I joined a zoning board recently. My small upstate rural hamlet, Ancram, sits next door to Copake, a summer redoubt for youth camps and a NYC arts and media crowd. The County teeters between blue and red, left and right. When we bought 32 years ago, an acquaintance sniffed, “oh, the Blue Collar Riviera.” In late 2023, the Town of Copake passed “A Local Law to Promote Affordable Housing,” reportedly replicating a similar law in Amenia.
When one town passes a law, neighbors seem to feel compelled to follow suit. I was sent the text to read. It was disturbing.
The virtue-signalling title is calculated to evoke the emotion of, why of course no one has any objection to “promoting” “affordable” housing for the “workforce”!
Nice goal. Strange, too, since Copake is full of small, relatively cheap housing, like the litter of camps and cottages around its lakes. But what does this law actually do? Well, if you ever want to subdivide a large parcel of empty land, expect to pay at least 20% or more of its value to low income housing. This you will be forced to build yourself, at your sole expense, in a venture that will likely end up as a loss. Low income units can be located elsewhere, but you still have to pay for it. Yourself. The units can then only be sold or leased to a restricted market of low income buyers. In itself, that suppresses value and kneecaps those who need to move out and sell a unit earlier than the minimum residency term set by the new law, of 10 years.
This isn’t a Town tax for low income housing to be sponsored by the Town. It’s a mandate that you build such housing on your own dime. This is grossly confiscatory. Subdivision into lots won’t be allowed unless you forfeit a big chunk of equity to change the Town demographics to “include” at least 20% “low income”—defined also to include, without regard to their wealth or incomes, government workers: state or municipal employees, firefighters, paramedics and veterans will also be eligible for these units.
Units are price and rent controlled. Heat, hot water and electricity reduces tenant rent, which is price-fixed at 25% of a “low income” figure as defined by HUD. So, if tenants run heat, hot water and air conditioning at full blast they won’t pay for that, you will—personally. If sold, the price is price-fixed at 30% of a local low income figure that is defined to cover annualized total cost of mortgage, taxes and insurance.
This dumps a public responsibility onto private landowners. Then, how much of this cheap housing is enough? The third subdivision built? The thirtieth? The requirement to flood the market with tiny homes never ends, if put into law. Eligibility data for units is also manipulable. Seniors with large assets, or people with fluctuating incomes, can buy in one of their low income years. All such regimes invite fraud, game-playing and corruption. Manhattan under rent control solved no social issues, as heavily lawyered wealthy elites can always exploit new legal complexity, that only a few can weave through. The intended victims of alleged disadvantage rarely benefit.
The law may also be NIMBY in disguise, as it can be expected to halt development cold. Seizing an owner’s equity as the cost of approval for a subdivision might after all do that.
The law is as ill-drafted as it is ill-conceived. Its own math doesn’t work. One example contradicts the just stated formula, in an odd clause that asserts propagandistically that the increase in density of a subdivision forced to load in low income units, is really a munificent “bonus” which benefits the owner. It’s not. It’s a rip off and probably unconstitutional, although burying a taking in a deceitful zoning law complicates that argument. Those who devised this communist nonsense about “inclusionary housing,” had to know this. It’s clearly intentional. Zoning has been known to pose this type of threat for decades.
Rent control famously destroys real estate markets. This law doesn’t just strip huge value out of real estate (whose owner must already pay state and federal capital gains tax) it also won’t help the poor. The government bureaucrats in the eligibility class are likeliest to be the ones to profit if any such units are ever built.
Property owners shouldn’t be extorted to pay for dubious public works social projects in exchange for an approval to subdivide. This law distorts a real estate market in this region that was extremely depressed for decades. It contrives not only to steal value from owners but to coopt their uncompensated slave labor to build and manage housing, at Town command.
DOTCOMMIE 