Buckle Up
Last month the planning departments of Ulster, Dutchess, and Orange Counties released a joint study they’d been working on since 2007 about the affordability of housing in our region. The picture it paints isn’t pretty. For the ten years ending in 2006, median home prices rose almost 10% a year, from $95,000 to $245,000. Prices of course, have dropped since that peak, but household income for the past 13 years has only risen about 4% a year. And so coupled with rising energy costs and property taxes, fewer and fewer of us can actually afford to buy homes and many struggle with the ones they have. Two years ago our county planners told us that to afford a median-priced home here requires a household income of at least $72,000. Plenty of us aren’t making that, and this newest study details how this “affordability gap” in Ulster County is going to keep growing, even in a depressed housing market. If you care to read the particulars, they’re at www.co.ulster.ny.us/planning/ucpb/house/tricounty/ucdata,pdf.
Those years prior to the end of 2007 when we officially entered the recession, those were the GOOD years. The bad years are just beginning, and according to the study, “...the next 15 years or so will likely be very different than the last 15… with relatively restrained economic growth expected.” How restrained exactly? Well through 2020, employment is projected to grow only about 3⁄4 of 1 percent per year, and our annual economic output will only grow about twice that rate. These are not good numbers. The only consolation and it’s scant, is we’re in the same boat as just about every exurban county in the Northeast. And while the boat may or may not feel like it’s sinking depending on how dry your feet are, it’s also not going anywhere terribly fast.
So what can do we do to help ourselves? Well we think the answer is we try and plan and position for the future as well as we can, and hold on for a long, difficult ride like on the Old Plank Road. We need to redouble our efforts at building infrastructure and long term opportunities for a diversified and sustainable local economy. We need to protect our unique scenic resources and invest in the quality of life and recreational opportunities that draw new families and investment here. And we need to maintain the best school system we possibly can, and strengthen our institutions and our local safety net including food and energy production.
But what we shouldn’t do is try and tell ourselves that economic growth lies in simply marketing our assets better, or that pie-in-the-sky development prospects will materialize anytime soon. We live in a world where real projects from single family homes to major commercial developments all need real financing through an investment climate that can support them. And to imagine that’s about to emerge within any reasonably foreseeable time horizon is just projection that’s unsupported at this point by anything more substantial.
So how practically, do we best deal with these prospects? One key answer we think, is that taking care of each other means we have to find ways to be FAIR to each other. But to do that we’ll need to come to grips with the inequities we’ve allowed to persist for far too long. In Shandaken the central issue of fairness is taxes; who pays what, and why the town hasn’t had a property revaluation in 32 years. Some in Shandaken pay taxes based on 100% of their property’s market value. Others pay their taxes on closer to 30%. And nobody from either political party has for years, said boo about it. So some, mainly newer property owners, go on paying at several times the rate others do, while others continue paying based on a fraction of their property’s value. Our town board won’t deal with it because they’re afraid if they try and establish local taxation that’s actually fair to everyone, some people’s taxes will ultimately go up and they won’t be reelected. So the inequities continue based on the enormous power of the town’s tax assessors and the reality that the system is heavily weighted against all individual assessment challenges. Shandaken’s only hope for fair taxat ion is with town government, which frankly has failed us on this. Just as every town government before it has also failed us, though none quite so egregiously as the previous one.
In Olive, the fairness issues are more diffuse, more subsurface. We see them in process issues like zoning and planning, and the ways in which the town’s political leadership does or doesn’t factor in those it sees as outside of its support base. But such problems aren’t unique either to Olive or to our region. And neither are the core issues of land use, public policy, and the planning & zoning conflicts that typify areas like ours as they transition from fairly isolated rural towns to exurban bedroom and second-home communities. These are our region’s central issues and have been since the 1960’s.
Forty years ago when the Catskill Center for Conservation & Development was founded, most people found its name vaguely comical. Back then, many of us held to a more simplistic view than we do today, a view that the two concepts are antithetical. But time and recent years have proven that the name and the idea were genuinely prescient. And most of us do understand that finding a balance between the concepts is critical to the “smartgrowth” initiatives now so central to statewide planning efforts. So we honor the vision of the Center’s founders, and note the hugely important role it’s come to play in advocating on behalf of all of our communities in the Catskills. That’s the kind of homegrown vision we need for the future and growing it is everyone’s job.
BP