The Housing Crunch in Tivoli: Four Renters Share Painful Stories of Seeking More, Accepting Less

Art Carlson, a Tivoli resident for decades, remembers when beer on Broadway cost just 60 cents a pint and an apartment in the village went for $350. Now paying $8 for a pint and $1,750 to rent a condo in Tivoli today, Carlson, 68, has one complaint. 

“I just wish there was more room for people who weren’t wealthy to be able to live here,” he said. 

In this, Carlson is not alone. The Daily Catch sat down with four renters who have faced steep costs and limited housing options as they fought to stay in the community they call home. Their stories speak to several issues dominating the Tivoli market that can be felt across Dutchess County and in the region at large. 

Pattern for Progress, a Newburgh think tank, has been sounding the alarm on the Hudson Valley housing market for years. Part of the problem, CEO and President Adam Bosch said, is the home affordability gap. “There’s a clog in the pipeline, and that clog is at that first rung of homeownership. As a result of that clog, everything behind it is backed up.” The cost of homeownership, Bosch explained, is out of reach for many in the region, putting pressure on the rental market as higher-earning, would-be homeowners linger in the rental market, increasing demand opposite a tight supply and allowing landlords to continue raising rent. 

In Tivoli, census data sides with Bosch. As of 2022, the average household income was $44,583, and the average price of owner-occupied housing units was $346,900. If an average Tivoli household applied an average down payment (13.6 percent that year, according to real estate search engine Realtor.com) to an average Tivoli home, their monthly housing costs would be roughly $2,486 or 69 percent of their monthly income, by Daily Catch calculations.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which manages several affordable housing programs, recommends that homeowners spend 25 to 28 percent of gross monthly income on housing. Since most lending institutions follow this standard when issuing mortgages, the average Tivoli household would likely be turned away. 

Decreasing household size and lack of residential property development are among other pressures at work in Tivoli and beyond, Bosch said. “As the size of the household goes down, demand for housing goes up. That is the major driver for the demand for housing in the region,” he added. 

A 2022 U.S. Census report showed that the average household size in Tivoli was 2.2 people, down from 3.06 in 2010. As the average household shrinks, more units are needed to accommodate the same number of people. But Tivoli Mayor Joel Griffith doubts that the village can accommodate enough units to satiate rising demand. “Even if the Village were to grow, which is a highly debatable proposition among Tivolians, we couldn’t grow enough to absorb a fraction of the current demand for places like Tivoli,” he said.

For now, Tivoli is focused on expanding community resources and repairing aging infrastructure that strains to support its existing population of roughly 1,000 people. The village has also passed legislation restricting the number of short-term rentals permitted in the community and allowing residents to build accessory dwelling units on single-home lots. 

But the newly minted STR legislation will likely return only five units to the conventional market. And so, with no miracle on the way, Tivoli renters hang in the balance: futures uncertain, costs on the rise. Here are some of their stories.

Vanessa Hutchins
Family Seeks Escape from Mold
In the beating heart of historic Tivoli, U.K. expat Vanessa Hutchins rents a two-bedroom apartment for $1,400 per month. There, she lives with her husband, their two small children, and her sister-in-law. While the family of five fits in the apartment for now, Hutchins preemptively began searching for a new place last year. 

A stay-at-home mom, Hutchins has encountered pushback from would-be landlords about the family’s single-earner status, noted on rental applications. “Before they even meet us, it’s what’s on paper that matters,” Hutchins said. Still other landlords have declined to rent to a family, preferring to subdivide apartments to lease to Bard students room by room. 

Staying in the Red Hook school district is a priority for Hutchins, whose sister-in-law is a senior in high school. To do so, the family has set its search budget to $2,000 per month with hopes of securing a three-bedroom apartment. Recurring mold in the family’s shared bathroom has added pressure to the search, but options are limited. The apartments that fit their criteria, Hutchins said, often cost between $2,400 and $3,000 per month. In recent weeks, Apartments.com displayed three available rentals in Tivoli: a two-bedroom townhome for $2,300 per month, a two-bedroom house for $4,900 per month, and a five-bedroom house for $15,000 per month. 

Unless a better option arises, the family plans to stay in their apartment. “We’re just going to make the best of it,” Hutchins told The Daily Catch. 

Finn Tait
Confronting Vermin Everywhere He Turns
Living mostly on a $4,000 monthly stipend willed by his late father, part-time Thrift2Fight employee Finn Tait commenced to search for a two-bedroom apartment in late 2023. His $2,500 budget, he hoped, would be enough to secure on-site laundry and off-street parking in a Tivoli home suitable for himself and his two Poodles, Boris and Dandy.

