Blueprint for growth: Kingston’s housing director ushers in a new era of development using a diverse playbook

by Zac Shaw for Ulster Strong

When Bartek Starodaj took the job as Director of Housing Initiatives for the City of Kingston, he was looking for a place where housing policy could move from theory to dramatic change.

Bartek Starodaj, Director of Housing Initiatives for the City of Kingston

“I'm a graduate of Bard, from the undergraduate and graduate program,” Starodaj said. “My graduate degree was in policy. After graduating, I went to Washington, DC to work at a large NGO on urban policy. But I had always wanted to have a more local impact and work within a smaller municipality.”

He landed in a city wherein housing development was an urgent priority. In response, Kingston’s “Kingston Forward” form-based zoning code was adopted in August 2023, with the goal of making it easier to get shovels in the ground while balancing the needs of the community.

“At least since the time that I've been here with the city, we’ve really changed a lot of our policies and zoning to reflect that desire,” he said. “The largest change was the 2023 zoning rewrite, which really made it much easier to build new housing, and really facilitates quicker approvals of the housing that we need.”

What followed was the development and planning of hundreds of units across multiple buildings towards Mayor Steve Noble’s goal of creating 1,000 new domiciles in five years.

“We have easily the most housing under construction and planned in the city of Kingston, the most we've had since the 1980s,” he said. “It’s definitely an exciting time. We’re very clear that we’re pro-development and pro-housing. We believe that growing our housing supply is essential to increasing affordability and increasing opportunities within the city of Kingston.”

In addition to zoning changes, Kingston has leaned on process improvements intended to reduce uncertainty during environmental review, and policy tools meant to attract mixed-income projects. Starodaj cited a citywide “generic environmental impact statement” approach as one way Kingston tries to streamline the State Environmental Quality Review process. He also pointed to tax exemptions that Kingston has adopted to support new multifamily and accessory dwelling unit development.

And the city is looking inward at what it already owns.

“We’ve also walked the walk in the sense that we are taking a hard look at all of the city-owned property and seeing if we can make use of that for new housing development,” he said.

Midtown Thriving is the city’s biggest effort in the quest to construct more living spaces, especially affordable ones. The plan focuses on a large Midtown corridor and the city’s supply of abandoned and blighted parcels, particularly along Broadway.

“Midtown has the largest concentration of vacant and underutilized sites within the entire county,” Starodaj said. “Owing to the presence of the railroad there and the historic industrial uses there, there’s a lot of vacant sites that tend to be on the larger side compared to other lots within the city of Kingston.”

He described the logic behind a coordinated plan.

“The thinking behind Midtown Thriving is, why don’t we make an effort in particular within Midtown to redevelop those sites, given the opportunity that’s there,” he said, “and also given the number of community needs within Midtown, not only for more housing, but we’re talking about grocery stores or other community spaces that could also be co-located with new housing on these large lots.”

For Starodaj, the point is not housing alone.

“It’s meant to be a holistic approach,” he said. “There are sections that focus on the physical environment and infrastructure, but it also focuses on the other needs of the community… and how do we make it so that the diverse communities within Midtown all feel welcome, that there are third spaces for all these groups to mix.”

Much of the housing currently being built or planned is market-rate or above, but Starodaj said the assumption that affordable housing is harder to build is not quite accurate.

“I would take issue with that,” he said. “There’s actually difficulty with building market-rate housing and difficulty with building affordable housing.”

He framed the difference as where the money comes from.

“Often market-rate housing won’t have any real public subsidy tied to it,” he said. “In that case, those developers have to raise enough money to cover their large costs without the public subsidy.”

Affordable projects, by contrast, can be built around major subsidy programs, but that creates its own constraints.

“With affordable housing, oftentimes there can be large public subsidies, especially if we’re talking about the low-income housing tax credit,” he said. “Those subsidies can cover the large construction costs that a project will face.”

The bottleneck is competition.

“There are state subsidies out there for affordable housing, but there’s not enough of it,” he said. “It’s also quite limited and highly competitive. We’re competing with all the other communities in New York state.”

Starodaj credits nonprofit and mission-driven builders with keeping affordable production alive in leaner years.

“We wouldn’t be anywhere right now without RUPCO,” he said. “Prior to some of the newer housing projects that we have now being built, like Golden Hill, RUPCO was really the only one building affordable housing at any scale with Landmark Place and Energy Square. These partnerships are incredibly important.”

He also described housing work that looks less like new construction, and more like preserving what exists.

“We have many partnerships specifically with RUPCO right now, with home repairs, and accessory dwelling units throughout the city,” he said. “We are going to need to rely on our nonprofits to get all this work done, and that includes building new housing.”

Kingston has also been developing a financing tool aimed at a common pain point: early-stage capital.

“I did propose last year to create a new nonprofit, which would have its own revolving loan fund that projects would benefit from,” Starodaj said. “I have continued the development of the nonprofit, and it will be launched soon this year. We’ll be announcing more on that quite soon. We really do need new tools to help foster the kind of housing development that we all recognize we need.”

