Adirondack communities take stock of housing inequalities
By Tim Rowland
The Covid-19 pandemic and short-term rentals are typically blamed for a critical shortage of housing in the Adirondack Park. But while they were certainly catalysts, the predicament was born of a complex web of cultural shifts, public policy decisions, land-use regulations, new technology and other disparate factors, some dating back to the 19th century.
Housing in the Adirondacks today, if it can be found at all, is unaffordable, not just to long-time residents, but to the young professionals with kids — the very demographic the Adirondacks is trying to attract. Some fear this is leading to hyper-gentrification, a Great Camp 2.0, where the poorest are living in their cars while massive amounts of wealth and resources are spent on palatial compounds deep in the forest with “spirit dens” and floating boathouses that might be used only a few weeks out of the year.
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So complex is the issue that some believe there to be no solid solution.
Others, while acknowledging the absence of a quick fix, endorse chipping away at multiple levels in hopes of alleviating the problem. Ideas range from microgrants of a few thousand dollars to shore up or insulate older homes to universal health care, which could remove significant costs from the building industry.
What’s in common is the belief that the shortage of affordable housing has transgressed the bounds of shingles and siding, and bled into a threat to communities across the Adirondack Park.
Based on a series of interviews, review of documents and analysis of real estate data by the Explorer in recent months, the region is at a crossroads and forced to deal with long-term structural inequities in Adirondack society.
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“The canary has been in the coal mine for some time, so it’s no surprise we’re in the situation we’re in,” said Terri Morse, director of Essex County Mental Health, an agency that is among the first to detect community malaise. “If this problem is not solved people are going to flee from it.”
Long-time residents remember that housing in the Adirondacks has always been challenging, due to the high percentage of vacation homes and aging stock that needed excessive repairs.
But with typical Adirondack ingenuity, there was usually a workaround.
North Elba councilor and housing advocate Emily Kilburn-Politi said that 20 years ago or more a young couple could, if all else failed, scrape together $70,000 for a small chalet on wooden pilings in a vacation-home neighborhood. Today, Realtors say those same chalets are bringing $300,000 or more.
How did we get here?
This subprime mortgage market collapsed in 2007, and housing collapsed along with it. For the next 15 years, much of the nation rebounded from this plunge in homebuilding, but the Adirondacks did not.
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One explanation is that there were few construction workers left to do the building. Older contractors retired, and younger contractors left for busier regions. As for new builders graduating from trade schools and entering the workforce? There weren’t any.
Touting the economic advantages of an advanced degree, adults urged high school students to attend college at the expense of the trades. Since 2018, according to the consulting group Camoin Associates, an economic development consultant in Saratoga Springs, the North Country has lost a quarter of its carpenters and electricians.
These one-time starter homes today are being converted into rental properties, and no affordable replacements are being built. According to a spate of recent housing studies, the last appreciable wave of Adirondack construction occurred in the mid-2000s, when banks were on a lending bender, awarding loans regardless of details like verified income and work history.
On the front lines of the industry, Nicole Martinez, president of Wildlight Business Solutions, a construction-support company based in Keeseville, said that Camoin’s estimate sounds about right. But she says there’s more to it. The emphasis on college fed a community divide and that, on the eve of the pandemic, was wide and about to get far wider.
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“It gave children the message that if you don’t go to college, you can’t be a success,” she said. “It made them feel like dirt.” Many who went away to college failed, returning home with nothing to show for it but a simmering resentment of an economic model that seemingly had no place for them.
Those who succeeded at college did indeed benefit financially, said Nicole Justice Green, executive director of PRIDE of Ticonderoga, a housing and community development nonprofit that serves three North Country counties. But with housing prices in the stratosphere and saddled with student loan debt, many applicants have no chance at a mortgage.
Or, if they did, they would soon be outgunned by a new wave of competitors. The Town of Keene has a housing problem, but before that it had a hiker problem. More and more visitors had been coming for recreation, causing trailheads to overflow with cars that spilled onto roadsides and into private neighborhoods. Social media was choked with resplendent photos of Mount Marcy, Rainbow Falls and Indian Head. Phone apps made it a snap to check the forecast, book a room and zip up or down the Northway at the drop of a hat.
In the late teens, record visitors hiked the mountains, paddled the waters and understandably fell in love with the region. When contagion struck, these visitors knew where they wanted to be — a place with which they were already quite familiar. They traded congestion and sickness for open spaces, natural beauty and a lifestyle closer to family and the land.
