Sitting around a table on Hudson Valley Community College’s Troy campus, eight individuals with experience in a range of fields met with Republican state Sens. Dan Stec, Jake Ashby and Jim Tedisco to discuss affordability in New York.
An increase in the cost of living was top of mind for many of the panelists. For Abbie Kovacik, executive director of Brightside Up, an organization dedicated to improving child care options in the Capital Region, affordability is most visible in the rising cost of child care.
“It is more expensive for a toddler or an infant to go to child care than it is to send your freshman to HVCC. So that’s difficult for parents, who are often at the beginning of their careers, to afford,” Kovacik said. “In New York state we do have child care assistance. Each county Department of Social Services distributes assistance based on the family’s need. Currently, the qualifying benchmark is 85% of the state’s median income.”
While assistance programs exist, Kovacik noted that much of the funding is already spoken for.
“We have many families who are seeking child care assistance in order to afford child care but are unable to get it. It’s very difficult to afford,” she said. “If we had a group of families here, they would likely say that’s one of the biggest burdens they have. Families get through the first five years of their child’s life and then they breathe easy.”
The rising cost of living is also affecting local restaurants. Herbie’s Burgers co-founder Aaron Wilson said local bureaucracies can pose major hurdles for small businesses.
“We tend to shoot for downtown areas because we don’t want to see the downtowns fail,” Wilson said. “But it seems like towns are begging people to open up downtown, and when you say, ‘OK, I’ll do that,’ they try to stop you every way. Like, well, you need to get this permit, you’ve got to get this inspection, your sign might be too big. Meanwhile, a larger business that has a skyscraper of lawyers and architects and engineers can just get through, pay the fines — they have the ability to just show up and take care of this stuff.”
Wilson also linked escalating costs to worsening mental health and higher staff turnover for locally owned restaurants.
“We are seeing homelessness on the rise, crime on the rise, response times from police going up,” he said. “I’m seeing way more mental illness and drug addiction and, frankly, people who just can’t afford to go to our little fast-food restaurant anymore. And on top of that, you have our staff who obviously want a livable wage, they would like insurance, they would like child care. We would like to give them all those things, but then you’re not going to come into my spot and buy a $45 burger.”
Following the forum, Ashby — whose 43rd District includes portions of Albany, Rensselaer and Washington counties — said legislators from both parties will have to work together to make New York more affordable.
“You talk about unlikely participants coming together. What do you think is driving that? It’s the unaffordability we’re facing in New York state,” Ashby said. “We as elected officials need to be able to come together and make those reforms. Time continues to slip away and we continue to see people leaving New York, but that doesn’t have to be the case.”
