Valerie Russo works two jobs, from 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., at a Hudson Valley shopping center. She and her three kids have lived in a motel room for two years, courtesy of Ulster County.
The Albany Times Union ran an excellent story about homeless Hudson Valley families stuck in hotels for years, with Russo as its centerpiece.
Her experience is not unusual. Ulster County has contracts with 24 hotels and two shelters, but families spend an average of more than three years in this “emergency” housing.
From a real estate perspective, these contracts are a reliable source of income for hotel owners. But from a social-welfare and public-spending perspective, this is a disaster.
Hotels are built for short visits, not for boys and girls to spend their childhood. The cost to taxpayers for Russo’s room is $110 a night.
It would be cheaper to house families in apartments, but the article doesn’t explain why that does not happen. Probably it’s because motels can keep rooms available for immediate placements, while apartment buildings cannot.
However, if the average stay is 1,132 days, it makes no sense to use properties designed for temporary housing. It’s not disclosed why these families are not using rental vouchers, but we know that many more people are eligible for vouchers than actually receive them.
The article eventually gets to the question of why the rent in Kingston is too high for working families like Russo’s.
This might sound familiar: Two Kingston council members say the area median income used to determine rents for affordable housing is too high because it includes richer areas outside Kingston.
They propose lowering the AMI by only including Kingston in the metric. That, in turn, would reduce rents that are based on a percentage of AMI.
Some advocates make the same claim about New York City, where the AMI is elevated by wealthier suburbs.
The obvious problem is that in the Real World, legislating lower rents does not reduce the cost of building and operating housing. The lower the rent, the fewer projects pencil out.
Kingston’s mayor and housing director predicted that if the affordability threshold were lowered for multifamily development in Kingston, it simply wouldn’t be built.
It’s clear that building housing with rents that some families cannot afford is better than not building at all. Without a doubt, the affordable units will become homes for some people who need them.
Homelessness is largely a housing problem, and it persists in Kingston because housing growth did not keep pace with demand, pushing vacancy rates down and prices up.
The city does now have some multifamily developments in the pipeline. But Valerie Russo still might not be able to afford their affordable units — or any apartments freed up by people moving into the new projects.
Real estate alone cannot solve her problem, which is as much about her income being too low for a family of four as it is about Kingston rents being too high.
The solution in Kingston, as it is in New York City, is a rental voucher and a sufficient supply of housing to ensure she can use it.
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