Housing need is hot topic for Town Board

Household makeups in Westchester County show flat population and shrinking families. HUDSON VALLEY PATTERN FOR PROGRESS

By JEFF MORRIS

The need for more housing — especially of the affordable variety — has been a hot topic in New York state for years, resulting in proposals and debate at every level of government. 

This week, a discussion about housing dominated the Oct. 7 Bedford Town Board meeting. Lasting nearly an hour and a half, the presentation, “Housing Trends, Needs & Tactics” by Adam Bosch, president and cEO of Hudson Valley Pattern For Progress, drew the chairs of the town’s Planning Board, Zoning Board and housing committee to the meeting. Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress

is described as “a nonprofit organization that provides objective research, planning, and educational training throughout the region,” with work that “identifies civic challenges and promotes regional, equitable, and sustainable solutions to constantly improve the quality of life in Hudson Valley communities.” It says it does this on a foundation of facts and experience, “without political aims or affiliations.”

Supervisor Ellen Calves introduced Bosch, noting that in formulating the new comprehensive plan, the community had weighed in on wanting to have a diversity of housing in Bedford, and “we are thinking about that diversity including whether formal affordable or just more affordable options.” Those options could possibly include things like apartments or townhomes, senior housing, and accessory dwelling units, she said.

Calves said there are applications coming before the Planning Board “because of market forces and the fact there hasn’t been housing built in Bedford for a long time.”

Bosch’s wide-ranging talk featured data and recommendations that were local to Bedford as well as encompassing the entire Hudson Valley, and included some conclusions that were both surprising and non-intuitive. In some cases, he came up against assumptions that have fueled much of the local conversation regarding housing availability and affordability, which he referred to as a “two-headed housing crisis in the Hudson Valley.”

One data point he focused on was renter wages vs. rental costs, with wages stagnant while rents increase. He noted that average median income in the Hudson Valley has actually increased because of an influx of higher incomes, while the percent of AMI of the average renter in the region has been backsliding, making most rentals unaffordable. “What you’ve seen is the disappearance of what we’d call modest rents,” he said.

Bosch called the housing squeeze in the region a consequence of “our under-building housing for the past 25 years: outdated zoning, slow approval processes, lots of different things rolled up into this kind of situation we’re at, where now we have a lot of sort of lower middle class, blue-collar job working folks who can’t find a place to live in the region anymore.”

Citing current year housing data specific to Bedford, with a median sales price of $1.2 million and an average of $1.8 million, Bosch acknowledged that the market locally is different from other parts of the county. Other figures he shared, derived from HUD reports for the period 2015-19, showed 34% of home owner households and 57% of renter households as “cost burdened or severely cost burdened.”

Size of households shrinking

“The major demand for housing across the region is not driven by population growth,” Bosch said. While Westchester County has had a little population growth over the past decade, “the region has essentially been at 2.4 million people for 30 years.” He said a variety of factors have taken housing out of circulation, but the bigger driver is the shrinking size of the average household. “I know that sounds crazy,” he said, but if the same population is broken up into smaller households, it increases the demand for housing. “In Westchester County, the shrinking size of the average family alone drives a demand for more than 12,000 units of housing just to maintain a flat population.” Bosch asserted that “if you’re not on board for a little bit more housing, then you are voting for a future of population, customer base and workforce shrinkage; prepare for it.”

Bosch also noted that the increase in people who work from home is a double-edged sword: while most are working at jobs that are located elsewhere, they are bringing back income that is spent and taxed locally; but at the same time, houses are taken up by people who are not available to work in local jobs. He pointed out that population shifts in the region have affected other counties much more dramatically than Westchester, which has had a kind of roller coaster of population, but that its physical proximity to New York City is no longer necessarily an advantage in the digital economy.

Another key demographic point Bosch highlighted is the sharp drop in births in the Hudson Valley, which was interrupted by a one-year baby bump in 2021, following the pandemic. That means “We have, right now, 48,000 fewer children in our public schools than we did in 2004, which was the peak of enrollment for the region; 97 of our 120 school districts have actively shrinking enrollments.” He said that is why 53 school buildings have closed throughout the region, though the shrinkage appears to have now reached a floor.

Bosch stated that the Hudson Valley will continue to feel stress from the housing shortage, the worsening workforce gap, and a reduction in full-time residents. “Based on the regional planning and the regional research that we do, we feel strongly that the evidence shows the future of the region is going to be determined by two words that start with the letter H: housing and humans, and do we have enough of both?” 

Saying it was good to hear that Bedford did a new comprehensive plan, Bosch noted, “A lot of communities across the region are now getting around to rethinking their zoning. It is the case that we had what’s called ‘Euclidean zoning’ across the region for decades, where industry went here, commercial and retail went here, housing went far away from those things, and those three never shall touch,” he said. “But that’s not the modern pattern of development. That’s not how Gen Z and Gen Alpha want to live.” 

Bosch said they are seeing pockets of success across the region where communities become more flexible with their zoning, caring more about what buildings look like than what goes in them.

“This does not mean every community looks the same,” he emphasized. “This does not mean everyone becomes New Rochelle. This doesn’t mean any of those things. What it does mean is you can craft your zoning in a way that meets your community needs, meets your aesthetic desires, meets your density desires, and still provides the kind of flexibility that will allow for the person who cooks your meal at the local restaurant to potentially live in the town you live in.” Bosch concluded, “We have to come around to just being more creative and flexible with our zoning, at a scale that’s right for your community — and the scale is different for every place.”

Calves pointed out that the town faces a lot of limitations due to being in the New York City watershed. Bosch countered that he was a director at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection for 10 years, and that she’d be surprised at the degree to which DEP is willing to engage with municipalities, citing work that has been done in Mahopac as an example.

There was further discussion around challenges for the commercial district on North Bedford Road, and the town’s rules regarding the percentage of new apartments that need to be affordable. Asked about accessory dwelling units, Bosch said he was not really high on ADUs, considering them to be a very small portion of the housing solution. He also pointed out that neighboring states all have a statewide housing policy, and New York does not, leading to a “hodgepodge” of rules and regulations.

Asked for any advice regarding NIMBYism, Bosch said what works best are family and economic arguments. He related an anecdote about a woman who he recently heard objecting to a housing plan by saying it was not needed, and in the next breath complaining about her 31-year-old son living in her basement. He again connected a lack of housing to a lack of workers at local businesses and many additional symptoms of housing troubles “that are all over the place, if you care to look for them.” Making those arguments can soften opposition, he said, as long as a project is designed well and at the right scale for the community.

Finally, he said, “It comes down to a part of leadership, and that is, not believing that the loudest voices represent the majority of your folks.”