Adam Bosch crunches numbers for a living, converting data sets into reports that tell the story of the challenges facing the people of the Hudson Valley.
Bosch, a former journalist, is president and CEO of Pattern for Progress, a Newburgh-based research institute tracking trends across the nine-county Hudson Valley: Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester.
Pattern for Progress makes recommendations about childcare, access to broadband, poverty, migration and demographic shifts. More and more, its focus is on housing.
In a sea of housing data points, Bosch said there’s one number that knocked him over, a number that sums up, in a sobering nutshell, how difficult the Hudson Valley housing market is to crack. This number shows how far out of reach home ownership has become for so many.
“When you go into a bank and say, ‘Hey, I want a mortgage,’ the first thing they do is they look at your income and they look at your credit rating, and they spit out a letter to you that says ‘You will qualify for a mortgage off up to X,'” Bosch said.
The problem is that, in each county, families earning a median income qualify for mortgages that are $109,000 to $280,000 short of median-priced homes.
“There’s not a single county where the median earning family qualifies for a mortgage for the median-priced home,” Bosch said.
The median mortgage gap, by county
Here’s a look, county-by-county, at median sale prices in the second quarter of 2023, the mortgage needed to afford the median price (after a 6% down payment), and the mortgage gap for a two-person household with the median income for that county:
In Columbia County, a two-person household seeking a $450,000 median-priced home would fall $251,649 short.
In Dutchess County, a two-person household seeking a $414,000 median-priced home would fall $142,656 short.
In Greene County, a two-person household seeking a $346,000 median-priced home would fall $185,078 short.
In Orange County, a two-person household seeking a $395,000 median-priced home would fall $124,796 short.
In Putnam County, a two-person household seeking a $450,000 median-priced home would fall $109,609 short.
In Rockland County, a two-person household seeking a $588,000 median-priced home would fall $239,329 short.
In Sullivan County, a two-person household seeking a $275,000 median-priced home would fall $125,478 short.
In Ulster County, a two-person household seeking a $400,000 median-priced home would fall $181,727 short.
In Westchester County, a two-person household seeking a $650,000 median-priced home would fall $280,699 short.
What the mortgage gap means
The mortgage gap has already changed the face of the Hudson Valley, and has the potential to change it even further, Bosch said.
“It means that for the majority of our neighbors, homeownership is out of reach,” he said. “They are going to be in a rental for much longer than previous generations, and many of them will end up in rentals forever.”
Bosch was quick to point out that there’s nothing wrong with being in a rental. His parents never owned a home, he said. They didn’t want to clean gutters and mow grass. But his parents had a choice. The current housing market and wage levels are taking that choice from thousands of people across the Hudson Valley.
“For whatever proportion of people who want to own a home, fewer and fewer of them are going to find that it’s something they can fiscally pull off,” Bosch said. “That puts additional stress on the rental market, drives the demand for rentals up, pushes the cost of rentals up, and it exacerbates the housing stress at all levels.”
While the Hudson Valley is still predominantly an owner-occupied region, by a 2-to-1 margin, Bosch said: “We continue to see the number of renter-occupied households increasing at a much greater pace than the number of owner-occupied households. The last data we had, there’s about 592,000 owner-occupied households and about 295,000 renter-occupied households. But the increase is much greater in the renter occupied when you compare 2010 to 2022.”
With demand up for rentals, those renters are paying more.
Rents soaring, too, leaving no options for many
Each year, Bosch’s group issues its “Out of Reach” trends report on the rental housing market. In 2023, that report found that over the past five years, rents rose between 25-45%, with inflation putting the basic costs of living — food, transportation, healthcare, and more — out of reach. It concluded that “even with long work hours or multiple jobs, most renters in our region struggle to pay for rent and modest living costs.”
For years, Pattern for Progress has documented the impact of the housing shortage on life in the Hudson Valley, from a rise in homelessness to an inability to house a workforce. These effects lead to “long waits for plumbers and electricians, restaurants and small businesses that struggle to find help, limited childcare and home health aid workers, and various other economic conditions.”
The stress of not being priced out of the home ownership choice, and facing a white-hot rental market, Bosch said, forces some to exercise a different choice “to pick up and vamoose.”
In an April 2023 Pattern report, “The Great People Shortage and its Effects on the Hudson Valley,” Pattern reported a net exodus of 130,000 residents in the region since 1996.
“According to a 2023 U.S. Census Bureau survey, the most cited reasons for leaving New York State were housing-related, including the search for more affordable and higher-quality housing opportunities elsewhere in the country,” the report said. “Two-thirds of those who left New York in 2022-2023 due to housing-related reasons relocated to the neighboring state of New Jersey.”
Other Pattern reports
Pattern for Progress has been cranking out findings on the housing market across the Hudson Valley:
Last month, it created Rockland’s first comprehensive community and affordable housing needs assessment. It found that in the first quarter of 2023, Rockland’s median sale price of homes passed Westchester’s for the first time, reaching an all-time high of $573,000 and making home prices in Rockland among the highest in New York state.
In January 2024, Pattern’s Center for Housing Solutions & Community Initiatives issued “Local Zoning, Regional Needs,” a report that reviewed the statewide policy decisions made by New York’s neighboring states, and how the Empire State has lagged in creating affordable housing mandates.
Then there’s “Moving In, Moving Out,” a special report issued mid-2023 that crunched IRS migration data to see how the first full year of the pandemic created a spike in housing prices here.
Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Hudson Valley NY home ownership less likely due to mortgage gap
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