Tait’s hopes were quickly dashed. He could not find an apartment that fit the bill in Tivoli and, sight unseen, signed instead for a two-bedroom in Germantown. There, Tait was greeted by water leaking from the ceiling, widespread black mold, a thriving indoor mouse population, and a glaring lack of central heating. 

In flight from these conditions, Tait commenced to search for new lodgings this spring, again with a $2,500 budget and his sights set on Tivoli. Again, Tait was unable to find housing. “I feel like I’m a pretty appealing tenant to have,” he said. “I’m single, I just have the dogs, and [I’m] willing to pay a lot of money. But I still really struggled to find stuff. So I really can’t imagine, if you have less money than me, being able to find anything by yourself.”

In August, after pursuing nearly 25 apartments with no luck, Tait compromised and moved into an Elizaville ranch with a roommate. His landlord required the pair to pay more than $8,000  in advance, including a security deposit, a pet deposit, the first month’s rent, and the winter heating bill. 

Since moving in, Tait has encountered mold, rodent droppings, and a rat carcass in the garage. Sometimes, he said, he sees mice crawl out from underneath the burners of his stove. Pests and mold may breach the New York State warranty of habitability, under which landlords are required to provide safe and habitable conditions. Tenants may sue landlords if a breach has occurred, but in Tait’s experience, most lawyers will turn the petty claim away. 

Tait’s landlord has promised to rid the property of vermin, as soon as he recovers from a back injury. 

Chloe Monahan
Del’s Creamery Exec Forced Northbound
Born and raised in Red Hook, Chloe Monahan feels at home in the mid-Hudson Valley. But with rent on the rise, it’s a home she may never return to. 

“I would have stayed in Tivoli had the pandemic not happened,” Monahan told The Daily Catch. Now a resident of Cohoes, Monahan left her friends and family behind when she was priced out of Tivoli in early 2020. “It was heartbreaking because I had to give it all up and walk away.” 

At the time, Monahan worked over 70 hours a week to afford $1,200 monthly rent and steep electricity bills in a one-bedroom apartment on Broadway. Then a server, bartender, and landscaper, Monahan lost many of her hours during lockdown, and she could no longer afford to stay in Tivoli. 

Traversing the Hudson Valley and beyond, Monahan spent the next three years, from Hudson to Philadelphia, searching for affordable housing. In Red Hook, she lived in an illegal, windowless studio fashioned out of a storage unit. In Hudson, she sublet a room with random housemates, one of whom fostered an in-home fruit fly population with his indoor composting activities. 

“Even though my situation wasn’t great, everyone around me was always worse off,” she said. 

While Monahan, now Chief Operating Officer for Del’s Roadside Creamery, would prefer to live in Hudson or Tivoli, lack of housing and high rent stands in her way. In this, Monahan recognizes that she is not alone. “There’s a lot of people that would have stayed if they could have afforded it, but got pushed out already,” she said. 

 

Masha Zabara
Thrift2Fight Founder Feels They May Be Forced to Leave
Belarusian immigrant and business owner Masha Zabara arrived in Tivoli in 2016. With neither family in the United States nor the ability to return to Eastern Europe, Zabara forged a strong community in Tivoli. Eight years later, Zabara’s community has started to disappear. 

They sort their friends into two categories: friends who have left Tivoli due to housing cost, and friends who will eventually leave Tivoli due to housing costs. As their social circle narrows, Zabara questions their own decision to stay. “What’s the worth of living in a community when you don’t have it anymore?” they asked. 

Earlier this year, Zabara faced this question head-on when searching for a rental to replace their first Tivoli apartment, a Broadway one-bedroom at $850 per month. The apartment, located in the same building as Tivoli Bread + Baking, had its flaws, Zabara admitted, but it was home.

It was also the original stockroom of what is now Thrift2Fight, a secondhand clothing operation owned by the Belarusian immigrant in partnership with Bard graduate Jillian Reed. Despite the many memories made in the apartment by the bakery, Zabara was forced to leave in March when the building owner reclaimed the apartment.

In their search for new housing, Zabara could not find anything comparable to the cost of their previous apartment. For now, Zabara is living with their partner and a miniature poodle, Belka, in a two-bedroom Broadway apartment rented for $1,800. But as Zabara looks to the future, Tivoli seems less and less tenable as a place for the young entrepreneur to live and run their business. 

“The problem is that there’s no future” for working-class renters in Tivoli, they said. “[And] I just don’t care about serving rich people [at Thrift2Fight].”

The post The Housing Crunch in Tivoli: Four Renters Share Painful Stories of Seeking More, Accepting Less first appeared on The Daily Catch.