Feature

Building a Solution:
Desperately Seeking Housing Part II
By Todd Paul photos by roy gumpel

single mother Cheryl smith and her family at the home she bought with hudson river housing's help

Three years ago, then-Ulster County Legislature Chairman Danny Alphonso asked the county Planning Board and Mental Health Department to form a county housing consortium. The goal was to qualify for hud Supernova funding, which required the county to establish a "continuum of care" serving the homeless. The consortium was to provide that continuum.

The county was successful in obtaining hud funding. But the consortium’s members quickly realized that the housing problem went far beyond their mandate. Home prices were soaring, landlords were reporting bidding wars for apartments, and over half the county’s renting population was housing-cost burdened. Housing agencies reported hundreds of families on waiting lists for affordable homes, but no new affordable housing was being built. "It’s not just the homeless," says Virginia Craft, a planner with the county Planning Board and a member of the consortium. "There’s a housing problem on all levels." Marshall Beckman, head of the county Mental Health Department and former chair of the consortium, explains that when examining the plight of the county’s homeless, "You cannot help but be exposed to the broader housing issues we’re facing."

The consortium realized that leadership from the county legislature was needed to address the housing crisis. They wrote a report detailing their findings and making the case that housing directly impacts the regional economy, and, in September 2001, presented it to new Ulster County Legislature Chairman Ward Todd. Upon hearing the numbers, says Craft, "Ward just sort of slumped in his seat. He said, ‘This is not good.’"

The county legislature broadened and formalized the consortium’s mandate. No longer focused on homelessness, it now reports to the Economic Development Committee, and is guided by a newly formed executive committee chaired by Chester Straub, who heads the Ulster County Development Corporation, a nonprofit agency that works to attract and support businesses.

Straub says the executive committee’s first act will be to conduct a series of outreach sessions in various communities. These sessions have two goals: First, to create a common understanding of the housing issues faced by the county; and second, to come to an understanding of what the localized needs, resources, infrastructure, and zoning are in the county’s towns, cities, and villages. Once that is done, the consortium can meet with developers and investors to help them direct their efforts toward fertile ground.

First-time homebuyer Cheryl Smith in her new house

But education is key to preparing the soil. "We’re trying to open up people’s minds about the housing issue," says Beckman. He and Straub both note that misconceptions about affordable housing projects, such as the idea that they are ugly, attract undesirable tenants and bring down property values, need to be changed through education.

These are the very same issues cited by the Dutchess County Smart Growth Housing Task Force in a December 2001 report. Dutchess County has had a Housing Consortium for nearly ten years; like Ulster County’s, it was formed to capture hud funding, but unlike Ulster’s, it remained focused on homelessness, while the broader housing issues were taken up by other organizations, such as the Housing Task Force formed by County Executive William R. Steinhaus in January 2001. The Task Force’s report (available online, along with other housing-related documents, at www.dutchessny.gov/cd.htm) gives a concise picture of the affordable housing crisis, issues faced by developers, and possible solutions for the region.

"The creation of this Task Force stemmed from the concern that new housing being built in Dutchess County is not meeting the needs of our current residents and workforce," the report begins. “Many feel that this problem has been brought about by the recent influx of households who work in Westchester and New York City and that the housing market is creating large, expensive homes for these new residents while ignoring the needs of our existing residents and workforce.” After citing increases in population and commuters, the report states, “we are beginning to have a disconnect between the housing needs of many of our residents and the housing we are building…. Most of the new housing we are building is large and expensive, costing at least $367,000. New townhouses cost a minimum of $180,000. The median sale price of a single-family home in Dutchess County is now in the $210,000 range. In September 2001 there were only 45 single-family homes listed with the Multiple Listing Service for under $100,000. This housing is unaffordable and inappropriate for many residents. According to the report:

“Considering the significant increase in the median sales prices in the past two years, the median income household can no longer afford the median priced home since it is unlikely that the median household income has increased by the 35 percent that housing prices have increased by…. Income data shows us that about 20,000 households cannot afford the average one-bedroom apartment while 26,000 households cannot afford the average two-bedroom rent. About 21 percent of the county’s households cannot afford to rent an average priced one-bedroom apartment.”

