Kingston was recently named one of ten urban areas in New York State to receive an initial $25,000 grant to study measures to ensure that no residents are displaced from their homes. The grant allows participation in the state Anti-Displacement Learning Network, a two-year program scheduled to begin this month with a three-month learning exchange among the participants and consultants. The ten participating urban centers will include the Hudson Valley small cities of Kingston, Newburgh and Hudson, plus Ithaca, Elmira and Broome County, as well as the state’s four largest cities: New York City, Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.
“Housing costs and displacement pressures are rising across the country, destabilizing families, neighborhoods and entire cities,” explained PolicyLink, an advisory anti-displacement organization. “The network is advancing bold new ideas while building the power, voice and capacity of communities directly impacted by displacement in defining challenges and advancing solutions.”
New York State this past summer adopted a game-changing law, the Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act of 2019. Under that law, New York municipalities with a housing vacancy rate of less than five per cent can adopt rent control. Local adoption would change the playing field for dealing with community displacement, but it doesn’t assure housing improvements. You can be sure that the Anti-Displacement Learning Network will be looking very closely at the consequences of adopting such local legislation and at other items in the toolbox of tenant-protection and housing-supply mechanisms.
Not everyone is happy with the legislation. E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy, for instance, thinks the new law “is likely to have a chilling effect on prospects for multifamily investment and development in struggling communities across New York State — especially Upstate.” Investors, he argues, are likely to be fazed by the newly created possibility that their properties will be subject to rent regulation.
An unnamed downstate developer classified the new law as “Punishing Landlords 101.”
Kingston has recently completed a housing vacancy study whose findings have not yet been released. Fifty-six percent of Kingstonians live in rental housing.
Mayor Steve Noble says he is committed to make sure no Kingston resident is displaced. “As we continue to rebuild our infrastructure, invest in our parks, and encourage new businesses and residents to move to Kingston, we run the risk of contributing to the displacement of the people who have called Kingston home for their whole lives,” he said in his January 1 state-of-the-city speech. “We need meaningful legislation to protect the rights and well-being of our residents across our city. Like other communities in Ulster County, we are losing priceless units of potential affordable housing to an unregulated short-term rental market. This sharp decrease in available units, coupled with rising housing and utility costs across the city, is unsustainable.”
Passing pro-tenant legislation wouldn’t fix the current housing shortage, Noble continued, “but it will provide key protections and stability while we develop further housing reforms.” He urged the Common Council to act on both short-term rental regulations and tenant protections without delay “before it is too late.”
“I’m conscious of the fact that it is becoming increasingly harder to afford to live in our area,” Noble had said in his 2019 state-of-the-city speech. “Rents are going up. Houses are selling for record-high prices. Opportunities for home ownership feel out of grasp for so many.” He promised “meaningful, realistic policies” to address gentrification and displacement.
“Affordable housing doesn’t scare me. Knowing that some of my constituents — our neighbors — are at risk of homelessness or displacement — that’s what scares me.”
The displacement picture hasn’t changed for the better in the past year’s hot real-estate market. The data showed a 25 percent increase in the number of Kingston single-family homes sold in 2019 (220) over those sold in 2018 (176). The median price of a Kingston single-family house increased 18.6 percent from $161,695 in 2018 to $191,750 in 2019.
New purchasers find Kingston residential real estate in the middle price range an increasingly good bargain at a price affordable to them. Industry figures show 60 Kingston single-family transactions between $200,000 and $500,000 the year before last. In the year just concluded, there were 100 such sales.
Speculative buyers profit from the increase in value whether the residences are occupied or not. They make far more from the price appreciation than they can net from a rental. A local law imposing an added tax on properties unoccupied for a period of years has been talked about in Kingston.
Displacement, which has a wide variety of causes, impacts disproportionately on under-resourced low-income communities, negatively affecting overall community well-being. This new anti-displacement initiative provides an unusual opportunity for Kingston to assess its situation and develop its own action strategy.
Displacement is as much a social phenomenon as an economic one. Fancy stores and pricey restaurants appealing to weekend visitors and not to longtime locals add non-income elements to the growing gap between different kinds of residents of a heterogeneous neighborhood. As a 2019 economic working paper entitled “Income Growth and the Distributional Effects of Urban Spatial Sorting” explains, “As the rich get richer, their increased demand for luxury amenities available downtown drives housing prices up in downtown areas. The poor are made worse off, either being displaced or paying higher rents for amenities that they do not value as much.”
The $25,000 in funding to Kingston for anti-displacement measures came from Enterprise Community Partners, a deeply funded national non-profit partnering with the state attorney general’s office. After the initial three-month peer-learning process, the participants in the Anti-Displacement Learning Network will get technical help in developing plans to implement their chosen strategies. Strategies deemed likely to be successful will be awarded up to a million dollars each for implementation. The execution phase is scheduled to finish at the end of 2021.
Elected officials in the jurisdictions will collaborate throughout the process with local stakeholders. Kingston elected officials will be collaborating with representatives from local organizations: Guy Kempe from Rupco, Frank Waters from Midtown Rising, and tenant advocate Rashida Tyler from the YMCA and The Real Kingston Tenants Union.
Rupco is already collaborating with Enterprise to help small building owners in Newburgh and Kingston to stabilize and upgrade their properties. Rupco serves as local “landlord ambassador” to acquaint landlords with governmental programs to help stabilize, upgrade and preserve buildings for long-term affordability, and to expand opportunities for preservation-focused housing developers to acquire occupied and distressed multifamily housing stock. Michael D’Arcy, landlord ambassador outreach coordinator at Rupco, can be reached at 331-2140, extension 268.
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