Is Homeownership Out of Reach in the Hudson Valley?

  |  September 27, 2013
house-for-sale

We keep this blog going in part because we believe that affordable housing (and by that we mean housing that people of regular old means can afford) is a mission. It’s a need that can’t really be met within New York City, and so we scour the Hudson Valley and the Catskills to find homes that do meet our criteria. And, usually, there are lots of them. (Not that we have anything against luxurious homes — we look at those, too!)

So we were a bit confused to read this news story about a report called “Housing in the Hudson Valley: American Dream Revised,” compiled by  the Center for Housing Solutions at Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress. “Among its findings was a precipitous decline in home mortgage applications in the Hudson Valley,” writes the Hudson Valley Reporter. “…conventional mortgage applications dropped 80 percent between 2005 and 2011. The report revealed that would-be homeowners submitted 30,327 mortgage applications in 2005 and that number dropped to 5,909 in 2011.”

Well, not a total shocker. There was that little thing called the Great Recession in there. Might have been more instructive to find out if they’re on the up and up again now that we are, apparently, coming back from the brink. The conclusion of the authors is that we need to improve our inventory of rental housing to make up for the mortgage decline.

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