BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Franchi Salvador just wants a place of his own, an apartment big enough for his four young children and his fiancee so they don’t have to live with friends, relatives, or, as is the distressing case right now, in temporary housing for homeless families.
He took a major step in that quest about six weeks ago when he ditched his construction and home remodeling work for a job at a nearby warehouse and distribution center. The hours aren’t ideal — overnight from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. — but the pay is much better. The $3,500 to $4,200 he earns a month is more than double what he was pulling in before, and Salvador, 30, figured it would be enough to rent a three-bedroom apartment.
So far, it hasn’t been. His earnings mean he can only afford to pay about $1,400 a month in rent, Salvador said he’s been instructed as he conducts his search, and that doesn’t go as far here as it used to.
“I know nowadays that’s not going to get me what I need for my family,” he said Wednesday in a Bethlehem transitional housing facility operated by New Bethany, a local nonprofit. His fiancee, Maritza Colon, entertained the three children not old enough for school — Xzevian, 4, Khione, 2, and PJ, 1 — as Salvador explained how they’re tag-teaming the problem.
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“I’m making sure that money’s coming in right now. My fiancee is handling all the paperwork, whatever has to be done, setting appointments, interviews,” Salvador said. “We’re doing everything we can.”
Many Americans are in a similar situation, struggling to afford housing as costs have skyrocketed since the pandemic for renters and home buyers because of a nationwide housing shortage and a spike in mortgage rates. The problem isn’t limited to high-priced markets such as Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles. The ability to work remotely has allowed people to move farther from urban centers, helping push up prices in places like the rolling hills of the Lehigh Valley here in northeastern Pennsylvania.
A report this summer by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University found that despite a cooling rental market, the cost burdens for renters is at an all-time high nationwide. And a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that only 10 percent of US adults said homeownership was easy or somewhat easy to achieve.
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Former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris each have made improving housing affordability a key campaign issue. Bethlehem, a city of about 78,000 people in the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania, helps explain why.
The high cost of housing was one of the most pressing concerns mentioned by voters in dozens of interviews in Bethlehem and the rest of Northampton County, which President Biden narrowly carried in 2020 after Trump won it four years earlier. The area has experienced a building boom in e-commerce distribution warehouses in recent years because of its easy access to interstate highways and major cities, drawing new workers and pushing up housing prices.
“With all the new buildings and everything, it’s making it harder to afford living here,” said Maria Groff, 31, an accountant and mother of three who lives in nearby Easton. “It’s like New York City prices.”
Bethlehem Mayor J. William Reynolds said he has “guarded optimism” that the federal government will help communities like his tackle the problem because both major political parties have acknowledged the dire need to make housing more affordable.
“It’s a lot easier to go find a job and work hard and get paid a living wage than it is to find a place to live,” he said. “And that’s a heartbreaking statement in 2024.”
Bethlehem has been trying to do something about it.
Two years ago, the city commissioned a study that proposed 10 initiatives to address rising housing costs that have hit hard in a community that was highly affordable for years largely because of the flight of workers from the contracting centerpiece of its economy: the sprawling Bethlehem Steel factory that was among the nation’s largest before fully closing in 2003 after decades of decline.
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The rusting remains of the hulking plant, which still loom over the city, highlight Bethlehem’s turnaround. It is now the distinctive backdrop for an arts and entertainment district that boasts the nation’s largest free music festival and has helped make Bethlehem a more desirable location.
Its proximity to Philadelphia and New York City — both less than two hours away — lured people who could work from home. The housing committee’s initial report last fall found that the median sale price of a home in Bethlehem jumped to $302,000 from $182,000 from May 2019 to May 2023, while the median monthly rent increased to $1,910 from $1,354.
“In the past 20 years in the city of Bethlehem, we’ve increased our jobs by 30 percent but our housing supply has only increased by like 5 percent,” Reynolds said. “We’ve got a whole bunch of people that don’t care about any issue other than ‘How am I going to afford a place to live?’”
Ruby Gaillard-Jones, 69, and her husband, Ronald Jones, 74, experienced what she called “sticker shock” when they moved to the area in 2015 from South Carolina to be close to two of her sons.
The couple was unable to afford to buy a house, and the rent on their two-bedroom townhouse has increased over four years to $1,700 from $1,340. On top of that, the landlord last year started requiring them to pay for trash pickup and water service while failing to keep up maintenance on their small yard, said Gaillard-Jones, who is the database administrator at Community Action Lehigh Valley, an antipoverty nonprofit.
“They don’t really do a great job. They’re supposed to kill the weeds,” she said of her landlord one recent evening, motioning at her overgrown yard. “We were going to extend this patio, but then my husband and I said, ‘Why? We’re not staying here. We’re not putting money in something for someone else.’”
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They plan to move back down south when she retires, which means they’ll be farther away from five of their grandchildren, Gaillard-Jones said. But she’s encouraged that the detailed plan from Harris to make housing more affordable includes calling for the ambitious goal of building 3 million new homes and rentals nationwide over four years through tax incentives and streamlined regulations.
“I loved that about her when she said that,” Gaillard-Jones said of Harris, whom she plans to vote for. “If we can get more housing — affordable housing — on the market, then yes [that would help]. And I think if they do that, the prices need to be controlled in some kind of way.”
One of Harris’s campaign ads focuses specifically on housing affordability, stressing her family’s childhood experience as renters before her mother was able to save enough to buy a house. “I know what homeownership means, and sadly right now it is out of reach for far too many American families,” Harris says in the ad. She has also proposed $25,000 in down-payment assistance for first-time home buyers.
The Trump campaign also has stressed the issue in its own housing ad, highlighting increasing costs and blaming Harris for not doing something about it as vice president. “Kamala Harris DESTROYED the housing market. President Trump will make home ownership attainable for average Americans once again!,” his campaign posted on X last month in releasing the ad.
Trump proposes to encourage home construction by eliminating regulations with the goal of cutting in half the cost of building new homes. He also has said he’d push mortgage rates back down to 3 percent from the current level of about 6.4 percent for a 30-year loan, but he hasn’t detailed exactly how that can be done.
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Toni Lynch, 77, a former homebuilder who lives in Mt. Bethel in the northern part of Northampton County, said reducing regulations is key to making housing construction more profitable. He believes Trump will do that and is voting for him.
“The regulatory process needs to be made much easier and simplified at every level,” Lynch said. “Trump, having been in the building business himself, understands the process better than anybody else. He seems to know what to do.”
A 2022 housing industry study said regulations were responsible for about 40 percent of the cost to build apartments, but many of those are state and local requirements that Trump has no authority to eliminate.
Bethlehem’s proposed housing initiatives try to increase construction on the city’s limited buildable space in part by updating zoning laws, gaining control of vacant land, and launching a pilot program to build more so-called alley houses. The city hopes to build up to 30 of what are formally known as accessory dwelling units — small homes located in alleys or converted garages at the end of driveways — over five years.
New Bethany, the Bethlehem nonprofit, is constructing one of those houses in conjunction with students at the city’s Lehigh University, said Marc Rittle, New Bethany’s executive director and a member of the city’s housing committee. It’s just one small step addressing a big problem.
“There is absolutely, in my opinion, both a Republican and a Democratic case to get more affordable housing,” he said as he gave a tour of one of the organization’s transitional housing facilities, where Salvador and his family occupy one of the 12 high-demand units. “I have always throughout my career talked about housing, and this is the first time that other people are joining in.”
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Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.