Kingston undeniably has issues. There’s a billionaire multi-property holder Uptown who won’t stop suing the city and another property owner down in the Rondout who owns a large amount of waterfront that he’s been sitting on for decades. A blizzard of Freedom of Information Act requests gulp official energy, with some submitted just to see what other people are filing for. The UCAT bus hub has been relocated from Kingston Plaza, at the request of property owners; the new location is out by the Family Court. And there are gadflies in the ointment, relatively small in numbers but vocal online and at meetings, convinced that the place is headed to hell in an artisanal handbasket.
As is the case across the region, housing costs have been rising far faster than wages for at least the past five years—median home prices in Kingston have climbed roughly 65 to 70 percent, rising from about $270,000 in 2019 to around $440,000 today—and homelessness has grown. The city currently has 309 units of new affordable housing in various developmental stages from planning to leasing, ranging from condo and freestanding ownership opportunities to fully supported apartments. Entities involved include but are not limited to city and county government, RUPCO, the Kingston Land Bank, Family of Woodstock, and private developers, and though nobody thinks it’s enough, it may—in combination with new market rate units, form-based zoning, accessory dwelling units, and vigorous tenant protection laws—eventually help to mitigate the ongoing pain that has come with being a Very Hot Housing Market.
Home Making
Renny Scott-Childress, a SUNY New Paltz history professor who’s been Ward 3 Alderman since 2015, would like to see the city go farther into public ownership than the 481 units currently owned and maintained by the Kingston Housing Authority, on whose board he serves. “In Vienna, Austria, the city owns something like a third of all rental housing, which creates a very powerful downward pressure on rents. The other thing that helps is that they don’t kick people out; there are requirements for getting into it, but after that, there’s no ceiling on how much you can earn.”
Over the years, Scott-Childress says, the objections he has heard to creating housing tend to sound the same. “‘We don’t want those people here, and it’s going to bring all these people up from the city.’ We heard that when RUPCO was renovating the old Alms House into affordable units [Landmark Place opened in 2021 for 66 units for seniors]; we heard that about the Kingstonian [still in concept phase], which is market rate. Well, the people who need homes—whichever people—are already here.”
Jenna Goldstein, Ulster County community organizer with For the Many, runs a hotline for tenants and sees the need every day. “We need to have currently beautiful, currently affordable, permanently ecologically friendly housing, and we need it now,” she says. “Acting as if incentivizing builders to build affordable housing is accomplishing anything, that’s a joke. It’s not gonna happen without some serious persuasion.”
Advocates have had some notable success this year: the New York State Court of Appeals upheld key tenant protection provisions in the city’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act, including a vacancy study that legally established a state of emergency in 2022 and a required 15 percent rent reduction for included units, and the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s decision not to exempt the city’s largest apartment complex, the 266-unit Stony Run, from ETPA provisions. A fresh study released by the city last summer, indicating a higher vacancy rate, was embraced by landlords; activists say they’ve found evidence of warehousing—deliberately keeping units vacant in order to skew the results—and that the emergency absolutely continues. The city’s Common Council now plans a thorough legislative review of the entire ETPA situation, vacancy survey included, and separate-but-equal public hearings for tenants and landlords.
Scott-Childress, who’s not planning to run for council again, says that he’d like to see the city utilize democratic assemblies to hash out difficult issues, akin to the method used successfully in Ireland in resolving abortion rights and gay marriage. “Instead of having the mayor and the council propose solutions, you’d reach out to the public and say, ‘Here’s the specific problem we need to work on, are you interested?’ From the positive responses, you randomly select something like 18 people to work with a consultant. Make it time-limited and issue-specific, and together they can do the research and come up with a proposal. That way you can pull in people who may not be inclined to commit to a volunteer board or commission, people with a wide range of perspectives. And instead of jumping directly to resolving the issue, you start by working with everyone to articulate their values, where you might be more likely to find some overlap, some agreement.”
Cusp of Change
Tony Marmo grew up in Dutchess County, married a Kingstonian, took a human resources job at Kingston Hospital at 25 and found himself CEO at the relatively tender age of 40, in the mid-`90s. Now the CEO and owner of Normann Staffing, he serves on the boards of Hudson Valley Pattern For Progress, the Hudson Valley Economic Development Corporation, the Ulster County Workforce Development Board, and the Kingston Loan Development Corporation Board.
