Living in America is more expensive than it’s ever been, especially the ‘living’ part.
Housing prices are skyrocketing everywhere, urban and rural, and New York in particular has become a hotspot of the current housing crisis.
Lawmakers are taking steps to address the issue; last week, a deal was reached consisting of a series of measures created to deal with the state’s housing crisis. These include tax credits, tenant protections and zoning changes.
It’s a part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Housing Compact, a proposal intended to double the rate of housing construction in the state and create hundreds of thousands of new homes in the next decade.
Hochul saw last week’s announcement as a victory in the housing crisis fight. But while the plan will create many new homes, the numbers will likely be in the tens of thousands, figures far short of the ambitious goals of the Housing Compact.
It led to general apathy and unhappiness among tenants and landlords, with the general consensus that it was a mere drop in the bucket of what’s necessary to achieve true success.
Housing is an urgent need throughout the state, but there is no one single solution that will alleviate it. While most of the focus is on New York City, something that works for that specific area might not work for smaller population centers and vice versa.
Different types of communities — urban, rural, suburban — have different housing needs. But the undeniable truth is that they all need help and they all need to be more affordable.
In 2022, almost 40% of New York households were paying 30% or more of their income for housing according to the Office of the State Comptroller. That represents the third highest rate of housing burden in the country. A whopping 20% of households were paying more than 50% of their income for housing.
New York has consistently ranked as one of the states with the highest cost burdens for owners and renters.
In the last decade, the state added more than 460,000 housing units. That may seem like a lot at first glance, but as an increase of less than 6% it is far below other states, ranking 32nd out of 50.
And while these numbers are obviously skewed by the astronomical cost of living in New York City and its surrounding areas, things aren’t that much better in the rest of the state.
In the Southern Tier and Mohawk Valley, 16% of owners and more than 40% of renters live in cost-burdened households, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent and utilities.
One of the downsides of the recently announced plan is that the housing growth in question will largely be limited to New York City, leaving out other parts of the state being similarly affected by the affordability crisis. Employing incentives to spur new housing is a half-measure considering its poor track record in other states.
So what are the solutions? As noted earlier, there isn’t an all-encompassing cure for the state’s housing woes, but there are steps that can be taken.
Getting relevant stakeholders to help increase supply is a first step, while proposals for a more comprehensive and expansive agenda of reform can help move things forward.
This is easier said than done, but by empowering specific localities to implement their own solutions, it may help New Yorkers combat the growing sense of housing insecurity.
Whatever legislation is in the works needs to be able to protect low-income tenants who literally live under the shadow of eviction. It needs to encourage the production of more affordable units. And it needs to realistically offer up the promise of home ownership to those it has long denied.