CEDC turns to rental costs at second housing forum | Columbia County

HUDSON — The Columbia County Economic Development Corporation held its second annual housing forum, this time focusing on state and local efforts to improve housing affordability throughout the county.

“CEDC’s strategic plan rests on four key pillars, two of which are quality of life and workforce development. Safe, quality, affordable housing is a vital aspect of both of those pillars,” said CEDC Housing Development Coordinator Chris Brown.

According to the CEDC, some challenging areas when it comes to affordable housing include aging housing stock; more than 50% of the housing in the county is well over 50 years old. Median home sale prices in the county have increased 67% since 2018.

“A number of factors inform home sales prices, but what we experienced during the early stages of COVID-19 can rightly be called a ‘black swan’ event,” Brown said. “Our region — which has long been a popular weekend and getaway vacation for New York City residents — absorbed a large number of ‘COVID refugees’ who moved out of their more densely populated neighborhoods. We are now starting to see an uptick in new short-term rental listings, which may suggest that a significant number of ‘early COVID’ home buyers have now returned to their city residences while maintaining their upstate homes as income properties.”

Forty-six percent of renters in Columbia County are housing-cost-burdened, according to the CEDC, while 22% of renters are severely cost-burdened, and 50% of their gross monthly income is spent on housing.

“Across Columbia County, nearly half of all renters pay more than 30% of their monthly income for housing, with half of that group spending more than 50% of their monthly income,” Brown said. “Both of these groups are what the federal government considers ‘housing cost burdened,’ with the second group in the ‘extremely housing cost-burdened’ category. Lower- and moderate-income households are much more likely to be included in these cohorts and are more severely impacted, as they typically have less room to make tradeoffs between housing expenses and the rest of their budget.”

One of the major takeaways from last year’s summit was create a countywide housing task force, hire and manage a housing development coordinator, develop a county infrastructure master plan and sponsor a countywide nonprofit organization such as a housing trust or community land trust.

In response to this, in the fall of 2022, the Columbia County Board of Supervisors established the Columbia County Housing Task Force. In June 2023, the CEDC submitted a grant application on behalf of an incipient community land trust and in September 2023, supervisors approved an application to create and establish a land bank. Last month the application was approved by the Empire State Development Corporation.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, land banks are nonprofit entities that work…