BEDFORD, N.Y. - A “two-headed housing crisis”—availability and affordability—has effectively dashed hopes of home ownership in this area for most everyone who’s not already paying off a mortgage.
That was the blunt warning, delivered by a regional planning executive, that Bedford officials are now mulling over as they consider the town’s future housing options.
Supervisor Ellen Calves said that in developing the latest revision of Bedford’s comprehensive plan, “the community had weighed in on wanting to make sure that we had a diversity of housing [types].” Other “people are always asking, ‘Do we really need housing?’”
So, the supervisor said, she had invited Adam Bosch, president and CEO of Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, “to help us understand better . . . and answer some of these questions.”
Bosch spoke for an hour and a half at the Town Board’s two-hour Oct. 7 meeting, with the chairs of Bedford’s planning and zoning boards and a member of its housing committee in attendance.
And while his message, examining the fallout from a quarter-century of “underbuilding housing,” was delivered to a Bedford audience, it had relevance throughout Westchester and the eight other counties served by his nonprofit organization.
“We have sort of a two-headed housing crisis in the Hudson Valley: We often find ourselves not having enough housing,” Bosch said. “And we oftentimes find that the housing we do have is not at a level of cost that folks looking for housing can afford.”
In a chart, he showed that the median price of a home in Westchester had risen from $530,000 in 2019 to $780,000 in 2025. “What this means . . . when you see home prices go up this rapidly, this much,” he said, “is that statistically home ownership becomes very far out of reach for anyone who already doesn’t already have it.
“And that’s not a bumper sticker phrase,” Bosch said. “That’s actually a statistical fact.”
With another chart, Bosch depicted the plight of first-time homebuyers in the region’s counties. In Westchester, where the maximum mortgage for which a potential buyer can qualify tops out at less than $500,000, he said, a median-priced home requires a mortgage of almost $700,000 after a 6 percent down payment.
“It is the case that home ownership has sprinted away from people far more quickly than people have been able to try to catch it,” he said.
The alternative—renting a living space—has also become expensive. “Across the region, we are seeing far more people seeking out rentals, far more people staying in rentals for longer, and far more people likely to be in rentals forever.”
But because of the “massive” increase in demand for rentals over the past 10 to 12 years, Bosch said, “rents proportionately have been outpacing renter wages by about double. More recently, in the past four years or so, we have seen the growth in rents outpace renter wages by more like quadruple or quintuple.”
Meanwhile, across the region the typical renter wage as a percentage of area median income (AMI) “has actually been backsliding,” he said. “What that means just functionally is that you can’t afford a rental in our region unless you have a spouse, a roommate, live at a severely constrained standard of living or have public assistance of some kind. That’s just statistical fact.”
Bosch called that “a consequence of our underbuilding housing for the past 25 years.”
In introducing Bosch, Calves acknowledged that “there really hasn’t been housing built in Bedford in a very long time.”
Bosch called on communities to consider the zoning code and “diversifying the types of housing you allow. A lot of folks across the region still think that housing is a binary choice: it’s a house or an apartment. [But] there’s a whole spectrum of housing that exists between those two things.”
Developers are constructing one-, two- and three-family homes, he said, “even . . . sixplexes” built to look like two-family homes, as well as apartments, townhomes, condos, SROs and co-ops. “You have all kinds of different housing that can help meet the need for people across a broad spectrum of income.”
Bosch discussed the forces creating the Hudson Valley’s housing crunch. “It is not what you think it is,” he said.
“The major demand for housing across the region is not driven by population growth,” Bosch noted. “Westchester has had a little bit of population growth over the past decade. But the region has been essentially at 2.4 million people for 30 years.”
He blamed “two things” for driving the region’s demand for housing. “The first one . . . is what I call sort of the ‘junk drawer’ of things: factors that are taking housing out of circulation,” Bosch said, citing, for instance, second homes, short-term rentals and, in some counties, dilapidated housing stock.
But he called the shrinking size of an average household the bigger driver of demand. “I know that sounds crazy,” he conceded, but consider: If Bedford had a population 20 years ago of 100 people, all living in families of five, they would need 20 homes. Twenty years later, say, the population of Bedford is still 100 people, but the average family size shrinks to four. Now they need 25 homes to shelter the same size population.
“In Westchester County,” Bosch maintained, “the shrinking size of the average family alone drives the demand for more than 12,000 units of housing. . . . We need more housing just to maintain a flat population.”
In a free-wheeling discussion after Bosch’s presentation, Calves discussed variances with Peter Michaelis, chair of the Zoning Board of Appeals. She said the public at times did not understand why his board had granted a particular variance, which is relief from “letter of the law” zoning code enforcement.
Planning Board Chair Deirdre Courtney-Batson suggested that if the ZBA was granting great numbers of specific variances—for parking, say—perhaps the zoning code itself was due for revision.
Tom McGrath, a member of both the town’s Housing Committee and Blue Mountain Development Corp., which produces government-assisted housing, told the meeting that Blue Mountain will hold an information session Nov. 13 on affordable housing.
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