UPPER SAUCON TWP., Pa. – An interactive dashboard launched this week by the Lehigh Valley’s top planners lays bare the region’s deepening housing crisis.
It shows many of the trends and statistics that local officials, housing advocates and experts have been warning about for several years:
- The Lehigh Valley is thousands of units short of what it needs to house all of its residents in 2026 (6,073 units, as of the dashboard’s release Wednesday).
- That shortage is expected to balloon past 50,000 housing units by 2050, with the Lehigh Valley among the few areas in Pennsylvania steadily adding residents.
- And workers across many industries aren’t earning enough money to keep up with quickly rising housing costs.
But the newly revamped tool – the culmination of a yearslong partnership among the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission, Lehigh and Northampton counties and Urban Land Institute – offers a chance to dive deeper into local housing data than ever before.
Users can break down the numbers by municipality, enter their income to see where they can afford to live, and track what developers and officials are doing to try to fill the region’s growing gap.
Can you afford it?
The dashboard’s “Can I Afford Housing?" calculator shows a household earning the Lehigh Valley’s median income – $84,260 – could likely find plenty of units in its price range.
It would have a monthly housing budget of about $2,100, based on the widely used standard that a household – which often has multiple earners – should pay no more than 30% of its annual income on housing costs.
Median rents are lower than that in all but five of the Lehigh Valley’s 62 municipalities, while median mortgage prices would be within that budget in 43 municipalities, according to the LVPC’s tool.
But anyone looking to find housing on their own would likely struggle in the Lehigh Valley’s current market.
Northampton County’s per-capita income was $32,746 last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, giving a single-earner household a monthly housing budget of about $820.
Median rent and mortgage prices were higher than that in all 38 municipalities in Northampton County – and significantly higher in many, the dashboard shows.
A person earning Lehigh County’s per-capita income – $43,088 – would have more opportunities.
But their monthly housing budget of a little under $1,100 only eclipses the median rent price in five of Lehigh County’s 25 municipalities, according to the LVPC tool.
A per-capita earner would spend about 37% of their annual pretax income on the median rent price in Allentown, while a median mortgage payment would be an even larger burden, taking more than 43% of their earnings.
Those numbers are bleaker in the Lehigh Valley’s other two cities; someone earning Northampton County’s per-capita income would spend about half their gross income on median rents in Bethlehem and Easton, according to data from the new dashboard.
The LVPC launched its new dashboard Wednesday at its final Housing Supply and Attainability Strategy session at DeSales University.
Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel, who was among a dozen regional experts on a panel at the event, said the region is facing a “genuine crisis” due to its housing shortage.
He called on developers and officials to show “urgency” and embrace larger projects in areas that can “absorb” them.
“Density is sort of a destiny,” Siegel said. “[If] we can build on top of existing infrastructure, then we all are better off – and we can also preserve all the other things that we value: good schools, open space, parks, they all go hand in hand.”