A $12.3 million Dutchess County Housing Trust Fund has been created to aid in bringing more affordable housing to the county. The fund was set up at the direction of Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro.
The plan called for three new programs to be conducted under the fund: the Housing Creation and Preservation (HCP) Program; the Infrastructure and Pre-Development Support (IPDS) Program; and a First-Time Homeownership (FTH) Program.
“As communities throughout the nation deal with housing challenges, Dutchess County is working on solutions” Molinaro said. “This sizeable investment represents the importance Dutchess County places on helping those who seek a place to call ”˜home”™ find it, whether that means rehabilitating current housing, or creating new units or offering financial assistance to those looking to buy their first home.”
HCP will concentrate on new affordable rental housing through new construction, rehabilitation of existing housing stock and adaptive reuse of nonresidential buildings. Money could be used for projects having all of their units in the affordable category or for projects offering housing to mixed-incomes. Single-room occupancy rental housing also would be eligible for funding.
The IPDS would help with the expansion or extension of water and sewer infrastructure for affordable and mixed-income housing developments. It also would help fund the development of generic environmental impact statements for new affordable or mixed-income housing projects.
FTH will support programs that help provide down payment and closing-cost assistance for low- and moderate-income first-time homebuyers who can afford a mortgage but lack savings to cover the down payment or closing costs. The program will also support construction or rehabilitation to create affordable homeownership opportunities for first-time homebuyers undertaken by nonprofit entities.
To initially support the Housing Trust Fund, Molinaro asked the Dutchess County Legislature to allocate $9.3 million in federal money the county was granted in the American Rescue Plan and an additional $3 million from the general fund balance.
Announcement of the Housing Trust Fund came just a few days after the county”™s Department of Planning and Development released its “2021 Rental Housing Survey” and a second report looking at for-sale housing in the county.
The rental survey found that the vacancy rate in market-rate apartment complexes hit a historic low of 0.6%, the lowest rate since the first version of the annual report was published in 1980. In contrast, the rate of apartment construction in Dutchess, at 417 new units, was the second highest in the past 15 years. Rents in Dutchess went up in 2021 by as much as 7.9% according to the report.
The county”™s “For-Sale Housing Report” found that the number of sales in 2021 rose 15% from 2020. The cities of Beacon and Poughkeepsie had the most active markets in 2021, with approximately 6.5% of the homes in Beacon and approximately 5.5% of the homes in Poughkeepsie changing hands. The report found that construction of new one-family homes remained low with 327 new homes built in 2021 compared with more than 1,000 new homes built each year during the early 2000s.
The report also found that the square footage of new homes and lot sizes fell in the last decade. In 2021 the median lot size for a single-family home was one acre, down from nearly 1.6-acres a decade ago, while the median square footage was 2,400, about 500 square feet less than in 2012.
