It is said that life is a numbers game. Two statistics-driven items underscore the changes Ulster County has already experienced and offer us a glimpse of what’s to come.

First, the federal government has raised the Area Median Income (AMI) for the Kingston Metropolitan Area (which is a federal census unit that includes not just the City of Kingston but the entire county).

That figure is now $83,900, up 7.3 percent from last year, for one person.

AMI is a longstanding and often controversial figure used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others, to assess a community’s relative wealth. You might have a dim memory from middle school of learning three kinds of average: median, mode, and mean.

The median, which is in play here, is the number in a data set that is the middle number in a set. In this case it means that exactly half of the county makes more than $83,900, and exactly half makes less. The AMI for a family of four rose too, but not as dramatically: the 2025 number is $119,800, a bump of 2.2 percent. These numbers have been on the rise for a long time, but especially recently, as more high-income people choose to make their homes among us.

Why these numbers are so important, and an increase in them so problematic, is that they’re used to determine rents in affordable and workforce housing. The problem is that this is a calculation that kind of depends on a relatively narrow range of incomes. If you calculate the median of 1, 2, and 3, you get 2. If you calculate the median of 1, 2, 50, 51, 52 you get 50. It doesn’t matter that half of the numbers are well below that mark, the injection of high numbers skews the entire range.

The same problem applies to housing. If most people are in a similar boat economically, you can pretty much get a feel for what most people are bringing in. That’s why AMI exists in this context, to do a temperature check on incomes and figure out what’s a reasonable rate to ask people to pay for their housing. So, if you take that 50 number and use it to figure out housing needs… 1 and 2 are out in the cold.

As we all have heard a million times by now, American wealth inequality has been widening for about 60 years now, as wealthy people become more wealthy compared to working class and poor people. Just a few high-income earners can fling the AMI into the stratosphere, and render meaningless a number that’s supposed to tell us what most people can pay for housing. It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just how we count this stuff.

The other number that caught our attention came from Syracuse.com, who went through Census data to find out which New York communities have the most college graduates.

Where did we land? Higher than people might think: Fourth in the state. Some 17.1 percent of Ulster residents have a master’s or more and 39.1 percent have a bachelor's or more. That’s 64th and 97th in the nation respectively. This is a good thing, but it also tips off the same imbalance. About 89% of high-income families send their kids to college, while just 64% of middle-income and 51% of low-income families do.

We’ll spare you any more calculations and simply state the higher the AMI is, the less affordable the housing will be. So, while the community continues to get more wealthy, those at the bottom, through no fault of their own, may have to spend even more of their limited incomes to keep a roof over their heads.

This kind of quiet numbers game is terribly important as municipalities consider how to address the region’s housing crisis. The AMI can tell us what’s “affordable” in Ulster – but can it really tell us what average people can afford?