New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli will be the featured speaker Monday at a corporate breakfast in Tarrytown hosted by Community Housing Innovations Inc., a regional nonprofit affordable housing agency based in White Plains.
The breakfast program, “The Housing Affordability Crisis in Westchester: Meeting the Challenge,” will examine housing affordability issues in the region and existing CHI programs that provide home ownership and rental housing opportunities to teachers, laborers, retail workers and other working families and individuals.
In March, DiNapoli released a comptroller”™s report that found housing costs in New York rose sharply relative to income from 2000 to 2012. Statewide, more than half of renters and more than a third of homeowners are paying at least 30 percent of their incomes for housing. In Westchester, 40.5 percent of renters and 30.6 percent of homeowners are paying more than 30 percent of their incomes for housing, the study found. The federal government describes affordable housing costs as being less than 30 percent of household income.
An earlier report in March by Community Housing Innovations Executive Director Alexander Roberts found that Westchester has lost nearly 13 percent of its 25- to 34-year-olds since 2000, while that age group grew 3 percent nationwide in the same period. The percentage losses were greater in Westchester communities with the highest housing prices and least affordable housing, Roberts reported.
CHI provides grants of up to $25,000 for income-eligible, first-time homebuyers in Westchester. Since the program was launched in 1997, the agency has provided $12 million in state down-payment assistance to more than 500 first-time homebuyers in Westchester and on Long Island, along with free counseling to thousands of others.
The breakfast presentation will be from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at Abigail Kirsch at Tappan Hill in Tarrytown. Registration will begin at 7:30 a.m.
Tickets are $45 and can be purchased online at chigrants.org.
The event is sponsored by Continental Home Loans, O”™Connor Davies L.L.P., People”™s United Bank, Benchmark Title Agency L.L.C., Cannon Heyman and Weiss L.L.P., Community National Bank, M&T Bank, Mortgage Master and Total Management Corp.
There isn’t an affordable housing crisis. There IS a wage crisis.. For 35 years, middle class wages have declined or stagnated. Americans have been forced to take paycuts in order to compete with low wage workers in China, India, and Mexico. The crisis lstems from NAFTA, deregulation, globalization, and the de-unionizing of the American workforce. Bring manufacturing back to the US and the affordable housing crisis as well as many other government created problems will be solved.