A Practical Solution For Our County’s Housing Crisis

By Al Bellenchia

Firstly, I want to invite everyone to Columbia-Greene Habitat for Humanity’s upcoming Community Celebration on May 2nd at our new ReStore location in Livingston, which marks the beginning of the next chapter for our organization. Everyone is welcome to come learn more about our vision and plans, how to support Habitat, meet our team, and tour a prototype home being built on-site that reflects our new direction: modern, energy-efficient homes designed to be safe, sustainable, and scalable. 

We’re eager to tell you all about our strategic plan and the Rural Starter Home Initiative (RSHI), which focuses on average-wage, middle-income workers in our community who have been priced out of homeownership due to rising home costs and property taxes. We’re seeing this nationwide: working residents (teachers, technicians, health care, and service workers) no longer able to live sustainably in the areas they serve. Years in the making, RSHI offers a practical “shovel ready” solution.

More on the problem:

According to Wikipedia, the phrase “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics” was popularized by Mark Twain, who dubiously attributed it to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The saying has been used over the years to mock the use of facts and stats to support weak arguments.

Last fall, I attended an economic and workforce development meeting for our two-county service area where the economic and demographic facts presented were damnable, despite being neither disputable nor weak. Any controversy about them stems solely from disagreement over which actions are needed to counter the trends that spell trouble for our region.

The presenter was the head of Hudson Valley Patterns for Progress, a research organization focused on NY’s Hudson Valley region. Habitat has also partnered with them on our own research into the impact of local property taxes on housing affordability, which led to groundbreaking legislation that was passed in the summer of 2025.

The facts they presented were sobering and arresting:

• The median-earning family in the region falls short of qualifying for a mortgage on the median-priced home by $102K to $353K, an increase from the 2024 gap of $99K to $280K. Even four-person households cannot afford homeownership in the Hudson Valley's current market.

• The median housing price in Columbia & Greene Counties has increased 101% and 97%, respectively, in the past five years.

• Based on current trends, if [individuals and families earning a median wage] do not currently own their own home in our region, it is unlikely they will ever be able to do so.

• The population of most Hudson Valley counties is shrinking and aging. Births are down across the region. Those moving in are predominantly older (55+).

• We are losing population in the prime earning and child-rearing ages (35-54). This means our localities have fewer school children, fewer working-age residents, and fewer prime consumers to fuel their economies.

• Projections show our regional workforce will shrink by between 100,000 and 150,000 workers over the next one to two decades. The vast majority (more than 75%) of businesses in our service area employ 10 or fewer people; thus, each vacancy has an immense impact. And, as these business owners seek to retire, who will they turn to, to inherit their enterprises? If the businesses don’t survive the aging of the Boomers, the potential economic impact will be severe.

Alarms need to be going off in town halls and economic development offices. The data should be spurring action to keep essential, median-wage workers in our communities. They should be setting off talk of a “moon shot” to site and construct housing accessible to these workers who are migrating outside of the region.

More on the solution:

“You cannot predict the future, but you can create it.” - Peter Drucker

While frustrating, even maddening, our fate is not yet cast. It is not yet hopeless, and we are not helpless. We have the ability to increase the production of housing that’s affordable to our median-wage workers. There are state incentives available to help finance these projects.

What we need now is a coalition of the willing to update zoning and other practices that are now counterproductive to smart, planned development. Small clusters of starter homes sited responsibly can unlock our frozen markets.

The good news is that we are making progress as more communities and citizens recognize the need for swifter action. Getting there took time, and we are now at a tipping point: if we can get our communities to collaborate, progress will accelerate. That’s our goal: more progress now.

Our little Habitat for Humanity operation was a pioneer in creating energy-efficient, affordable housing. Our passive-energy townhouses in the City of Hudson, built in the early 2010s, were the first of their kind in the country. In all, four duplex units were built there, and one each in the Village of Valatie and the hamlet of Ancramdale, for a total of a dozen passive-energy affordable homes built in about a decade.

COVID-19 and its aftermath radically changed the nature of our organization, as it did for so many others. The economics that underpinned our operations — relying on a mostly volunteer-driven organization — no longer worked. Spikes in the cost of construction materials, coupled with supply disruptions, meant we could no longer fund the energy-efficient homes we were building and remain solvent.

The migration of people out of New York City into our rural communities poured accelerant on an already hot and supply-constrained housing market. Remote work exacerbated a growing disparity of income and wealth, and crowded out local average-wage residents in the market for goods and services, especially housing. This has not abated.

Foundational aspects of our organization's functioning were also adversely affected, including volunteering, philanthropy, competition for labor, and the donation of land, materials, and dollars. The evaporation of inexpensive building sites and low-cost labor through volunteerism became acute challenges.

We were not alone in this new reality: Over the past decade or so, about a third of Habitat affiliates in NY state have ceased to function. Nationwide, the affiliate attrition has also been significant. Many have been smaller operations serving rural areas.

This is where we stood when I took over as executive director in early 2021. Thankfully, we also had many tangible and intangible assets to leverage. And that’s where we focused: a clean sheet of paper, but rebuilding from our strengths.

The strategic plan we developed called for us to build more and more often in more communities. It also called on us to innovate, expand our range of services, and be more active and visible in informing and educating our market about housing facts and potential solutions.

We developed two initiatives to bring our plans to life: “Habitat Helping Hands,” our repair and education program, and our Rural Starter Home Initiative.

Our Rural Starter Home was created to address the fundamental issues I’ve cited above and to align with NY and federal grant and funding programs that encourage the construction of energy-efficient housing at scale.

Working with a local architect, we developed a design that met several criteria:

• Build costs not to exceed $250,000, including well & septic (most of our communities do not have municipal infrastructure).

• Energy-efficient, net-zero-ready, and using sustainable materials.

• Flexible design to offer size and space options for a range of family sizes and needs.

• Able to be clustered in light-density developments.

• Scalable, panelized production: capable of being produced on site or in a factory-like setting to offer economies of scale and workforce training opportunities. Easily transportable to building sites.

• Volunteer-friendly (our earlier passive townhouses were not.)

• Affordable at 30% of income (the standard for affordability) for average-wage workers.

In Spring 2024, we broke ground on a 1/2-acre lot we purchased in an established community of modest ranch-like homes. Construction started at the NY State Capitol grounds, as part of Habitat NY State’s biennial “Capitol Build Day.” There, some 300 volunteers came together to build the home's panels, following assembly plans created by our construction team. It became proof of concept that this design could be constructed off-site and easily transported.

The house is now complete and waiting for a family. We are making progress on securing more sites to construct clusters of these homes. 

This is what we are excited to share more about with attendees on May 2nd. We’ve built a model home directly next to our new ReStore, and it will be ready for you to step inside. In addition to the tours, we plan to celebrate the supporters who help us build, hear from key members of the community, and look forward, together, to define our future.

Thanks for reading. Hope to see you there.

Al Bellenchia

Columbia-Greene Habitat for Humanity - Building On Our Foundation

Saturday, May 2, 2026 | 11AM - 2PM

3521 US-9, Hudson, NY 12534