We used HUD’s Community Planning Development Systems database to identify areas that have the highest number and share of households paying 30 percent or more of their income on housing. While the HUD data is based on the 2011-2015 American Community Survey (ACS), it still provides useful insight into affordability across the county. We will update this analysis when new data becomes available.

Our analysis found that about 43,000 households in Dutchess County are cost burdened by housing. These households are spread across every one of our towns, cities, and villages. Our most populated communities have the highest number of cost burdened households. The City and Town of Poughkeepsie have 12,700 such households or almost 30 percent of the countywide share. The City and Town of Poughkeepsie together with the towns of East Fishkill, Hyde Park, and Wappinger account for over half of the cost burdened households in the county.

But affordability can vary within a municipality, just as it does within a county. The HUD database allows us to assess affordability within our communities at the census tract level. This more focused look found that the Middle Main section of the City of Poughkeepsie had the highest share of cost burdened households at 67 percent, followed by tracts in the City’s Northside area at 58 percent. Overall, in six of the eight census tracts in the City, more than half the households experience a cost burden. Tracts in the City of Beacon, Village of Rhinebeck, and the Town of Poughkeepsie also had at least half of their households living with a cost burden.

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.

A variety of transportation options can help mitigate the impact of high housing costs, by lowering transportation costs, expanding access to more housing choices, and providing better access to job and educational opportunities. 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 also look at programs that connect people to jobs and educational opportunities that raise incomes. And we can support local land use decisions that provide more housing choices for a mix of incomes and family types.

First, we can look at promoting sensible transportation and housing policies (such as smaller lot sizes and zoning that allows for mixed housing types) at the county and local level to shape a transportation system and housing landscape that provides options for more people (we talk more about this under Advocate). Second, we can make smarter decisions about how and where we invest our transportation dollars (we talk about this under Invest). And third, we can concentrate on how and where transportation access poses a problem across our county, and particularly in our most cost-burdened communities: those areas where at least half of households pay 30 percent or more of their income on housing.

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 with very high crash rates; the northern part of the City of Beacon is home to severe traffic congestion; and the Village of Rhinebeck has limited bus service. We can use this knowledge to shape our policies and target our investments to improve the location affordability of these areas.