When a Housing Crisis Has No Number, Cities Like Scranton Hold the Clues
By Bahram AzabDaftari
Founder/CEO, The Imagination Tree
No one seems to agree on how big America’s housing crisis really is.
A recent Washington Post article noted that experts estimate the United States needs anywhere from 2 million to 20 million additional homes to close the housing shortfall. That range alone tells us something important. This crisis isn’t just about how many homes we need to build. It’s about how poorly we understand what we’ve already lost, what we’ve failed to maintain, and what we’ve overlooked.
Nowhere is that clearer than in legacy cities like Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Here, the housing crisis doesn’t show up as skyrocketing rents driven by tech booms or population explosions. It shows up in quieter ways: aging homes falling into disrepair, vacant upper floors above once-busy storefronts, and neighborhoods that have been left to manage decline rather than supported through reinvestment.
Scranton’s challenge is not a lack of buildings. It is a lack of systems designed to protect, adapt, and steward what already exists.
That’s why I’ve argued that Scranton’s affordable housing problem is fundamentally a preservation problem. Every year, we lose livable, affordable homes not because they can’t be saved, but because the mechanisms to help owners rehabilitate them are fragmented, underfunded, or inaccessible. By the time housing shows up in crisis statistics, it is often already gone.
The same dynamic plays out along Scranton’s vacant commercial corridors. Long stretches of underused properties are often explained away as “market failures,” but in reality they are the result of zoning and policy choices that no longer reflect how people live or work. Rigid single-use zoning, outdated commercial requirements, and barriers to small-scale residential conversion have left entire corridors frozen in time.
These buildings are not obsolete. Many are perfectly suited for mixed-income housing, live-work spaces, senior apartments, or small-scale redevelopment that strengthens neighborhoods instead of displacing them. When rules prevent that from happening, vacancy becomes a policy outcome, not an economic inevitability.
This is where Scranton matters to the national housing conversation.
When experts can’t even agree whether the country is short 2 million or 20 million homes, what they are really admitting is that we don’t have a good handle on how much housing has been lost through neglect, bad policy, and disinvestment. Legacy cities hold much of that invisible inventory.
Unlike high-cost metros, Scranton still has intact neighborhoods, walkable streets, existing infrastructure, and a building stock that can be reused rather than replaced. It has residents who are deeply rooted in place and invested in their communities. What’s missing is not potential. It’s coordination, capital, and a development approach that centers people instead of speculation.
That is the work of The Imagination Tree.
As a nonprofit public charity, our mission is to reduce poverty and strengthen communities through equitable development. Building on more than 15 years of service to underprivileged populations, we now focus on housing stability, neighborhood revitalization, and community-centered development as foundations for opportunity and long-term mobility.
We believe safe, affordable housing is not simply about shelter. It shapes educational outcomes, physical and mental health, economic participation, and dignity. When housing becomes unstable, everything else becomes harder to hold together.
In cities like Scranton, real progress doesn’t require waiting for massive new construction or outside saviors. It starts with preserving existing housing before it disappears, rehabilitating small-scale neighborhood properties, reforming zoning so housing is allowed where people already live and work, and activating underutilized buildings in partnership with residents and local organizations.
The national housing debate is stuck on how many new homes we need to build. Scranton invites a different question: how many homes could we save, restore, and reimagining if we chose to?
We don’t need a perfect number to begin. We already know enough to act.