New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie announced $3 million in grant funding to support affordable housing in Columbia and Dutchess Counties Thursday. The Democrat met with officials and housing advocates in Hudson.
Speaking in front of a duplex apartment building, one of the city’s first affordable housing units, Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, says the affordable housing shortage is a national problem.
“The issue of people being able to have a place to live, a place to call home, and a place to take care of their families, we are indeed in a crisis. And what we're doing here today is, really, it's a small piece of what needs to really, really be done,” Heastie said.
Heastie says he heard that firsthand.
“Recently I was at a speaker's conference in Utah, Utah, of all places where, you know, most of the population is really centered around within 50 miles of Salt Lake City. And the speaker there actually said, the two biggest problems that people in Utah are dealing with is affordable housing, and climate,” Heastie said.
During the previous legislative session, majority lawmakers could not come to agreement on an affordable housing plan with Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat. Between 2020 and 2022, the median home sale price in Columbia County rose by more than 20 percent.
State Assemblywoman Didi Barrett, a Democrat whose 106th District includes parts of Columbia and Dutchess Counties, says the money will be divided among local organizations.
“One and a half million will be allocated to Columbia County Habitat for Humanity to support their great work creating affordable and energy efficient homes for first time homeowners. And the other 1.5 million is for Dutchess County-based Hudson River Housing to continue the development of affordable Smart Growth rental units,” Barrett said.
Al Bellenchia, Executive Director and CEO of Columbia County Habitat for Humanity, made reference to George Bailey from “It’s A Wonderful Life,” saying those who “do most of the working and living and dying” deserve housing.
“At the beginning of this year, we announced a plan to accelerate our building capacity. In May, we broke ground on two homes in Philmont. And last week, we announced the new building concept that will bring efficient, sustainable and low-cost homes to more of our communities,” Bellenchia said.
Christa Hines, President and CEO of Hudson River Housing, says housing is finally becoming part of the narrative, and adds HRH is supporting those plans.
“We're also really excited to be bringing our home ownership counseling and our educational services here to Columbia County. We have lots of other exciting projects that we're working on one in Pine plains, in Millerton and Amenia, in Millbrook and Poughkeepsie in southern Dutchess, just to name a few,” Hines said.
Democratic Hudson Mayor Kamal Johnson says the impact stretches beyond just housing.
“For the last two years, we haven't been able to keep a football team on the field and our high school, because we haven't, we don't have enough students,” Johnson said.
Johnson says misconceptions surrounding affordable housing need to be cleared up.
“We're not realizing that these are the people who work in our schools. These are people who work in grocery stores, who take care of us in the hospital. So as we work on a local level, to put over 100 new units of affordable housing over the next three years, it's amazing to hear that there's a state commitment as well,” Johnson said.
Johnson is a member of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, which promotes UBI: Universal Basic Income.
Hudson’s UBI program, a collaboration between former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s Humanity Forward and community center The Spark of Hudson, began in September 2020 with monthly $500 payments for five years to 25 recipients; anyone whose income was below $35,000 annually was able to apply. The program grew a year later to include 75 recipients, about 1 percent of the city’s population.
Johnson says the impacts are showing.
“Every single one of them has maintained the job that they've already had, as well as being able to show basic needs being met, like housing, food, shelter, being able to be there for their children and not work, you know, 100 jobs, just to make ends meet,” Johnson said.
To address the shortage, Johnson is working on two redevelopments in the city.
“The school district owns the former John L. Edwards Elementary School, I believe that is on the table. And the ask is going to be affordable housing, I can't speak for the school district, but the city has a project down on Mill Street, that is a 60-unit affordable housing project. That project, we're going back and forth with the school district because there is a stipulation back from the 80s that says if that property is developed to anything that is not a park, we basically need the permission of the school district,” Johnson said.
“Gonna be constructing affordable rental units, and that's about probably 90 of those and then also doing two new home ownership opportunities,” said Michelle Tulo, Hudson’s housing justice director.
A new report from Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress entitled “Out of Reach” found the average single worker cannot comfortably afford a one-bedroom apartment in any of the region’s nine counties, and median home prices are more than $100,000 higher than the mortgage a typical family would qualify for.
Pattern President and CEO Adam Bosch says people aren’t graduating from rentals to ownership, and that’s why 97 of the Hudson Valley’s 120 school districts shrank this year, leading to broader economic effects.
“If you're not going to build actively the housing that's needed by the workers, then the work that they do is going to start to disappear, the diner is going to close the dry cleaner is going to close, there's going to be fewer grocery stores, you know, the restaurants that we'd love to go to are going to shrink in number. If you don't want to see that, you got to understand that the ability to have the workers at those places is directly connected to having the housing that those workers need. Otherwise, we're shot, we're just going to continue to hollow out,” Bosch said.
The housing built by Habitat for Humanity will be passive, meaning its energy efficiency should cap fuel bills below 10 percent of a person’s income.
