In the Hudson Valley, everyone acknowledges a critical need for more housing that workers and young families can afford. So when this year”™s RUPCO Community Award winner looked out over his influential audience, Michael Berg couldn”™t resist delivering a message.
Berg is executive director of Family of Woodstock, a nonprofit social service agency with a $15 million annual budget that administers programs ranging from homeless shelters and teen support programs to soup kitchens. At their annual lunch Oct. 12, the Rural Ulster Preservation Company called RUPCO gave Family of Woodstock the award “for 40 years of servicing people of need.”
Accepting the award on behalf of Family of Woodstock, Berg noted his long involvement with the Ulster County Housing Consortium seeking to reverse the housing shortage in the county and region that has worsened with each passing decade.
“Speaking from my heart,” Berg said, “the effort has been tremendous but we”™re not succeeding yet. The communities are not welcoming community housing. And I look around this room; I see community leaders and business leaders. We need you to speak up, to say we won”™t have a work force unless you build family housing. It is urgent.”
Berg said good jobs can only be created in places with housing for workers; and young people can only afford to stay in a region if there is housing to raise a family. “If everyone in this room will take responsibility,” he said, town boards and planning boards will welcome such housing.
The change could be a dramatic upsurge in new housing, “So RUPCO doesn”™t have to spend $1 million and 6 years to get 53 units that were desperately needed years ago.”
Berg was referring to Woodstock Commons, the $14.1 million, 53-unit affordable housing project that was approved this summer by the Woodstock town planning board and won full funding from the state housing administration. The approval effort took more than five years despite the fact RUPCO was invited to build an affordable housing project in the town by Woodstock”™s affordable housing committee.
Brian Lawlor, the state commissioner for Homes and Community Renewal, who was the keynote speaker at the lunch, cited Woodstock Commons as the sort of visionary housing that state officials will support in a time of reduced resources for government and increasing public need. Woodstock Commons has 52 units on seven acres of the 28-acre site and will seek LEED certification for its energy efficiency, including using geothermal heating and cooling. It will provide housing both for starter families and senior citizens in the same complex, an intergenerational approach that Lawlor lauded.
He said the project meets the new model his agency is developing when deciding where to disburse funding, by using partnerships, leveraged funding and environmentally sensitive construction. “The fundamentals of Woodstock Commons are strong, we know there is a need, there are many partners and the leveraging is really impressive,” said Lawlor. “The outcome, I think, will be spectacular.”
But at only 52 units, it will barely begin to address the need. In 2009, a joint housing study by the planning department of Ulster, Orange and Dutchess county determined that Ulster required 16,000 total units of affordable houses and apartments by 2020, Dutchess County would need 25,000 housing units, and Orange would need 31,000 affordable units.
