SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — Affordable rental apartments that are nowhere to be found. A building boom that leaves locals out in the cold.

Here in Sullivan County, the post-pandemic eviction rate remains stubbornly high. Hundreds of people are homeless, a troubling number of them families. When they look for a place to live, they find rents have risen as much as 45 percent in the past five years. Homeownership, too, is increasingly out of reach: The median-earning family is unqualified—by a mile—for a mortgage on a median home.

Everyone agrees housing in Sullivan County is in crisis.

Many of the newer members of the legislature, such as Matt McPhillips (D, 1), ran for office vowing to tackle the problem.

The legislature is considering two proposals to address the problem: One would establish a housing trust fund and the other would turn a dormitory at SUNY Sullivan into county housing. The county says it can no longer accommodate its unhoused population permanently in motels. 

But some legislators also support a proposed state law that would make evictions easier.

All this is happening amid a building boom. The revenue the county collects from mortgage taxes has tripled in fewer than 10 years—from $469,369 in 2012 to $1,706,851 in 2021, the height of the pandemic—and is still double the 2012 amount (see sidebar). 

Evictions are stubbornly high

The pandemic-era moratorium on evictions brought a rare respite to Sullivan County. But after New York lifted its moratorium in January 2022, Sullivan’s eviction rate rose to the sixth-highest in the state, with 8.3 percent of all renters evicted that year, according to the Cornell ILR Eviction Filings Dashboard for New York State.

And the high rate doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In 2023, the Office of the Sullivan County Sheriff conducted 401 evictions. In just the first three months of 2024, the sheriff’s office conducted 147 evictions. If the rest of 2024 continues apace, evictions will increase by more 45 percent over last year.

“The undersheriff said we have so many evictions,” Luis Alvarez (D, 6) told the legislature’s public safety committee in April.

“Our civil division has been very busy,” said Undersheriff Eric Chaboty.

“New York has made a mess out of it,” said Nick Salomone (R, 4). Salomone blamed laws that protect squatters, including people who break into houses owned by seasonal residents, and said he wants to work with the sheriff and county attorney to restrict squatters’ rights.

The Rockland County Legislature supports an Assembly bill (www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2023/A6894) that would exclude squatters from the legal definition of “tenant.” Thomas Cawley, the county’s parliamentarian, offered to draw up a version of the letter for Sullivan County legislators to send.

Chaboty urged Cawley to draft the letter “right away.” Cawley said he will present it at the next public safety meeting.

JoAnne Omar, a member of the Senior Legislative Action Committee (SLAC), objected to the tone of Chaboty’s report.

“I don’t know if he did or didn’t intend it like this, but [the number of evictions] almost sounded like trophies,” Omar said during the public comment session. “What happened to those people? What happened to their children?... And that’s why we need affordable housing. It really almost made me cry, the way he was reporting it.”

Homelessness strikes families

As of early April, Sullivan County has 288 documented cases of homelessness, according to John Liddle, the county commissioner of Health and Human Services (HHS). That number includes a “troubling number of families”—just over 100 children, about 42 families, he said.

HHS does not have a shelter for the homeless. Instead, it rents blocks of rooms in Liberty (Knights Inn, Budget Inn, Lincoln Motel, Liberty Motel) and Monticello (Super 8 and the Inn at Monticello).

But the Knights Inn has sub-par living conditions and a history of drug activity.

“We try to put our families in hotel rooms that have kitchenette space to make it a little bit better,” said Liddle. “Unfortunately, we just don’t have the capacity to go beyond that.”

The families who live in hotels are at a disadvantage. “We’re limited in what we can provide as far as in hotel buildings versus in a shelter,” he said.

A grand jury told the county to stop housing people in motels. “There should be a complete rethinking of the use of motels to house vulnerable populations in Sullivan County,” said the damning 100-page report published in early January. It was issued in response to the death of Akasha Luvert, an infant who ingested a lethal mix of fentanyl and xylazine at the Knights Inn in May 2023.

The county is considering turning SUNY Sullivan’s Lazarus I. Levine Residence Hall (“Laz Hall”) into a shelter. Liddle and a case manager toured Laz Hall with Sean Welsh, SUNY Sullivan’s vice president for administrative services, to explore the possibility, but the concept has not yet been endorsed by the county legislature or the college’s board of trustees.

The dorm has been progressively closing down because of its dilapidated roof. The last students expected to live there are scheduled to move out at the end of the semester. 

The idea of using Laz Hall did not receive a warm welcome from some residents. Sandra Cuellar Oxford, a county resident and advocate for undocumented people, said using Laz Hall would be “a disservice to the unhoused population.”

“Our kids deserve better,” she said.

