While the entire region continues to suffer from a housing crisis in general and an affordable housing crisis in particular, Kingston is looking for new solutions to a very tough problem.

Bartek Starodaj is the director of Housing Initiatives for Kingston, a City Hall office that has been at the forefront in supporting affordable housing. In a recent interview, he told Kingston Wire that he became inspired to take on this role after frequently visiting Kingston while at Bard College, where he studied environmental studies as an undergraduate and environmental politics as a graduate.

“When I first moved to Kingston, I was pretty easily able to find a place to rent, and it was pretty affordable,” Starodaj said. “I know that would be difficult to replicate now, if I was just starting out in Kingston, which is a real shame, because everyone deserves housing that is affordable to them.”

After graduating from Bard, Starodaj spent a few years living in Washington D.C. working for the German Marshall Fund of the United States in its Urban Program. This would motivate him to pursue local politics. “I think I realized while being involved with those discussions, [that] hey, wouldn’t it be great to take some of these best practices and learnings and apply it toward a place I really care about and feel I can make a difference,” he said. “Because despite the fact it can move quite slowly at times and be very bureaucratic, in terms of being able to positively impact an individual’s day-to-day quality of life … there’s no better place to make that impact than local government.”

Starodaj was one of the original board members of the Kingston City Land Bank, a nonprofit that acquires abandoned properties owned by the City of Kingston and fixes up the houses into places to live for first-time homebuyers at an affordable cost. While there are a number of land banks both in our area and across the country, the KCLB is one of the few that focuses on affordable housing by getting homes in the hands of working families. After a couple of years, he went to City Hall to take on the job of director of housing initiatives.

The Department of Housing Initiatives was opened by Mayor Steve Noble in 2019. “The mayor recognized that the housing issue may have been historically ignored in the city, so recognizing the need to tackle the housing crisis, he created the department.”

The department focuses on all issues related to housing, from zoning to managing funds to policy. “A lot of my day is communicating with residents and property owners, and the phone lines are always busy,” he said. “You’re serving the residents of Kingston. It’s great to not be sitting behind a cubicle and speaking to no one; you’re speaking to residents.”

As someone with a background in environmentalism, Starodaj finds a connection between the issue of affordable housing with environmental concerns. When it comes to the Land Bank, for example, existing properties being used for housing means that undeveloped areas do not need to be disturbed. The Mid-Hudson Valley has numerous mountain ranges, state parks and farms; Ulster County in particular is predominately rural and small-town in nature. As a result, housing has become a very keen supply-and-demand issue, with limited options to build new units. “We in Kingston have a special responsibility because we are the largest city in Ulster County … but what I also think is true is that everyone, every jurisdiction, should also do their share,” Starodaj said. “Because in this city we do not have enough land to meet the entire housing needs of the county … when we don’t build enough housing in our urban areas, we have these fights about building housing in areas that are ecologically sensitive … we should be building in areas that are already developed, not in forests, or large protected areas.”

While the Hudson Valley used to be known for a lower cost of living than New York City and surrounding areas and Kingston was 30 years ago just about the cheapest place to live in the area, in some places fair market rents have increased by as much as 45 percent since 2019, according to a report published by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress. This means that small businesses and middle-class individuals and families are increasingly being pushed out of Kingston and the Hudson Valley in general, in what Starodaj calls a “loss of human capital.”

“The demand for housing is strong, meaning that the rental vacancy rates are low, so it’s difficult to find housing, it’s difficult to find another place to live if you need to move because your rent is being raised or you have a housing conditions issue,” Starodaj said.

Kingston is part of the Ulster County Housing Smart Communities Initiative, which encourages municipalities to adopt Housing Smart Actions and receive support from the Ulster County Planning Department to adopt policies that support affordable housing.

As for policies to protect tenants’ rights, Kingston was the first city north of Yonkers to adopt the Emergency Tenant Protection Act, which stabilizes rent in buildings with six or more units built before 1974. Kingston was also in the forefront of the Good Cause Eviction movement; while its own law was repealed after other cities’ similar laws were thrown out in court, the city was one of the first to opt in to the new statewide Good Cause Eviction legislation.

But the pro-housing initiative with the potential of doing the most good is the city’s new “Kingston Forward” zoning code. Adopted in August 2023, the innovative code is designed to “make it easier to develop in Kingston while protecting what makes our city so unique.” Its priorities range from allowing old buildings to be repurposed as housing and legalizing accessory dwelling units (ADUs), to introducing mandates and incentives for affordable housing and diversifying housing types, prices and locations.

“Broadly speaking,” Starodaj said, “my vision is for a city that is welcoming, has a variety of housing types everywhere, where there is supply of rental and homeownership, homes available, and a city that’s a leader regionally when it comes to housing property and production.”