About Jamie Organski

Jamie Organski is an Adirondack area resident who has experience as a reporter, photographer and editor.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Boreas says

    I am glad people are beginning to accept there is a problem here and in other areas. Increasing property values often results in a net loss in generational residents as they take the easy money and run. What you are left with are second and third homes that are vacant much of the time. When those people ARE in residence, they demand infrastructure they are used to in other areas, and up goes the taxes. A perfect storm for removing generational residents from any area without strong and varied work opportunities.

  2. JB says

    Great article!

    As with anything Adirondack, the impending wave of community revitalization is bound to conjure mixed feelings. Indeed, there is a very fine needle to thread; we are living in an age where there are vast ideological minefields of neglected economic constraints and externalities to tiptoe around. In the Adirondack Park, with its incongruent island hamlets in a sea of wilderness that is itself an island in a larger sea of national economic chaos, those limits are more visible, but they exist everywhere as an eventuality. We must embrace those limitations for what they are: not as flukes, but as features. The problem is not, as some would have it, that this grand “design” of things–the limitedness–is foundationaly flawed, but that there is an unwillingness to explore why those limits exist. The Park is not dying from a terminal illness borne of its own stagnation, but from an inadequate immune system, unsuited to the assimilation of inevitable externalities–a variant of “Dutch disease” in which industrial tourism precludes self-determination.

    Where grassroots nonprofits in particular are prescient is in their acknowledgement of the inadequacy of any singular solution and in their professed aspiration to minimize the harms of environmental degradation and gentrification. But without seeing a more strong advocacy for addressing root causes, I am conditioned to fear the worst, notwithstanding that those at the helm are better qualified than I’ll ever be. The Georgist in me sees rent subsidies fueling the self-perpetuating cycle of inflation, supply contraction and land speculation; the Lockean sees artificial disruptions handicapping a self-correcting free-market; the Pigovian sees uncontrolled over-development and housing density besmirching community fabric; the eco-economist sees sprawling overuse as a driver of negative environmental externalities; the Jacobean sees the tourism economy as over-reliant on a destructive import.

    The Adirondacks is a magical potion of interplaying economic ideologies, and a comparative analysis yields a familiar etymology: community and environmental interests are, at the most primordial level, the same. It is this pharmakon of ideology that keeps us alive, but we are all beholden to it, and yet it is no longer beholden to us–at least until there is a catastrophic crash and we need to collect ourselves from the rubble in the wilderness. Our ideologies have taken on belligerent lives of their own, even though they are all cut from the same tiny corner of the same cloth; counterintuitively, it is the overcompensation for this inconvenient truth that is the source of our current state of paralysing contention. To find our way back home, we need to rediscover the “living” ideology that adapts to the pluralities of real-word constraints–institutions that embrace communities but also communities that embrace community, policies that happily embrace irresoluteness and economies that embrace human morality. That’s what the Adirondack Park was made for: complicated people, complex ecosystems, a bastion of local and national reciprocity. But, yet, the impetus remains: taming the untamed–no longer a wilderness, but now a six-million-acre wild-urban interface, hamets and hotels, Pessoa’s “well staring at the sky”–ideology must perpetually invent new problems for itself to solve amidst the unsolvable. And then, all over again, history repeats itself, with more entropy to contend with each time.

  3. Marcel Carrier says

    Jamie,
    Congratulations on your article ! A common sense approach is the Co-hab. If they can keep it local and keep government out of it as much as possible it should be successful by providing a disincentive and poison pill for people that would turn properties in to STR’s. Other than the “environmental” aspect of LivingADK, I like it !
    Marcel Carrier

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *