"Affordable Housing" in the Adirondacks

This shouldn't be so hard.

April 19, 2025

There are many economic challenges that north country residents must contend with. The lack of quality employment opportunities is probably the biggest concern for many people, particularly younger residents, but that is followed closely by the lack of affordable housing. The two issues are related, born of similar causes and conditions. These issues are not restricted to northern New York, of course, but we have our own specific local conditions that exacerbate the problem for developers and residents, especially within the Adirondack blue line.

Employment opportunities in Adirondack communities are often in the hospitality industry, with means that they are typically seasonal jobs. Hospitality businesses in dining and lodging usually have twelve weeks to make the math work—from July 4^th to Columbus Day, unless they are in close proximity to Gore or Whiteface and the additional ski related tourism that those slopes produce. That tourism business brings with it a demand for seasonal lodging, which puts additional stress on the available housing stock. Increasingly, individual property owners, especially second homeowners, have looked to generate income from their properties by utilizing online booking managers like Air B&B and Vrbo. These short-term rentals (STR’s) remove those units from the supply of year-round housing available for full time local residents.

This new income opportunity for property owners has a negative impact on year-round residents looking to rent an apartment, as rental prices have escalated with the increased demand. The resulting conditions impact the employment market in all of the expected ways. Not only are hospitality industry workers being priced out of the rental market, but higher wage positions for jobs like nurses and teachers are going unfilled because applicants cannot find an affordable place to live. Destination resort communities like Schroon Lake, Lake George and Lake Placid are being particularly impacted by the housing shortage. Municipalities are struggling with ways to discourage short term rentals to alleviate the housing shortage, while satisfying property owners demands to use their property as they see fit.

A few Adirondack nonprofits have explored innovative ways to ameliorate the impact that STR’s are having on the rental market. Sawyer Bailey, Executive Director at ADK Action teamed with her colleagues at Living ADK and Adirondack Roots to offer a stipend to owners of short-term rental properties, in an attempt to convince them to offer longer term leases on those properties. The program was financed with a grant from the Adirondack Foundation’s Generous Acts Fund. Part of the program was educational, simply showing STR property owners what the true cost of operating as an STR can be. Frequently, owners decide to convert from long term to short term rentals without considering all of the additional costs of operating the property as an STR. Frequent turnover means more frequent cleaning and maintenance, and additional repairs cleaning up after weekend guests, more frequent vacancies, local “bed taxes”, and the additional time that a property owner must devote to managing a property and dealing with the constant turnover. The program offers an additional stipend of a few thousand dollars as an incentive to owners to convert the property to long term rental. Bailey hopes to expand the program if the pilot is successful and is hopeful that individual municipalities will be willing to sponsor it, eliminating the need for philanthropic support. It is a lot cheaper to provide a new unit of housing by convincing a property owner to convert an STR to a long-term rental property, than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a new unit of housing. Adirondack Explorer, in an excellent series of articles written by Tim Rowland, explored other innovative housing initiatives inside the blue line.

Year-round, good paying employment opportunities are going unfilled because the interested applicants cannot find housing in the area that they can afford. I moderated an affordable housing conference last year where the director of a county health department showed me a file full of job applications from nurses looking to work here. They had all declined her offer of employment because they could not find an affordable place to live in the area. That story is far from unique. A study by the Lake Champlain - Lake George Regional Planning Board found that 38% of the employers that they surveyed have had prospective employees decline positions for lack of available housing. It is estimated that the Adirondack region will need 7,000 additional homes over the next decade. Some of the conditions that are exacerbating the problem are geographic or embedded regulations like APA land use restrictions, but some are state and local ordinances that could be reconsidered.

Like many north country economic development initiatives, housing is hampered by a lack of scale. It is hard to make the math work here, for any business. There are very few people, and they are spread out over a very large area. The Adirondack population totals only 123,000 people, but that population is spread over 6 million acres in over 100 towns and villages. By comparison, Brooklyn covers less than 1% of the land mass of the Adirondacks but has 20 times as many people. That lack of scale here makes it very hard to support a school system, or a fire district, and we have eighty. It makes it hard to field an EMT squad, or open a hardware store, or build fiber optic internet systems - or to build housing. Adirondack communities lack the scale to attract development projects of any size, even if the local regulations would allow for one. Developers are unwilling to commit time and resources to build just a few units.

This is not to suggest that it is not possible. Fortunately, there are community minded developers whose primary motivation is building local housing, not maximizing profit, and are willing to forego a larger payout that would be available in other locations with higher densities. These developments, like Steve Sama’s Fawn Valley project in Lake Placid, can make the math work by structuring a business plan that includes a supportive local municipality, state and/or federal tax credits, and frequently a philanthropic component in the capital stack. Local community organizations like the Adirondack Foundation have invested in projects such as these. Northern Forest Center is another regional not for profit that focuses on affordable housing, with current projects in Elizabethtown and in Tupper Lake, where NFC demolished an old hotel to build apartments. NFC President, Rob Riley stresses the importance of “community buy-in”—having a supportive municipality to help shepherd a project through the gauntlet of approvals that are necessary to make these things happen. Typically, developers must deal with town planning boards and zoning and historic committees and town boards and, and depending on location, the Adirondack Park Agency if they have jurisdiction where the property is located. The project’s location can bring out the inevitable pushback from environmental advocates at the required public hearings which adds to delays, and of course, to costs. Pre-cleared properties in which the pre-development administrative site work is being completed by the municipality or municipal land bank with support from local nonprofits are a new enticement being offered to potential developers. Every little bit helps, because for a variety of reasons, building here in the Adirondacks is more expensive than almost every other area of the country.