The report discusses specific impediments to affordable housing development, including the lack of vacant appropriately zoned land, local opposition or nimby-ism (Not In My Back Yard), and onerous procedural requirements. Of these, the report concludes, the most significant obstacle is nimby.
“This opposition is usually visceral,” says the report. “As soon as a developer announces his/her intention to develop higher density housing, local residents organize a local neighborhood group in opposition to the project. This group begins distributing information, often inaccurate or misleading, and issues strong objections to the development before any specific information about the impacts are available. Neighbors usually express concerns over traffic and impact on the school without even looking at the data and giving the developer an opportunity to address the concerns. Flooded with negative input from residents and uninformed about the actual impacts and the need for such housing, local municipal officials tell the developer that it is unlikely that they will get their approvals. The developer withdraws the application or converts the project into a senior citizen project, which is the only housing of any density that is considered acceptable.”

While this scenario seems to represent the developer’s point of view, giving little credence to what may be valid and important citizens’ concerns, the report does go on to allay popular misconceptions about affordable housing projects. For example, the report cites studies in California and Minnesota that show affordable housing does not hurt neighboring property values, and refers to “other research [that] shows an affordable housing project’s impact on neighboring property value relates mostly to the quality of construction and ongoing maintenance, not the type of housing.”

The report also cites a recent Westchester study that found “market rate, for-sale housing produced more in revenue than it costs to educate the public school students it generated.”

At its conclusion, the report lists a number of recommendations. These include local planning and zoning revisions, and the establishment of local housing committees; on a county-wide level, the report recommends evaluating all county-owned properties for use as affordable housing before selling them at auction, assisting with water and sewer availability to moderately-priced homes or multi-family housing, supporting development of moderately priced housing through block grants and investment partnership programs, partnering with the Hudson Valley Builder’s Association to site and streamline permitting of affordable housing, increasing public education and technical assistance to municipalities, and providing site-plan design services for multi-family and moderately priced developments.

Dutchess County also has a strategic plan produced by the Division of Housing and Community Development, in which affordable housing is the top priority. Recommendations include funding infrastructure improvements, supporting the creation of rental units through new construction or rehabilitation, supporting the creation of new homeownership opportunities through new construction, rehabilitation and down payment and closing cost assistance programs, and support for the rehabilitation of existing properties occupied by senior citizens.

Obviously, county governments can help support the production of affordable housing. But much of what they can do is indirect. Towns can have a much more immediate impact through their zoning, and many are beginning to reevaluate their zoning regulations in light of master plans and community surveys that show housing as a top concern. In Dutchess County, for example, the towns of East Fishkill and Pawling are developing ordinances that will award density bonuses to developers who include some affordable housing in their plans. If a developer is planning to build 30 units, for example, a density bonus would allow the addition of, say, five units of affordable housing, making a total of 35 units for a higher-than-normal density on the site. The advantage of this strategy is that it both encourages affordable housing and avoids the old housing project syndrome, whereby poor people are segregated into huge, ugly developments set apart from their neighbors.

Anne Saylor, of the Dutchess County Department of Planning and Development, says, "People are afraid of affordable housing because they’re afraid of the projects.” But the governmental operating subsidies that funded those old-style projects don’t exist anymore, and modern affordable housing is much more integrated and “normal” looking. Besides, in the rural mid-Hudson Valley, the people who need affordable housing are the people who already live and work here.

Cheryl Smith is a perfect example. A single mother of three, she has worked as a teacher’s assistant in a Poughkeepsie public middle school for 13 years. But even with a good job and help from the county’s Section 8 housing assistance program, she had trouble affording her 3-bedroom apartment, which cost $900 a month in rent alone. And she wanted a home of her own. “The rooms were tiny,” she says of that apartment. “I couldn’t even put a table in the kitchen.”