The college is also struggling financially. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education sent SUNY Sullivan a notice of noncompliance in November, warning that its accreditation is in jeopardy.

The rent is too high

If you think the rent is too high in Sullivan County, a recent study backs you up. The gap between the average renter’s hourly wage and the average rent for a one-bedroom is 64 cents. For a two-bedroom, the gap widens to $3.91. That means a renter—with an annual wage falling $1,333 short for a one-bedroom and $8,130 short for a two-bedroom—would have to work two jobs.

The 2023 Study for Housing Solutions and Community Initiatives by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, a nonprofit that provides research, planning and educational training, rents across the region have increased from 25 to 45 percent over the past five years.

“With inflation hitting a 40-year peak in 2022, the basic cost of living—for food, transportation, health care and more—are also out of reach,” according to the report, which is based on annual data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which compares fair-market rents with the wages of average renters.

The report says members of the working class nationwide saw their wages rise at half the rate of the highest earners. “This trend is generally worse in the Hudson Valley, where lower-income workers have seen their earnings decline or stagnate while our highest earners have seen their income rise by up to 26 percent.”

Houses are too costly

The difficulty of finding affordable rentals keeps people stuck where they are, said Adam Bosch, president and CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress.

“Homeownership is increasingly out of reach for the typical family that are your neighbors,” he told the legislature’s planning and community resources committee in March. “People are persisting in rentals for longer than they normally would. That puts more stress on the rental market because rents go up over time, and especially if you’re losing a portion of your rental market to dilapidation and blight. These things can exacerbate the overall housing stress that a county like Sullivan feels.”

Across the region, he said, the gap is growing between the cost of the median home and the mortgage that the median-earning family qualifies for. “That gap is getting bigger and bigger,” he said.

Bosch said of the nine counties included in the study—Columbia, Dutchess, Green, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester—Sullivan “owns the distinction” of the median-priced house going up by the greatest percentage—by more than double.

The median-earning family in Sullivan falls $125,478 short of qualifying for a mortgage for the median home, according to the report.

Short-term rentals are booming

Since the pandemic, the number of short-term rentals has significantly increased in Sullivan County. They don’t cause housing shortages, Bosch said, but they “can exacerbate a housing shortage by taking housing out of circulation for your full-time population.”

Some studies have found that short-term rentals drive up the cost of housing for long-term residents. In 2021, Airbnb adopted a policy to answer that problem, stating it would “ban new listings when a city notifies us that the listings are located at rental properties where the tenant has been evicted due to nonpayment.” 

Some towns, like Highland, have passed laws to give their planning boards more oversight over short-term rentals. Other towns, such as Tusten, do not have regulations beyond those of the state.

Currently, the county gets a bed tax in lump sums from Airbnb and VRBO, according to Nancy Buck, the county treasurer.

Housing trust holds promise

The cascading crises led Bosch to propose a housing trust for Sullivan County. Trusts provide a dedicated and reliable pot of money to meet housing needs—whether by building new housing or rehabilitating existing residences, he said.

The trust can help new construction projects be more affordable by offering gap funding, Bosch said. Developers can sometimes provide affordable units at 70 percent of an area’s median income, he said, but a trust fund can bring affordability up to 40 to 50 percent.

Housing developers, landlords, municipal governments, property owners and potentially, the Sullivan County Land Bank would be able to apply to the fund.

To pay for the trust, Pattern for Progress suggests an array of options: a real estate transfer tax, a short-term rental fee, a developer’s tax and a hotel/motel “bed” tax. All of these revenue streams are already allocated in the budget and would need to be reallocated to the trust. Bosch highlighted a provision in New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget that would apply hotel/motel sales tax to short-term rentals, but this provision was not included in the final budget.

Ulster County funded its housing trust by raising its hotel/motel tax by 2 percent.

The next step for the legislature is to work with the planning department to establish the housing, get the initial money, and then put in place the sources for replenishing it. 

Sullivan County has already budgeted $2 million for housing. Bosch said the trust’s success will depend on buy-in from towns and villages.

Legislator Matt McPhillips has signed on to the idea.

He made clear that establishing a housing trust is “a priority” for Sullivan County.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Thomas Cawley's name and to add the names of all the motels used by the county to shelter the homeless.

Mortgage tax revenue, 2012-23

The mortgage tax rate on real property located in Sullivan County is $1 for each $100 secured by the mortgage.

2012: 469,369
2013: 530,000
2014: 470,000
2015: 500,000
2016: 584,966
2017: 690,853
2018: 791,187
2019: 803,761
2020: 750,000
2021: 1,706,851
2022: 1,500,000
2023: 1,000,000

Source: Sullivan County Management and Budget (https://www.sullivanny.us)