Q&A: Dan Aymar-Blair on Beacon’s housing crunch and his run for Dutchess Comptroller
City council member Dan Aymar-Blair is running for Dutchess County Comptroller, hoping to unseat Republican Greg Poliver, who currently holds the seat.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that Dan was the architect of Beacon’s original “Good Cause Eviction” law, which passed in 2022 but was later struck down in court for superseding New York state law. New lawmakers went on to pass Good Cause legislation earlier this year, clearing the path for municipalities to protect tenants from evictions stemming from sharp rent increases. As Jeff Simms reported for the Current, Beacon opted into the new law in July.
In our conversation, Dan talks about the causes and possible solutions to Beacon’s housing crunch and his run for Comptroller. Despite the title, the Comptroller job does not involve online harassment (ha). Rather it’s about fiscal oversight.
Zach Rodgers: Let’s talk about Beacon’s Good Cause Eviction law. This was your baby two years ago. Beacon’s city council passed it against the advice of our general counsel and it was struck down in court before finally becoming a reality in 2024. Any lessons learned from this winding path?
Dan Aymar-Blair: Last time we had in hand some legal memoranda that said that the that could cause eviction was legal in New York State, which led me to be surprised when the city attorney came back and said otherwise. That was the crux of the conversation we had at that time. The courts felt that it was a state issue, and thankfully, the state took it up. So we have good Cause Eviction on the books.
I’ll never regret the energy and time we put into the issue. If we kept one family in their home, I’ll feel like we did our job.
ZR: Ah, that was my next question. So you still feel good about it? Because that was a pretty divisive string of council meetings for a law that would be struck down the following year.
DAB: The council voted six to one in favor of it. A lot of people came out about it, but there weren’t a terrible number of people who were opposed to it. It was definitely a hot issue and there were people certainly that we’re upset by it, but I think this is part of the job, and I feel we did a service to the people of Beacon. For 18 months before it was struck down, Beacon renters had among the strongest protections in New York State. So I have no qualms and no regrets.
ZR: What other carrots and sticks should the city adopt to create more affordable housing?
DAB: It’s a question we’ve been exploring for a while. I believe that if we want to have affordable housing in Beacon, we need to write into law where it needs to be. I don’t think natural market pressures will make developers build affordable housing. All the pressure is to build luxury. I understand people want to make as much profit as they can off their investment, so it’s hard to blame them, but that’s why we need to build in requirements.
In Beacon, we have a requirement that 10% of new development is “workforce affordable” housing. We have had discussions in Beacon City Council about making that a broader requirement, maybe a higher percentage or a lower average median income. One of the things that we hear in response is that raising that requirement makes projects unviable and that it’s hard to get a loan. I’ve asked for some validation of that information. When money is involved, the facts can get skewed. I want to understand the loan market, and I want to really understand what developers are up against. Until I see some substantive case that raising this requirement makes a project unviable, I’ll continue to advocate for increasing the carve-out.
One solution that I found appealing was having an overlay on certain parts of the zoning in the city that would incentivize the construction of affordable housing. There are different ways we could look at that, but the goal would be to incentivize affordable housing through zoning.
Some of the stuff we’ve taken up recently, such as removing the parking minimums and accessory dwelling units, are lauded as part of the solution by creating new units or lowering the cost of construction. I think the jury is out on that. I didn’t vote yes on either of those proposals because I thought that they were a little too broad, and I worry about congestion in certain parts of town.
I’m just not so sure that they’re going to help us with affordable housing. But, you know, these are some of the things that experts put forward. I’m not going to disagree with the mayor for trying to take them up. I just want to move the needle. I don’t want to take a lot of half-measures and then never make any progress.
ZR: If you really believe housing affordability is the most urgent problem facing Beacon, is there an argument for stripping away regulations to make it easy to build?
DAB: What guarantee would we have that the developer takes those savings and turns them into affordable housing? And that was part of my doubts about the last couple laws that we passed. When people are in this business and they save money, it doesn’t necessarily mean that out of the kindness of their hearts they’re going to pass that directly on to the tenants or lower the cost of the housing. We would be cutting the costs for developers with the hope that they would create affordable housing.
ZR: Isn’t that just market dynamics? Adding more supply means the available demand is spread more broadly, causing prices to fall.
DAB: That’s economics 101, but when the demand is so high and there’s no supply that could ever meet the demand, then those economic rules break down for us.
In Beacon, we have 15 to 20 years of evidence that increasing the supply is not meeting the demand. So much housing stock has come online in the last couple of decades, yet the property values are shooting through the roof. Is there a point where that breaks? I’m sure there is. Do we have enough land in Beacon to meet that demand? I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody knows, but there’s not a lot of evidence that adding extra units is bringing the cost down.
ZR: Many people would probably argue that we haven’t really built affordable housing units at scale. Is that wrong?
