Amenia Housing Board plans for future listening session

AMENIA — Going hand-in-hand with its goals for community outreach, the Amenia Housing Board’s plans to host a future listening session for the community on affordable housing were discussed at length at its meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 9. The board met at 5:30 p.m. via Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Member Leo Blackman gave an update on its housing survey and postcard and said the group is getting pretty close to distributing the postcard. He believes that can happen in fairly short order once the postcard’s redesign is done. 

Blackman reported later in the meeting the board would like to enlarge the postcard into a flyer to distribute at local businesses, as well as the Amenia Post Office, the VFW Post 5444 on Route 22 and elsewhere. Blackman encouraged Housing Board members to suggest locations to drop off flyers and volunteers to help deliver them.

Moving forward, Blackman said he believes the board’s next move should focus on a public meeting or a town listening session. After the Housing Board tabulates the survey results, he said it should share the information with the community. As the board didn’t put a due date on the survey postcard, member Jeff Barnett-Winsby recommended it tabulate the results in one month, but leave the survey open so results can trickle in and people continue to be heard.

“It may allow us to sort of continue to catch [the results] and then we can go in every three months and add that data,” Barnett-Winsby said.

Blackman agreed, adding the public meeting should offer the information gathered and share what the Housing Board has determined. With the listening session, he suggested the board first present what it learns from the survey and then ask residents questions about their feelings on affordable housing in Amenia. 

Drawing from his experience taking a class on housing at Pace Law School, Blackman said the facilitator of that class and a number of listening sessions, Tiffany Zezula, could probably be convinced to facilitate the Housing Board’s listening session. 

Blackman said a listening session would require Housing Board members to think about what they would like to get out of the session, the best way to communicate with Amenia residents and also those who work in town but can’t afford to live in town.

Barnett-Winsby suggested the board try and revisit some of the data the Tri-Town Coalition composed to put the housing survey responses in a broader context.

“I think we all know there’s a problem,” he said, “but I think sort of trying to help people understand what the problem is before we start to overlap the problem with the suggested solutions or what people are looking for, if we do a bit of that… for them, then we as a group, we as the listening session [can] all sort of come to conclusions together. It feels more organic. I think making more of a story of it may be helpful.”

Blackman shared his belief that one of the big problems in Amenia is that the people who live in affordable housing live in grim, substandard, housing. Part of the mission, he said, is to get people into homes that they feel comfortable in. 

He agreed with Barnett-Winsby that it would be useful to make an introductory PowerPoint presentation for community members, something that’s both visual and narrative to introduce residents to affordable housing. Blackman said it would also be a good way to introduce the survey results. 

Recently appointed community program director of the North East Community Center (NECC) in Millerton, Nathan Briggs commented that the survey would be a good way to capture a lot of quantitative data to use as a foundation while a listening session would be a good way to get qualitative data. When put together, he said the data will ensure the Housing Board gets the real perspective from everyone who is represented in the community. Briggs added he could touch base with NECC Executive Director Christine Sergent to see if NECC has any contacts to help Amenia pursue affordable housing.