to take a look at the full document, click on the attached document at the bottom of this page): 

Priority 1 Maintain Affordable, Good Quality Housing:  

The cost of preserving existing affordable units in our community is high for many of our homeowners and community members. It is also a much more affordable route than constructing new affordable units. Supporting programs that help city residents preserve affordable housing keeps people safely in their homes. 

Programming that will be considered to help preserve affordable housing include grant and loan programs that help owners and renters mitigate the risk of lead in their homes and make needed repairs and upgrades to their properties. Additionally, we continue to find programming that keeps our rental community safely in their homes through code enforcement a valuable strategy. 

Priority 2 Increase Affordable Housing Opportunities:  

The community has cried out a need for increased affordable housing for our low- and moderate-income households. According to the US Census (ACS 5-Year Estimate 2015 - 2019) an estimated 1,868 (or 19.47% of) Lancaster City homeowners and an estimated 5,805 (or 46.45% of) Lancaster City renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing.  

*Spending 30% or more of your income on housing is a national standard indicating you are living in unaffordable housing 

Although these numbers have improved since the 2008, they remain high. Households facing housing cost burdens often prioritize certain basic necessities over others; tradeoffs might include monthly rent or mortgage payments, food, health care, or transportation. These trade-offs impact the health and stability of our community members. 

The City is committed to exploring and investing in opportunities to increase affordable housing for it's community members. Solutions might include construction of new housing, housing counseling, homeownership assistance, and acquisition or rehab of existing housing for the purposes of increasing affordable housing. The Goal Outcome Indicators and Funding Allocations may shift and change as the City's team better learn the need and develop a strategy.  

Priority 3 Promote Neighborhood Quality of Life:  

The City's administration has taken on a neighborhood approach to understanding and addressing community quality of life. Our internal data shows that neighborhoods that exhibit housing and health challenges often have other needs ranging from low fire safety, lack of access to safe public spaces and facilities and the need for street and stormwater improvements. 

In order for a neighborhood to sustain a strong quality of life for its residents, we believe a well-rounded, resident-lead strategy makes a difference. Strategies may include block level street improvement projects, tree planting and stormwater improvements, sidewalk repair programming for low and moderate income households, community facility improvements, and funding public services such as the housing social worker and police social worker. 

Priority 4 Expand Economic Opportunities:  

The foundation of a strong city is household sustaining employment. Strong economic opportunities positively impacts quality of life of all City residents. In the wake of CoVid-19, the economic landscape is changing and the diverse businesses that provide job opportunities to our community are still adapting to these changes. 

CDBG provides opportunity to build and support economic opportunities within the community through the support of small businesses who build our city landscape and provide job opportunities to this community. 

Priority 5 Support Homeless Services:  

Our community members experiencing homelessness or at-risk of homelessness struggle to secure a safe, sheltered place to sleep every night, locate a place to shower and use the bathroom, find a place to clean their clothes, hold down a job, provide for dependent children, and attend to their health. People experiencing homelessness expend tremendous energy every day just to survive.  

We intend on supporting programming that connects unsheltered to services. We also intend on continuing to support our emergency shelter services and services committed to connecting those struggling in homelessness to stable, independent housing. 

Below is how we decided to parse the money out: 

When looking at the Community Priority Poll’s overall results, we’re proud to say that your feedback really drove where we ended up committing our dollars. Do you feel the same way? Let us know by leaving a comment!