GUILDERLAND — The board of the Guilderland Industrial Development Agency recently fine-tuned its policy for dealing with housing projects seeking financial benefits from the town. 

The IDA board initially adopted a policy that says, if a housing developer requests assistance from the agency, then at least 25 percent of its units are to be set aside for individuals who earn 80 percent of the Albany County area median income, in November.

The issue the agency ran into, Donald Csaposs, the IDA’s chief executive officer, told board members late last month, was the policy “we approved referenced a percentage of the median area income as defined by [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development]. We also approved a policy that was based on the median household income for Albany, and come to find out that HUD doesn’t provide a definition of the median household income for Albany.”

The fix recommended by Csaposs and agency counsel Christopher Canada was to use the Census Bureau’s QuickFacts dataset, which sets the median household income for Albany County at $85,333 as of 2024; according to Csaposs, 80 percent works out to about about $68,250 per year. 

The board chose to use county-level data rather than town-level data because median household income for Guilderland sits at about $112,000 per annum; had the board applied the same 80 percent threshold to the town’s own median, the resulting rent would have landed somewhere between $2,500 and $2,700 per month.

The change to county data meant as much as a $1,000 drop in rent. 

Now, “to qualify as workforce housing using the affordability guidelines established by HUD,” Csaposs explained to The Enterprise by email this week, “rent plus required tenant-paid utilities would not exceed $1,706 per month.”