“Everybody wanted to come where it was safe,” said Kristy Deyo, owner of Cedar Run Bakery and Market in Keene. “What we in our communities already knew was important, suddenly became important to the rest of the world.”
One additional component mattered considerably, something that didn’t exist in the short-lived property rushes attributable to 9/11 and the mid-aughts housing bubble: broadband. With the birth of remote work, those who came had the option to stay, and for many, that’s exactly what they did.
“There are definitely gig-economy workers in our district,” said Tim Seymour, superintendent of a Lake Placid school system where enrollment has plummeted from 1,000 students 20 years ago to just over 500 today.
Local governments and nonprofits collaborated to help connect the Adirondacks to the world, often in the face of corporate and state intransigence. The effect was palpable. “The first question buyers used to ask was, ‘does it have electricity?’” said Lake Placid Realtor Jodi Gunther. “Now the first thing they ask is, ‘does it have internet?’”
As the world wanted in, locals got squeezed out of the housing market. There were no long-term rentals, and “at one point there were no houses for sale in all of Keene,” Deyo said.
While residents compete for housing, outsiders arrive for brief stays and find accommodations. And that’s probably the most contentious point of the entire housing debate.
Houses for whom?
The Adirondacks are technically awash in housing, but it’s unavailable to full-time residents. The town of Arietta in the Southern Adirondacks, which includes Piseco Lake, has, according to the Lake Champlain Lake George Regional Planning Board, 292 residents and 775 residences, or about 2.5 homes for every man, woman and child.
But 707 of those housing units are what the Census classifies as “vacant,” meaning they are second homes, vacation homes or short-term rentals. So in reality, those 292 residents are availed of only 68 of their town’s 775 homes.
Demand for homes of all sorts drove assessments up 23%, said Christy Wilt, Arietta Town Board Member and executive director of the Hamilton County Industrial Development Agency. “People want to come to work here, but a school bus driver can’t buy a house,” she said.
Communities further removed from a lake or popular trailhead have their own set of issues. On the other side of the park is the northeastern Adirondack town of Altona, where the average employee has to drive nearly half an hour to work at generally low-paying jobs; two thirds of families earn less than $50,000 and more than half of those live in poverty.
In terms of housing, a staggering 82% of long-term tenants spend more than 30% of their income on rent, 30% being the maximum they can pay for housing without it draining their budgets of money for food, medicine, transportation and the like.
Through this lens, housing and wages are entwined problems. But the disparity between what people earn and what they would need to earn to buy a home — PRIDE’s Green estimates this gap to be $80,000 to $100,000 — can’t be addressed by asking the boss for a raise.
Help is on the way
As part of this series, we highlight examples of attainable housing projects in the Adirondacks
Project: Fawn Valley, Wesvalley Road, Lake Placid.
What is it? Fawn Valley, when completed, will include 22 cape homes and townhouses on Wesvalley Road open to people earning up to 200% of median income, with home prices ranging between $180,000 and $220,000.
What made it happen? Fawn Valley was inspired by a 2019 housing report showing great disparities between incomes and housing costs, even for those with well-paying jobs. That led to the creation of the Homestead Development Corporation that is in charge of the project.
What was a key moment? The Homestead Development Corporation was able to convince the IRS that higher income people were being shut out of the market. The ensuing tax-deductible status opened the door to philanthropic funding.
How is it funded? Donations, a line of credit from Champlain National Bank and a $400,000 grant from North Elba’s Local Enhancement and Advancement Fund, which relies on money from the Essex County occupancy tax.
For more information or to apply for a home: homesteadadk.org.
Working on solutions
Still, there may be hope. Across the Adirondacks, local governments and nonprofits are working on housing projects to create hundreds of residential units. These include large apartment complexes in Lake Placid, a group of residences at an old industrial site in Tupper Lake, a four-home development in Keene and a single house in the town of Jay.
Leaders are calling for new policies such as hamlet expansion, land banks and voluntary deed covenants to prevent residential housing from becoming vacation rentals.
Also, something of an underground, peer-to-peer housing market is evolving, in which sellers channel homes to permanent, contributing members of their communities, taking less of a profit than they could by listing on the open market.
There is general agreement that the shortage is beyond market fixes, and for that matter, beyond the ability of any one individual outfit. In Keene, said Town Board Member Teresa Cheetham-Palen, a planned small development of four affordable homes required the participation of private philanthropy, the Housing Assistance Program of Essex County, the Adirondack Community Housing Trust, the Keene Town Board, the Keene Housing Task Force and multiple volunteers.
