Paying rent and purchasing a home appears to be a fleeting dream for many in the county.

A recent report entitled: “Chautauqua County Housing Market Assessment and Development Strategy” has found that rent, housing prices and mortgage rates are out of reach for a large portion of county residents. The report was written by the MRB Group for the Chautauqua County Partnership for Economic Growth (CCPEG) and published recently.

The 78-page plus report covered a multi-faceted approach and provided insight into questions ranging from how to improve housing quality and diversity; addressing the housing needs of special populations; the affordability for the workforce and enhancing land management tools and resources to improve housing quality and access.

For Rebecca Wurster , planning coordinator for CCPEG, the statistical data tells a story.

“Fifty-eight percent of occupations in Chautauqua County pay annual wages under 50% of the area median income,” she said. “The definition of affordability has changed drastically, especially in the rising cost of housing, and the market rates that have risen.”

The report said the past general perception has been that middle class households could generally afford market rate housing, and that housing affordability was only a concern for ‘poor’ households. However, as housing costs and market rates have risen, this is no longer the case, the report states.

Furthermore, this report relies heavily upon the reported Area Median Income (AMI), to calculate some of its statistical findings. Some of the report’s findings include roughly half of renters in Chautauqua County are cost burdened; more than 40% of Chautauqua County households earn less than the annual income needed to comfortably afford the average rental unit, including rent and utilities; approximately 53% of Chautauqua County households earn less than the annual income needed to comfortably afford homeownership, including mortgage and utilities and 58% of occupations in Chautauqua County pay annual wages under 50% of AMI.

Statistically speaking, all of Chautauqua County has high, cost-burden housing stocks, to include rental properties. and “Owner-occupied households – County: 6,102; Dunkirk: 434; Jamestown:1,000 and Western, N.Y.: 49,298.”

“Cost burdened renter occupied households – County: 8,035; Dunkirk: 1,422; Jamestown: 3,388 and Western, N.Y.: 60,902,” the report reads.

The full, published report can be found at .choosechq.com