Affordable housing and the Millbrook comprehensive plan in Millbrook

The issue of affordable housing (housing that costs less than 30 percent of gross income) in Millbrook has been a surprisingly hot topic in discussions about the comprehensive plan update, with many participants insisting that it has no place in our list of goals or even in our discussions. Here are three reasons why I think it should be part of our plan (these are my own personal thoughts and do not represent the views of the Comprehensive Plan Update Committee or anyone else).

First, for our plan to be legal, we will probably need to provide in some way for affordable housing. I am not at all an expert on the law, but advice that we have received from our consultant (River Street) and the town’s attorney strongly suggests to me that any plan that does not at least allow for the real possibility of affordable housing runs the serious risk of being struck down as exclusionary.

Exclusionary plans have cost other towns large legal fees when they were successfully sued, and forced towns to go back and redo their comprehensive plans, both of which I would like to avoid.

It seems to me to be far more sensible to write a comprehensive plan that explicitly addresses affordable housing in the context of the other goals that we want to achieve (preservation of scenery, water resources, biodiversity and so on) than to remain silent about affordable housing and hope that we are not sued, or if we are sued, that we can then come up with something defensible to say about why the plan is not exclusionary.

Some have made the sensible suggestion that the town look to the village of Millbrook or other nearby municipalities to provide affordable housing, but the courts have said that municipalities cannot rely solely on other municipalities to provide affordable housing.

 A recent case in the town of Montgomery (Orange County) is instructive. The town of Montgomery contains the villages of Montgomery and Walden. Among other things, the town argued that affordable housing opportunities were available in these villages, but the court ruled that affordable housing “is not accomplished by abrogating control to others.†This lawsuit cost the town of Montgomery $561,790, plus their own legal fees.

So my first reason for including affordable housing in our comprehensive plan is that the law says that we must permit the development of affordable housing if there is a local or regional need, and it seems most sensible to be explicit about how our plan provides that opportunity.

If we are silent about affordable housing, we run the risk of having our plan overturned, incurring large expenses and inconveniences and ultimately losing our chance to provide the opportunity for affordable housing to be developed in a way that is most compatible with our other important goals.

Second, contrary to frequently repeated statements that our community is not concerned about affordable housing, the survey results (available at surveymonkey.com) in fact showed a substantial level of interest in this issue, especially among residents who have low income, rent or are young.

These parts of our community are badly underrepresented in the survey responses and public meetings, although they form important parts of our present-day and future communities. Members of these underrepresented groups showed a strong interest in the issue of affordable housing: 40 percent of renters “strongly agreed†that affordable housing was a priority issue (37 percent of housing units in the town are rentals), 32 percent of people with a household income less than $50,000 a year (38 percent of town residents have household incomes less than $50,000 a year) agreed, as did 32 percent of residents 20 to 40 years old (almost 40 percent of town residents).

I believe that young people, renters and people of modest means have an important place in our town’s future and that their level of concern about affordable housing is too high to dismiss.

Third, I believe that the scarcity of affordable housing threatens to radically change the character of our town over the next few decades.

The strongest message I have heard in public meetings, the survey results and conversations with town residents is that people really like the town the way it is, and that the updated comprehensive plan should strive to preserve that essential character. The widening gap between income and housing costs threatens that essential character.

The data collected for the community profile (washingtonny.org) shows that the ratio of housing costs to income has been rising over the long term (not just during the recent real estate bubble). This trend was noted with concern on the first page of the town’s 1987 comprehensive plan.

According to the 2000 census data (the most recent good data we have), about one-third of households in the town, both owners and renters, already are “cost-burdened†by housing (based on the standard definition that gross housing costs exceed 30 percent of gross income).

Many other town residents can afford their current homes only because they bought them decades ago, before real estate prices rose. These people would be unable to afford housing in the town if they moved here today.

Thus, there is every reason to believe that it will become more and more difficult for the kind of people who live in the town today to live here tomorrow.

How might increasingly unaffordable housing affect the character of the town? If affordable housing is available only in nearby municipalities, then people of modest means will be drawn away, and the town of Washington could become an enclave of the wealthy. At least some businesses might follow. Local employers may find it difficult to recruit employees or have to pay more to recruit and retain employees.

I don’t know if these changes actually will occur, but it seems to me that they at least merit serious discussion by our community.

I think that any of these three reasons — legal constraints, community interest and concern for undesirable change — would by itself be enough to put affordable housing on our agenda as a goal. Taken together, I think that they place affordable housing as one of the central issues that the comprehensive plan must address.

I understand that some pathways for achieving affordable housing (high rises in the hay fields) have unacceptable effects that clash with other important planning goals (preserving rural character, protecting water resources and the like).

And I understand that housing costs are driven by regional and even global forces that are completely beyond our town’s control.

However, similar objections could be raised for our other goals. Does the possibility that the Asian long-horned beetle will spread to our region and destroy our forests and scenic vistas mean that we should abandon our goals of preserving forests and scenery, because there is precious little that the town can do about this invader? Does the fact that the viability of farming will depend on regional milk prices and climate change as much as on anything the town can do mean that we should abandon the goal of keeping agriculture alive in the town?

Because we think these goals are worth pursuing, we leave them on the table and see what the town can do, and we should do the same for affordable housing.

It seems to me that the best course of action is to keep affordable housing on the table as a goal and look hard at whether there are effective strategies that we can pursue that will increase the possibility that housing in the future will be affordable while not unacceptably compromising our ability to reach the other goals that our community believes to be important.

The alternative — dismissing affordable housing as unimportant to our community’s future — risks costly legal action, disregards the opinions of a large part of our community and ignores the possibility that housing costs will eliminate the kind of town that so many of us love.

David Strayer is a freshwater ecologist who has lived in the village of Millbrook for 18 years. He serves as a member on the town of Washington’s Comprehensive Plan Update Committee and chair of its Environmental Resources Subcommittee. He also sits on the Conservation Advisory Commission.

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