“Through the `80s and `90s and even into the 2000s, I think the social fabric of Kingston stayed pretty much the same,” he says. “We had lots of working-class immigrant families—Irish, Italian, German, Polish, and African Americans—who were drawn here to work in industry, and those families opened little mom-and-pop businesses, and I think it was a common thread that kept Kingston and Ulster County more united than a lot of places. Then the switch was flipped and the floodgates opened, and especially since the pandemic, we had more and more people moving here from the New York City metro area. The last five or six years, it’s been different. There’s been a normal aging out of the generation I grew up in, and it feels as though we’re on the cusp of change, where the folks who were instrumental in volunteering, watching out for each other, starting nonprofits, are getting older. People are now more incentivized to stay home, not go out and join something or start something.”
Marmo is encouraged, though, by a younger generation that has stepped up in recent decades to launch nonprofits like the Center for Creative Education and MyKingstonKids, getting firmly established alongside longstanding institutions. Housing and jobs, he says, are the proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma. “We need houses to bring in businesses, and we need businesses so people can afford houses. I think we need to be open-minded about the kinds of businesses we bring in, and leverage resources like iPark 87. And I love seeing people start new small businesses. It’s really the best way to counteract the greed of the one percent.”
Growing Stronger
The 250-acre iPark 87 on the former IBM campus just over the city line in the Town of Ulster, struggled for years to gain redevelopment traction. Its 2021 purchase by National Resources brought a burst of hope, as CEO Joe Cotter laid out a mixed-use proposal for residential housing, a hotel and art center, a brewery, retail, restaurants, a film studio, and agriculture. When Cotter died suddenly last October, that ambitious plan was flung into limbo.
What’s going on there right now, though, is one of many things that Marmo finds encouraging: a brand new campus for the Career Academies of Ulster BOCES, offering a wide range of education for both teens and adults—everything from early childhood education, culinary arts, and nursing to IT, advanced robotics, and logistics. “You talk about how to bring in better jobs, well, BOCES has revolutionized their whole way of looking at education, and the seeds are planted that will mean iPark 87 will eventually be a hub that’s just as bustling and important as IBM once was, only with much more than a single business going on.”
Teens and young adults can access leadership skills, education, and hands-on job training through KWEST YouthBuild, and the NoVo Foundation is building out the Metro, a 75,000-square-foot space meant to incorporate a fully-equipped fabrication center, a culinary hub, and creative studios. Dance and art are going strong at the Center for Creative Education, as are sports, recreation, wellness, and childcare at the YMCA, while the YWCA offers an early childhood learning center and “Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness” programs for women.
There are art classes and a business incubator on Cornell Street thanks to ARC Mid-Hudson, and the Kingston Land Trust has secured a 54-acre farm property through its Land in Black Hands program and is building an ag education center, as well as working to create affordable homeownership opportunities. (There is also a Kingston Land Bank, which has renovated 29 homes and sold them at affordable prices.)
CPW, formerly the Center for Photography at Woodstock, opened 40,000 square feet of impactful creative space in Midtown last January, and Upstate Films launched a 50-seat Midtown screening room just last month. A quarry pond at Sojourner Truth State Park is being crafted into a swimming hole set to open next year.
And in early September, a fresh kind of civic experiment bloomed. Kingston Common Futures, incubated by the Good Work Institute, wrapped up its first community-led funding cycle, awarding $150,000 in grants to 11 projects chosen not by distant foundations but by neighbors themselves. The grantees range from a therapeutic transit initiative to a tenants’ union to Mujeres Artesanas de Kingston, a collective of women artisans. The process—mentors helping first-time applicants, volunteers vetting and deliberating—was as much about building relationships as distributing dollars. For a city often whiplashed by outside money and speculation, it’s a striking example of homegrown investment in shared future.
“There are a lot of people dedicated to the health of this community, and I’d like to see us build on that, grow it even stronger,” says Scott-Childress.
“This whole world is changing at a rapid pace,” says Marmo. “I think that with communication and civility, education and entrepreneurial energy—I think we can stay committed to each other and to doing better. I’m still real bullish on Kingston.”
This article appears in October 2025.