DAB: No. I’d say the largest flood of new affordable units will be Edgewater, because that’s a very big property, and 10% of that will be workforce affordable. And that’s a big improvement, right? But again, the last time I talked to Beacon Housing Authority, they had a 10-year waiting list. There’s a lot of demand.
ZR: If you want to solve this problem, it seems like you have to piss some people off. People will consider the new construction ugly or it will block their view. Do we have to choose between a quaint city and a livable city?
DAB: Maybe that’s a trade-off. NIMBYism is always a part of this. A good example in our region is the prison in Fishkill, where the state has looked at taking up a proposal for over 1,500 units. That immediately drew pushback from the neighboring communities. People just can’t fathom such a drastic increase in housing in their area. And some of the pushback is legitimate, such as the impact on traffic.
ZR: Let’s talk about your run for Dutchess Comptroller. What does the Comptroller do?
DAB: The comptroller’s office is the financial watchdog for the county. The comptroller is responsible for auditing and reviewing the books and making sure that we’re paying our bills on time, making sure we’re paying the right rates, making sure that we’re working within the policies, procedures, rules, of regulations that we have to. Another job is to look at and advise on the long-term financial health of the county.
I’ve been doing work like this for quite a long time. People don’t know this about me as a city council member, but in my day job I work in government finance. I’ve been doing so since the 90s. When I got out of college, I started at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, but profit wasn’t really a motivator for me, so I went into the government finance sector. I’ve been in New York City public schools since 2009 and while there, I managed a budget as big as Dutchess County’s. For the last 15 years, I’ve navigated financial policies, procedures, rules, regulations and legal requirements – making sure they’re in compliance. It’s exactly the work that the Comptroller’s office does. I feel very well-positioned to do this work.
ZR: How big is the county’s budget? And how is that money spent?
DAB: The overall budget is $601 million. The money mostly goes towards social services, such as community and family services. About $60 million goes to the sheriff’s office, and then you have a number of other recipients — the office of the aging, Veterans Affairs and other functions of the county. We have a big Medicaid payment that has to go to the state too.
ZR: When you look at the budget, is there a line item that just shocks you?
DAB: Not really. There are lots of line items that give me pause. Dutchess County outsources a lot of services. Are we getting the most that we can out of those big contracts?
And some of the spending priorities are askew. There’s one particular project in Dutchess County that gets people upset. Dutchess County signed a really terrible deal and committed $30 million to make improvements to Dutchess stadium. As far as I can tell, they’ve made good on $27 million of that. $25 million was voted on as a budget amendment, so there was no public input. They just took $25 million from the county savings and threw it at a minor league baseball stadium. Just for context, that’s twice as much as the entire tax levy of the city of Beacon. In addition to that, they took $2 million from our Covid money and used it to turf a field. So I think the spending priorities are the things that really raise eyebrows and certainly raise mine.
ZR: What would you do differently from your opponent Greg Poliver?
DAB: The first thing is public engagement. Part of the Comptroller’s job is to educate the public about the budget and the county’s finances. It’s not supposed to be a role where you’re doing some work, and you post it to social media when you’re done with your audit or your report, and you just move on to the next thing. It’s right there in writing that the Comptroller’s duty is to educate the public about the budget. And I take that part really seriously. It plays into my philosophy of government, which is that the government belongs to the people. My opponent just does an audit or report that he may not even be involved with, posts it on social media, and moves to the next thing. That’s not going to be the way I do it. I’ll be all over the campus and doing presentations on the budget and showing people where their money’s going.
I think that’s particularly important in Dutchess County, where we kind of have a news desert, except for your podcast and a few other publications. We don’t have a lot of news in the area. It’s hard for people to be educated voters.
In addition to that, my independence from the [Republican] political machine allows me to follow leads without any other consideration than to do the best job that I can for the people. I’m not going to shy away from topics that a Republican might. For example, doing a clean energy project could also be a cost savings. Doing the right thing for the climate is often doing the right thing for your budget. How much could we save by electrifying our vehicle fleet? How much could we save by electrifying our buildings? These are financial questions, and they’re also climate questions.
And then on housing, Dutchess County had an excellent housing study in 2022. The recommendations were excellent. I just think that they fell short in implementing these recommendations. So I think annually, we’ll be taking a look at what is going on in Dutchess County. I want to make sure we’re hitting the goals laid out in that report. And if we’re not, why?
ZR: What else should voters keep in mind as they decide who to vote for in a few weeks?
DAB: think you want to vote for someone who knows what they’re doing, someone who’s qualified. My opponent is in office because he was appointed. He lost his county legislature seat last year and was appointed to the Comptroller’s office. So you know, he’s in office because of who he knows, and I want to be in office because of what I know.
Everybody pays sales taxes. Most people pay property taxes. Do you want to have one-party rule or do you want to have checks and balances? Do you want to have independent financial oversight? I think the answer is pretty obvious for anyone at a time when everybody’s pinching pennies to make ends meet.
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