Obstacles have ranged from a difficult site plan to misinformation on social media to an apathetic power company that took years to relocate a problematic utility pole.
It is only with the help of many coordinated people and groups that this wearying but worthwhile work can be done. Some of this work will come to naught, but some will succeed.
Going down the list of helpers, Palen said, “We need a mix of all these just to have a chance. We need to join together so people can live and work in this unique location we call home.”
The series is funded in part by a grant from the Generous Acts Fund at Adirondack Foundation and by the Annette Merle-Smith Community Reporting Fund at Adirondack Explorer. If you would like to support our community reporting, get started here.
The Adirondack area is not unique to affordability problems. 40 years ago when I bought my first house it was very small and it needed work. I spent many years in my 20s working overseas and saving my money – I made huge sacrifices working hard in Africa – I worked in places like Sudan during a civil war… Now that’s a crisis.
My point is it took huge personal focus and work and this is no different now.
One solution, Trade schools should be a priority of the region. Skilled trades in electrical, plumbing, carpentry, roofing, painting ect are skills in short supply. A skilled person gets paid very well and are they are in short supply. There is plenty of old housing stock in need of repair. Invest in trades.
Another problem exists with this. Here’s an example – a friend of mine bought a run down house that had been vacant for 50 years. That’s 50. But it had good bones, so he bought it for more than it was worth, fixed it up – and his tax assessment immediately tripled. You can almost price yourself out of your own house by being in the trades. NY state is a tough place to live.
Jim V the taxes are true observation. Refurb properties should have a tax abetement program that defers the increase for ten years or so. The abatement is motivtaion to invest, fix and stay. I’ve seen massive renovations and deferred taxes downstate in 1980s.
There is no one fix. Houses will not fix or build themselves and there are hundreds of houses on the market today that need skilled trades not more studies.
Excellent article with nice graphics.
But seriously incomplete. It ignores the structural nature of the problem (which is why affordable housing is also a serious issue in rural communities that have little of the appeal of the Adirondacks). It has been clear at least since the Reagan era that supply side solutions to the ails of capitalism are, at best, insufficient. This is usually argued in terms of tax policy, but its true in housing, too.
It would indeed be great to build more housing in the Adirondacks (though not at the cost of the region’s natural appeal) and one can only applaud the efforts that are described here. But, as elsewhere, they don’t (and won’t) touch the numbers that are needed. I recently toured a project in Bozeman, MT where a community land trust has to write down $300,000 of the cost of a home to get a family supported by professional salaries into it. The numbers may not be quite so forbidding in the Adirondacks, but how far can philanthropy and grants take us?
Why are we not talking about tax policy? A Georgist Land Value Tax would take speculative land values out of the housing cost equation and shift the costs of government away from improvements, including new homes. Why not?
Why are we not talking about the income side of affordability? To suggest just one tiny measure, would providing affordable day care allow families to comfortably pay a little more for housing? Of course it would. Why not?
I will not ramble on. Just one more point. The national housing crisis is not due to a failure or a breakdown in the system. We have a system that is designed to create and concentrate wealth and it is doing exactly that. If we can’t change the system, we can’t solve this problem.
I agree 100% with this, but big systemic change is tough. There is a lot that can be done to improve the situation given present circumstances.
Further, if we’re ambitious, maybe the ADKs could be a model. It’s already a super unique and progressive place in terms of the protection of the park and the hybrid nature of those protections, allowing for communities to be in the midst of so much protected land.
I think if you aim for the stars, hopefully you land someplace further than marcy field to the garden parking lot, lol
This was a good debut to this series – many kudos. I think it was clear via my comments over the pandemic that my family tried to make a permanent move to the region in 2021 that didn’t happen. We had a lot of reasons for not being able to make a move work: child care availability and costs, housing availability, ability to work full-time remotely.
I do want to be honest and comment that there also was cold feet re the justifiably maligned concept of a “cultural fit.” I think it’s still quite a mixed bag re whether local residents even want young people of a certain flavor in their communities. But nor do I think it’s unreasonable to be uncomfortable with vegan granola crunching hippies like me either. Lol I realize I do not represent the majority of the country, or even of my generation…
…buuuuut, the average millennial or zoomer, which is the demographic that everyone claims to prize, is more woke than the generation dominating the region at the moment. It’s June 1st, and my big multinational office in the city has a giant honking progress flag in the lobby and a Pride flag raising later today and a bunch of zoom backgrounds with lesbians and drag queens that you can download for your meetings. We booked a major NBA player to celebrate Juneteenth for a meeting that will be attended by 1000s of employees. This is a company that all of the boomers have their retirement funds invested in. It understands that being woke is profitable, because being woke attracts the talent from my generation that you need to succeed.
