Birchez Associates LLC

Published: Wednesday, July 8, 2009
ULSTER PARK — A panel of federal and state representatives spent about an hour Tuesday explaining why the affordable housing market should be supported by local investment, but it wasn’t until the question of local need was raised that a human face was put on the charts and graphs.

Town of Ulster Supervisor Nick Woerner, a panelist who had been neither listed on the agenda nor recognized as an authority during the conference, said he had been raised in two affordable housing developments and found it important to help facilitate such projects whenever possible.

“To me, affordable housing is somewhat special because it goes further than that for me,” Woerner said. “Growing up in the city of Kingston, I lived in Rondout Gardens and Stuyvesant Charter (Apartments), which are two affordable housing projects.”

Woerner said the waiting list for such projects “is five times the available units, and that is a fairly safe number to assume these days. In some cases, depending on the project, those waiting lists are larger,” he said.

The conference panel, at the Birches at Esopus senior housing development, included U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Hurley; state Division of Housing and Community Renewal Commissioner Deborah VanAmerongen; James Logue, chief executive officer for Great Lakes Capital Fund; and Steven Aaron, founder and managing partner of Birchez Associates, which built the housing complex.

Among the goals of the conference was to develop support for Great Lakes Capital Fund to raise $30 million by the end of the year.

Woerner said the presence of local bankers among the 40 audience members was important because it would help them to recognize the level of support provided by state and federal programs.

“This is extremely important, and the key to continue providing affordable housing is having local banks begin to invest in funds like this,” Woerner said. “More importantly, it’s imperative that our local banks become more active partners. We do have banks now such as Ulster Saving Bank that does the federal home loan process for us.”

VanAmerongen said there was no number immediately available for how many people are waiting for affordable housing in the state. But “it’s thousands of families on a waiting list,” she said.

“We finance housing every year, and it often takes a year for a building to come through that construction process and get all the approvals that need to be done,” VanAmerongen said. “During that time, they hold lotteries for families — or, in some cases, seniors or persons with disabilities depending on the target market for that building — and they develop their waiting list from that. If you combine that with all of the buildings that have been in existence for 10 or 20 years, it would be tens of thousands just here in the Hudson Valley, probably, on those waiting lists.”

Aaron said the second phase of his Birches at Chambers project in the town of Ulster, has 300 people on a waiting list for 66 units.

“That list was from our 72-unit Phase 1,” he said. “So we’re talking, in most instances, literally years of waiting.”

Aaron said the conference was important enough for him to hire about a half dozen off-duty Kingston police officers to direct traffic from U.S. Route 9W to the Esopus complex on Ted Williams Drive, act as valets to park cars, watch over the entrance and patrol the hallway near the conference room.

Hinchey said it’s important for affordable housing providers like Birchez to be responsive to needs of residents.

Hinchey also encouraged local investment in future projects to “continue this movement….”