The houses at 110 and 112 Locust St. slated for demolition, which could date as far back as the 1820s.
A pair of historic homes downtown on Locust Street may avoid demolition after all, as the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, which proposed tearing them down earlier this month in a bid for more office space, has lowered the price for someone to take them off the agency’s hands.
In a meeting at PHFA’s Front Street offices last night with preservationists and neighbors, the agency agreed to offer the attached clapboard homes for $150,000, a bit below the $175,000 figure Brian Hudson, PHFA’s executive director, had cited at a planning commission hearing last week.
At that meeting, commissioners urged the agency to meet with members of Historic Harrisburg Association and Capitol Area Neighbors, two groups whose members spoke vigorously in opposition to the demolition during a presentation on the agency’s proposal.
PHFA, which says it has outgrown the eight-story office building it has occupied at Front and Locust since 2004, sought to demolish the homes to clear the way for a new 12-story, 160-foot office tower adjoining its existing structure.
Preservationists and neighbors objected to both the design of the tower and the destruction of the two homes, which are among Harrisburg’s oldest extant residential buildings, likely dating to the early 19th century or perhaps even earlier.
The agreement to seek a buyer “by no means makes all this a done deal,” said David Morrison, HHA’s interim executive director. The neighbors and his group still have concerns about whether the proposed new tower will be compatible with other buildings in the riverfront neighborhood, a historic district, he said.
The agency, for its part, has said that the Locust Street homes sat on the market unsold for three years before they finally purchased them last May for $140,000.
Hudson also noted that PHFA, though tax-exempt as a state-affiliated agency, makes annual payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to the city each year of nearly $100,000, and would continue to do so on any new building built under the proposal.