The point being: some people in the ADKs are verrrrry uncomfortable with the culture and future that is producing all of the above phenomena. As a granola crunching hippie, I mean you all no harm, and I truly mean you ALL. I want you to have healthcare on my tax dime.
…but I’m not sure everyone who would be a neighbor can say the same for me and my values, or frankly the values of people far less “radical” than I am. In 2020 and 2021 this tension was examined ad infinitum and like the theme of this article – no resolution was arrived at.
I think this series would benefit from keeping the following in mind too – what is the culture of the communities of the Adirondacks? How has tourism affected that culture? Because locals are so priced out of reasonable housing, does this affect whether they even want new residents? New residents of certain trades or income levels? Full time remote workers in service industries?
To close: it is worth repeating that many people and communities have been wonderfully welcoming as my family and I have visited over the years. Further, even I see the vibe slowly changing to accommodate the new generation in *certain parts of the Park. I am still deeply hopeful both that I will live the dream of being full-time, and so will many others from a diverse set of backgrounds. Looking forward to the rest of this series.
Vanessa, you’ve hit a big nail right on the head. My kids are highly paid remote workers, currently living in big expensive, west coast cities. One of them wants to move back to the east coast, but demands outdoor adventure opportunities. He and his wife came out to look at a home for sale in our area (southern Hamilton County). Between the Confederate flag in my neighbor’s yard, the dumb “Don’t Blame Me I Voted for Trump” flags, the guys at our local bar bragging about switching to Miller Light instead of Bud Light… they left feeling like they could never be welcome here. They were also very concerned that the schools would be too conservative, and not stimulating. Sadly, I couldn’t disagree with them. Clearly, there are some people with money who will build a house here that isn’t a vacation home, but it’s a limited pool of people I suspect.
I appreciate the reply, Mom 🙂
Right, there is definitely a demographic of remote finance/healthcare/especially techie millennials that would come for the outdoors opportunities. I could list a dozen friends off the top of my head who want to move someplace next to quality hiking.
And it’s not even that the challenges are insurmountable either. Or that there is a unified “culture” of the Adirondacks. Kudos to your kid for giving it a shot – it takes people even inquiring to move the cultural needle.
But see Lake Tahoe post pandemic as an example of why folks’ qualms may be more legitimate than one would assume. I read a lot about what I’ll call the “townie-techie” wars when a bunch of Bay Area folks started moving in. Never fun to relocate someplace and have people start waving signs at you…
…and the critique that wealthier buyers won’t solve the housing crisis is fair, too. That’s why I support the initiatives in this article.
What were your kids looking for?? Biden flags all around??
You can pay the taxes so everyone can have healthcare on your dime. I pay enough in taxes. Don’t need to pay anymore
Good introduction to the broad problem. One point I think may be worth a bit more emphasis is the recalcitrance of local elected leaders over decades in promoting better planning, trying to use the existing planning/zoning structures to build out denser and more liveable hamlets with quality services instead of fighting pitched battles against park planning. While people spent a lot of time fighting for or against sprawling up-market developments that mostly never materialized housing/hamlets crumbled, people got older and retired and their businesses closed, sometimes their homes didn’t turn over to a new generation, often because people don’t like to think about succession plans that maybe don’t maximize the value to retirees or their families, or there is no financial incentive (or resources) to maximize value to a community. There is so much to discuss! But the discussion isn’t of value unless voters elect people who will look at the problems with an open mind and work toward solutions that may take decades to come to fruition.
Great initiative! Here are my two cents. I believe that to make any dent to solve the housing crisis (anywhere in the country) we’ll need a change in paradigm. People now see houses as “investiment” or as “second homes”, but the reality is that these should be secondary roles. The main role of a house is to provide shelter to a family. Housing should start to be seen as a basic human need above everything else, not unlike food. Imagine what would happen if wealthy individuals would start to amass rice because they expect the price to increase or because they think they need to have in storage all the rice they need to eat during their whole lives: the market would go crazy, prices would increase and this would attract “rice speculators” hoping for a quick and easy profit. That is the situation in the housing “market” nowadays. Legislators will need to face this problem at some point and declare housing security something as important as food security.