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, in their current best seller, “Abundance”, compare housing costs in places like New York or California, and compares them to places like Texas and Florida. The authors were making the blue state / red state regulatory comparison, and how development rules and regs in New York and California are part of what is driving the exodus of residents to less expensive states down south. He makes the point that construction costs in places like Houston and Austin are often half the price of their blue state competitors and attributes most of the difference to regulatory expenses. Developers do not have to spend a year convincing the Houston Zoning Board of the merits of their proposal because Houston, population 2.3 million, has no Zoning Board. The town where I live in the Adirondacks, Schroon Lake, NY, population 898, does. My editor (read, my wife) reminds me that we do not have high-rise condo buildings collapsing under their own weight as they seem to do in Miami, so there’s that.

Zoning requirements in the Adirondacks are primarily dictated by the rules & regs of the Adirondack Park Agency, whose primary mission is to preserve the scenic beauty and natural environment inside the blue line. Properties located outside of designated “hamlets” are APA “jurisdictional” and subject to more stringent APA density restrictions, most often requiring eight acres of property to build a home. Properties that are located inside the village “hamlets” have more flexible regulations, but most towns have little or no buildable land left within their hamlet borders. Changing the APA rules would require years of hearings and a state constitutional amendment, so the chances of that happening are slim to none.

While all of New York must grapple with what many consider to be onerous planning and zoning regulations, developing property in the Adirondacks has its own specific set of issues, which add considerably to building costs. One is the local expense of “site prep” in the Adirondacks—clearing and leveling the land prior to construction. The basic problem is that we have no dirt in the Adirondacks. If you look at a map of New York state, just east of Manhattan, you will see a large pile of dirt, over 100 miles long. It is called Long Island, and it was formed when the glaciers scraped the north country as they advanced, depositing all of the topsoil at the southern terminus of the glacier. That is our dirt, and it is the reason that Long Island has potato farms and we don’t. In most parts of the Adirondacks, if you dig more than a foot down, you hit ledge rock, which is why building often requires blasting for a foundation—or finding room for your boiler in your kitchen. The equipment shed that my wife and I built two years ago required $70,000 for clearing and site prep and pouring the foundation, before we bought the first two by four. This was during the pandemic, so don’t ask what we paid for the lumber. Neighbors have spent double that amount.

Another challenge for affordable housing advocates is the stigma often associated with the term “affordable housing”. Even if the focus of a project is building “workforce” housing, where 80% of the tenants will be teachers and nurses and trades people—all people we desperately need here in the north country— a proposal to build work force housing is interpreted as “low-income housing” and that, most unfortunately, brings out the NIMBY in many people.

Many residential housing projects are supported by tax credits through New York State’s Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program. LIHTC actually acts as a conduit for federal dollars, and developers must meet many specific criteria to qualify for the credits. One of those criteria is an “income test” for prospective tenants, in an attempt to assure that a prescribed percentage of the residents’ annual income is below the “area median income” (AMI) for that area. The AMI for Essex County, NY is $75,000 for a family of four. Specific credit amounts are available for projects where a percentage of the tenants, typically twenty percent, have incomes that are 80% of AMI, or 60% of AMI, etc. Eighty percent of the apartments are priced as “market rate” housing. Often—I would like to say sometimes, but it is, unfortunately, most of the time—when an “affordable housing” project is proposed, it is met with very vocal resistance by neighbors, and sometimes the municipality itself. When housing advocates say “affordable housing”, some people see housing opportunities for nurses and teachers with a mix of a few lower income families, but others see graffiti covered, high rise tenement buildings in the Bronx with meth labs on the odd numbered floors—and not in my backyard!

I advocated for a project in Essex County last year in which the developer had received a commitment from a local town board to approve a planned residential apartment building. The developer was contemplating his first venture here in the Adirondacks and we were thrilled to have a new player trying to make a positive difference with an investment here in the north country. The discussions and required approvals, per usual, took long enough for there to be a change in town leadership, and the new town supervisor wanted no part of the project. The deal was scuttled. I can tell similar stories with identical negative outcomes in Inlet and Lake George, both of which occurred last year. This is why Northern Forest Center’s president, Rob Riley looks for “community buy in” before proceeding with any housing initiatives.

We must all do better to address this growing crisis. It is pointless to spend millions on economic development projects or education and training programs for residents if young families cannot afford to live here. Some of these issues can be changed with thoughtful regulatory review. Attitudes can be changed with thoughtful discussion. Construction costs for things like site clearing and remediation are here to stay. State and local rules and regs must compensate for that handicap, not add to the problem with additional regulatory expenses for developers.

Anyone who has ever been to the Adirondacks understands why people love living here. I have never been to a more beautiful place. We must do better at making sure that everyone can share that experience and help grow more robust Adirondack communities. Right now, our biggest export is our children, because most cannot afford to live here after graduation unless they stay in their parents’ home. That is not a sustainable business model. We must make some changes, starting with our attitudes about “affordable housing”. We can, and must, do better.

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