Many of the major projects announced or underway pair housing with ground-floor commercial space. Starodaj says there’s careful calculation regarding where to site these mixed-use buildings.

“I certainly don’t want to be in a position where we’re forcing commercial onto ground floors where there’s no real economic justification for that,” he said. “But historically Kingston is a mixed-use, walkable community. You had storefronts all over the city, and our new zoning code in 2023 really makes it more possible to have commercial in more parts of the city.”

He sees the strongest case along established corridors.

“We are really leaning into that mixed-use component of new projects, especially when a project is located along one of our commercial corridors like Broadway,” he said. “It adds to the walkability of the entire city.”

He also hears demand from entrepreneurs.

“Many people have expressed to me that there is a shortage of commercial space that kind of fits whatever they’re looking for,” he said. “I do think there is an economic case to be made that these spaces should be included in new developments, especially if they are located along the Broadway corridor, uptown or downtown.”

As Midtown grows, residents ask the obvious question: where do the cars go, and how do the pipes keep up?

“We did a full analysis of this as part of our zoning code, analyzing traffic impacts, parking impacts, infrastructure,” Starodaj said. “Generally speaking, we are very confident that the city has plenty of water for new residents to use. We have capacity in our sewer plant.”

“We have been making major roadway improvements throughout the entire city, such as Broadway, most famously,” he said. “That really sets the stage for more housing to be added along Broadway.”

Parking, he said, needs active management.

“There will soon be a parking study focusing on the utilization of parking lots throughout the city that looks at the stage for any new investments in municipal parking lots, or what we are doing with our existing municipal parking lots,” he said.

When all this growth is put into historical context, Starodaj says the coming population boom is something the city has plenty of capacity to handle.

“Keep in mind, the population of Kingston right now is well below the peak that we hit, I think in 1900,” Starodaj said. “We’re far from full. We have plenty of space to accommodate new development, particularly because, in contrast to 1900, our household sizes are much smaller, so we need a lot more housing units to accommodate the same population figure we had back then.”

The scope of Kingston’s housing agenda can sound like a large staff effort. Surprisingly, it’s a solo operation, albeit one that interfaces with many other roles in city government.

“The housing department is a relatively new department, and it is only a department of one,” he said. “I truly do rely on the rest of City Hall for supporting some of these initiatives. The mayor, corporation counsel, planning. I work really with every department in City Hall.”

Outside government, he leans on networks and working groups.

“Making partnerships with nonprofits, speaking to the county,” he said. “I do also manage a few groups, one of them being the Housing Task Force, and also the zoning working group that was appointed by the Common Council.”

He likes the pace.

“I’d much rather be busy, taking risks, and trying new things, rather than relying on previous models of how things were done,” he said.

One new effort is an eminent domain claim tied to a long-vacant parcel located downtown.

“We did start an eminent domain case downtown on a former urban renewal property, three and a half acres, that is still ongoing,” Starodaj said. “At this point we are waiting on a ruling from the appellate court up in Albany for whether that can proceed, which we’re optimistic the city will be successful in that.”

One recent flashpoint has been rent stabilization under New York’s Emergency Tenant Protection Act (ETPA), which Kingston has repeatedly revisited amid political and legal pressure.

“The law is quite clear that it does not impact new development,” Starodaj said. “It only controls buildings built before 1974 with six or more units.”

But he acknowledged optics matter.

“Sometimes just the fact that we have it can be enough to scare some folks away, even though it would not impact their development,” he said. “They do feel that it increases their risk calculation.”

He described the city’s stance as dual-track.

“We’ve been very clear, we’re all in for new housing, but we do also believe in protecting tenants,” he said. “We are trying to achieve that balance.”

For city-owned sites, Kingston uses a formal request for proposals process, with evaluation criteria and a committee selecting a development team.

“We just had that happen with 25 Field Court,” Starodaj said. “Multiple teams submitted, and we chose the one that we felt best met the evaluation criteria.”

Once selected, he said, the city typically enters a preliminary agreement.

“That gives that party basically exclusive rights for pre-development activities and grants them access to the site,” he said. “When pre-development activities are over, they typically go ahead with planning board approval, and at some point we will transfer the site over to them following Common Council approval.”

For private property, it is more straightforward.

“With any other private party just looking to develop any site, they would go directly to the planning department for site plan approval,” he said.

He also pushes opportunities directly to builders.

“I have tried to build a network of developers that I know personally that I know are interested in Kingston,” Starodaj said. “I do personally disseminate, to the extent possible, to my network for any opportunities, which has proved to be successful.”

He thinks Kingston’s reputation helps, especially for affordable developers used to long fights elsewhere.

“We have made it very clear that if you're trying to build affordable housing, you will be welcomed,” he said. “You won’t be banished.”

And for developers trying to get oriented, he keeps the door open.

“For someone looking to get the lay of the land and general resources, how to go about things, I’m always happy to speak to anyone,” Starodaj said.