Housing
Delafield Street, Poughkeepsie, New York
Housing is one of life’s basic needs, whether it takes the form of a detached home, an apartment, a condo/townhouse, or something else. Without access to adequate housing and the stability it provides, most of life’s other basic needs, such as improving one’s health, finding work, or learning, are extremely difficult.
Given its central role in our lives, paying for housing, whether by rent or mortgage, can easily become the single biggest expense for a household. Typically, housing and transportation costs make up about half of a household’s budget. The term ‘location affordability’ is often used to capture this combined cost for an area. While we have limited influence over the cost of housing, if we can reduce transportation costs, we can improve the ‘location affordability’ of an area.
In this section, we address potential barriers to housing by answering two basic questions:
- Where are housing costs a burden to residents?
- What transportation policies, services, and projects can we employ to lower transportation costs, and in turn, make locations more affordable?
A NOTE ON OUR METHODOLOGY…
You’ll notice that our discussion of housing barriers looks a little different than our barriers analyses on access to education, goods and services, and recreation. This is a function of the data available to us. Despite limited data, we wanted to evaluate affordability and determine how we can address those challenges. See our Methodology document (.pdf) for more information.
Where are housing costs a burden to residents?
We can look at housing affordability as a balance (or imbalance) between available income and the price of housing. If increases in housing costs outpace income growth (let alone income decline or stagnation), then there’s a greater chance of a cost burden. To understand affordability, we relied on definitions and data from HUD, with the aim to identify areas where housing costs make up 30 percent or more of estimated household income. Households that pay 30 percent or more of income on housing are considered cost burdened: the idea being that if a household is paying that much of its income on rent or a mortgage, they may have difficulty affording other life necessities such as food, medical care, and transportation.
We used HUD’s Community Planning Development database to identify areas that have the highest number and share of households paying 30 percent or more of their income for housing. While the HUD data is based on the 2017-2021 American Community Survey (ACS), it still provides useful insight into affordability across the county.
Our review found that about 39,000 households in Dutchess County were cost burdened by housing– across every one of our towns, cities, and villages. Our most populated communities had the highest number of cost-burdened households. Combined, households in the City and Town of Poughkeepsie accounted for almost one-third of the county share.
Affordability also varied within a municipality. Looking at census tract level data, you can get a more granular sense of affordability differences. For example, the Northside tracts within the City of Poughkeepsie had the highest share of cost burdened households in the county – ranging from 65 percent to a staggering 82 percent – followed by nearby tracts in the Town of Poughkeepsie (north Arlington area) at about 55 percent. The Village of Wappingers Falls was the only other area in the county that had over half its households living with a housing cost burden.
HOUSING AFFORDABILITY IN DUTCHESS
In Dutchess County, almost 35% of households spend 30% or more of their income on housing – the generally accepted upper limit a household should spend on housing. Lower income households are especially likely to be cost burdened.
What transportation policies, services, and projects can make locations more affirdable?
Housing affordability is a complex issue, and we don’t pretend to have all the answers – Moving Dutchess Forward is a transportation plan after all. Yet transportation policies, projects, and programs must be considered in any conversation about housing. Safe, convenient, and reliable access, or the lack of it, affects our housing choices: it can expand or limit where we are able to live, and in turn, how much we pay to live there.
We can help households facing cost burdens by improving transportation safety and reliability, providing convenient transit access, and creating walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. We can focus our efforts by using the safety and reliability data presented in our Barriers to Safe Access and Reliable Access sections to see how these transportation issues intersect with our most cost burdened communities. For example, the City of Poughkeepsie’s Northside and Middle Main areas are home to intersections and streets identified as hotspots in our Safety Action Plan, while Wappingers Falls experiences traffic congestion and dangerous walking conditions across major highways. We can use this knowledge to shape our policies and target our investments to improve the location affordability of these areas.
We can concentrate our transportation investments on how and where transportation access poses a problem across our county, particularly in our most cost-burdened communities (we talk about this under Invest). For example, funding a variety of transportation options can help reduce the overall cost burden by lowering transportation costs, expanding access to more housing choices, and providing better access to job and educational opportunities
We can also support local land use decisions that provide more housing choices for a mix of incomes and family types. We can promote sensible policies at the county and local level, such as smaller lot sizes and zoning that allows for mixed housing types that provide more options for people (we talk more about this under Advocate).
What We Heard
“Our young adult daughter lives with us. Because of health issues, she does not drive. She wants to find full-time work but will have to move where there is affordable housing, public transportation, and access to her health services.”
– Moving Dutchess Forward survey
Our Role
Based on this analysis, our role could include the following:
- Work with County Planning to promote housing that supports mixed incomes and mixed uses and encourage those projects to provide walking, bicycling, and transit connections, which help reduce transportation costs.
- Promote housing opportunities near existing or proposed bus routes and rail stations.
- Reduce transportation safety and reliability issues across the county, regardless of the form of travel, with a focus on our most cost burdened communities.
- Evaluate and rethink transit services to best meet local needs, particularly in our most cost burdened communities.
- Target future transportation investment, especially for walking, bicycling, and transit infrastructure, with a focus on our most cost burdened communities.
- Maintain transportation infrastructure, especially for walking, bicycling, and transit, focusing on our most cost burdened communities.
- Consider access to housing, especially in our most cost burdened communities, when evaluating potential safety and congestion-related improvements. Use our Project Selection Framework to prioritize projects that improve access to basic needs like housing.
See our Barriers to Basic Needs Map for areas with housing cost burdens.