So you want the government to get involved to make laws about people being able to buy a 2nd home?? The government should not be making laws against the number of homes people can buy
We moved to the Adirondacks after I retired 18 years ago. We have a house with no mortgage and automobiles with no payments. The logistics of living here are challenging and expensive. Trips to the doctor and buying groceries in all types of weather, the high cost of energy, the cost of home upkeep, finding repair people when something breaks, finding health care, are some of the challenges we face living in the beautiful pristine Adirondacks.
Pristine no longer if you keep building and destroying the beauty of the Adirondacks.
The disparity in ADK housing is outrageous. As a telephone repairman for the last decade I have been to Great Camps wrapped in luxury to small huts covered in moss. This phenomenon is not unique to the Adirondacks but rampant all over America. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. A paradigm shift will be necessary to reexamine our social priorities and fight the plague of “Capitalism on Fire”. As it is we are a nation divided. The poor will survive this debacle but the rich will either share their fortunate positions or be forced to join the downtrodden as we eat your cake.
Fine NY has at least 10 properties listed for under 60 k . Maybe people should look to other parts of the park for housing
Lee Nellis makes an excellent point here. Economic development agencies will of course always want to increase (and subsidize) housing supply. Nonetheless, they seem to have also convinced many that housing affordability problems are caused by supply constraints, despite the obvious pitfalls of endogeneity bias in such assertions.
This is about much more than housing supply. It’s about whether the Adirondacks follows in the footsteps of other tourist destinations — the evolution towards the Disney Land experience, where housing becomes so unaffordable that it must be centrally controlled and, eventually, the few natural attractions that are left are replaced by artificial ones (arenas, resorts, etc.). …Or, we manage to break the cycle, and local economies survive.
I don’t see any actual evidence presented here that there is, in fact, a large, unmet need for full time homes for young professionals, yet this seems to be one of the premises of this article. What demographics suggest this is a problem? And who could afford newly constructed homes here (given the costs of new construction) besides people in professional occupations? Are these remote workers who supposedly want to move here full time, but don’t because of housing?
priceless stuff….I get these articles through APLGRB(review board). This article was first. The second article was about new townhomes: “has started construction on the final phases of a townhome development in the Adirondacks near the base of Whiteface Mountain, called the Owaissa Club. The project is over a DECADE old in the making”…..and we wonder why?
When we see long standing problems in local communities like lack of affordable housing, bad telecommunications infrastructure, failing or no municipal sewer, un inspected septic on lakefront homes…you name the issue that lingers unresolved for years and decades, we must look at some underlying failure in our system of government. I submit that the supervisor system of county government is failing us. It doesn’t encourage broad solutions across wide regions. Instead it often happens that supervisors elected in very small population towns collect an additional paycheck at the county level and then represent their siloed ideas at the county. There is no political incentive for them to follow up on ideas that challenge the status quo. Those trying to bring change are facing a political status quo death spiral.
This appears to be a much needed and thorough assessment of the many sides,
issues and people awareness of them. I find it very interesting as I grew up in
the PH/Moriah/Mineville/Westport area and can see how deteriorated and depressed it has become. I remember the 40s and 50s when there seemed to
be a lot to do and main streets were healthy.
I have grandchildren on the west coast who want to come back to the east and
are outdoors people but are educated and “cultured”. The problem is proper growth without destroying the reason people want to come and live in the
Adirondacks and educational, cultural opportunities around for them to enjoy.
Are you saying that people living in the park aren’t “educated and cultured”??
You have a choice to live in an area that meets your needs.
It sounds like the Adirondacks are not progressive and educated enough for them.
After I graduated from college I moved to Wilmington. There were jobs at Whiteface Mtn. It was the best time of my life & the best age to do all of my outside adventures! Lakes, mountains, skiing, fishing & hiking all right there. I worked with young parents & they struggled for grocery stores, handymen, & women, doctors, good medical care & good schools. Things there now are worse because of housing & all I’ve spoken about above. There sure are lots of second homes, bigger grocery stores now. Lake Placid isn’t what it used to be. It was quaint now it appears there is no Code Enforcement. Just anything goes. It’s sad, no housing & schools are having to close. Just my 2 cents….Seemed a whole better & balanced back in 1981.
No code enforcement?
HA, try to build something.
Can someone define “Affordable Housing”?