The Pella Area Community and Economic (PACE) Alliance reviewed the latest information regarding the development of housing in the community at their quarterly meeting Friday.

Dr. Andrew Green presented findings from a Central College Housing Study aimed to guide the city and PACE Alliance about possible policy options to grow the home ownership rate in the community.

Green tells KNIA/KRLS News the latest phase focused on the effectiveness of economic incentives to prospective developers and homeowners.

“What we concluded from the study was that these incentive programs can work,” Green says. “They can stimulate housing growth, they can shape the rate of home ownership, but they are just not a universal panacea for housing problems that not only our city and county face, but that communities all over the country face.”

Green says the study recommends a variety of ways to help alleviate issues with a lack of home ownership.

“We recommended that decision makers not consider these incentives programs to be universal panaceas, that we really need to collect some additional individual level data about the attitudinal predisposition of potential home buyers, to figure out whether or not these incentives programs would really change or drive the behavior of those potential home buyers,” Green says.

Stay tuned to KNIA/KRLS to hear more from the PACE Alliance meeting and the Central College Housing Development Study, and find a link to the report here.