Smith took a six-month class for first-time homebuyers offered by Hudson River Housing, a nonprofit housing agency in Dutchess County. “They teach you the lingo of banks,” she says. Once the class was over, she began to save money for a down payment; for every $1 she saved, Hudson River Housing contributed $3, up to a $5,000 maximum. The agency helped her qualify for a mortgage by paying off debts and cleaning up her credit rating. Within two years she was ready to buy a house.

The house she bought was owned by Hudson River Housing, which, in addition to helping first-time homebuyers, provides affordable housing stock by buying and renovating existing buildings. Smith now pays a $600 mortgage payment—$300 less than her previous rent—and plans to cut her 30-year mortgage down to 15 years by making extra premium payments. She loves her house, which is in a good neighborhood and has plenty of room for her children. “I feel like I’m living in a mansion,” she says. “My kitchen is huge!”

Hudson River Housing was started in 1982; last year it served over 3,000 clients, with nine programs ranging from emergency shelters to transitional and permanent housing. It is just one of several agencies that help people find affordable housing. In Ulster County, similar nonprofit housing agencies include Family, Kingston Housing Authority, the sharp (Shandaken Revitalization Plan) Committee, and rupco (Rural Ulster Preservation Company).

Jane Todd, executive director of the sharp Committee, says sharp has $14,000 grants available toward down payments, closing costs, and mortgage buy-downs. Funded by a state grant, the fund has helped 15 families buy houses since 2001. But, she adds, the current surge in real estate prices is making it harder for sharp to help people, because families that qualify for the grant often can’t qualify for a mortgage. For example, to qualify for the grant, a family of four must make under $44,700 per year. But at that income level, the same family could not qualify for a mortgage on a house costing over $154,896. And it’s increasingly hard to find such a house at that price in which four people could live.

Todd also notes that, increasingly, sharp faces community resistance to the housing projects it initiates—even senior housing. For example, sharp has funding in place to add five additional units to an existing 19-unit, low-income senior housing development in the town of Olive, but the project is being held up by an Article 78 filed by a neighbor.

“The story is the same wherever we go,” says Todd, who notes that the need for more units is clear. “There are no apartments available in Shandaken,” she says. “None.”

Housing woes are not limited to this region. Todd just returned from a meeting in Utica of the New York State Rural Housing Coalition, of which she is a board member. “We all had the same stories to tell,” she says.

Like others in her field, she says affordable housing is difficult to site, largely because of misconceptions about the kind of people who will live there. She says 99 percent of sharp’s clients are working couples, and it’s very demeaning for them to hear that they are considered undesirable by their potential neighbors.

Kevin O’Connor has worked on these problems for a long time. Formerly a member of Dutchess County’s Housing Consortium, he is now a member of Ulster County’s Housing Consortium and executive director of rupco. “The answer is fairly simple in my mind,” he says. “We gotta build more housing.” But how to do it—faced with restrictive zoning, nimbyism, and a sagging economy—is not so simple. “I don’t think there’s any easy solution to this at all,” he says.

Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs. Developers are interested in Ulster County, which just received the “difficult to develop” designation from hud that allows developers an extra 30 percent on tax credits. (Dutchess County has had this designation for years). Also, developers have formed a lobbying group, New York State Association for Affordable Housing, to seek funding for such projects. And New York just adopted the international building code, which will allow builders more flexibility and make it easier for developers from other states to work here. rupco, O’Connor reports, now has $1.3 million in down payment and closing cost assistance, and plans to open a home ownership center in Kingston this fall.

Indeed, Ulster County has stacked the Housing Consortium with leaders in a wide range of fields, in an attempt to represent as many stakeholder groups as possible. The roster includes Michael Berg, director of Family; Tom Jackson, president of the county Association of Town Supervisors; and Steve Finkel, director of economic development for the city of Kingston. Says Beckman, “I think we’re really poised right now to do really good works on behalf of the county.”