Having released a “Housing Needs Study” in November, Warren County is now taking steps to identify “concrete objectives that we can accomplish at the county level to address our housing challenges,” county Administrator John Taflan said in his annual report, presented to the Board of Supervisors on January 19.
According to Taflan, Warren County has signed a $15,000 contract with a consulting firm, LaBella Associates, which has been tasked with, among other things, developing a strategy to “implement (those) highest priority recommendations.”
That strategy will include coordinating Warren County’s initiatives with those of municipal planning offices, the
Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board, Warren County EDC and others, said Taflan.
Warren County suffers from a significant housing shortage, concluded the Housing Needs study, which was commissioned by the county’s Planning Department.
When the rate of vacancy drops below 5%, a housing shortage exists, says Julia Smith, the study’s lead author. The vacancy rate in Warren County is 3.6%, Smith told a committee of Warren County Supervisors on November 14.
According to the study, inventory is low, with houses selling faster than the national average. Single-family homes, when available, are expensive: typically, $300,000 and above. The supply of rental units is equally limited and comparatively expensive. Rents have increased by 22 to 41% over the past few years.
“The housing needs assessment contained valuable data, but few if any recommendations to address such issues as the lack of housing for those workers whose skills are in demand in our communities. They can’t afford to live here,” said Taflan.
LaBella Associates’ recommendations are expected to be available to the public in May, 2024.
“This will help us turn our housing study into a housing strategy,” said County Planner Ethan Gaddy.
Some of the initiatives developed through the strategy will be eligible for state grants, Gaddy added.
An Adirondack Park-Wide Issue
Taflan said the challenges in providing housing that communities in Warren County face are not unique. “Every rural county in the Adirondacks and upstate New York has the same issues,” he said.
Lori Bellingham, the Lake Placid-based Adirondack Foundation’s vice president for community impact, agrees.
“We know of too many people who have looked for or secured jobs here, intending to move to the region but have had to turn down those jobs because they couldn’t access housing. We know of young adults who have had to move away from the region, away from their families, because they couldn’t afford any of the available housing options,” she testified before the Joint Legislative Budget Hearing on Housing in Albany on Feb. 14.
Throughout the Adirondacks, Bellingham said, “there has been an increase in pressures on existing housing. The region has seen a 43% growth in short term rental listings since 2019.”
Seasonal housing, she said, absorbs 24% of units in the region, and in some communities, as much as 70%.
“Stable, appealing, year-round housing (is) a foundational driver for (a community’s) health, education, workforce and civic engagement,” said Bellingham.
According to John Taflan, among the factors hindering the construction of new housing in Warren County are limits placed by the Adirondack Park Agency on density in areas outside the hamlets.
Beth Gilles, the director of the Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board, acknowledges that municipalities and non-profit housing groups must work with the APA if the housing shortage is to be addressed.
She told a committee of Warren County Supervisors in February that her organization is in the process of drafting “an APA pre-development approval program for housing, so that projects would be shovel-ready and able to be marketed to developers.”
“It’s time for us to re-engage with the APA,” said Taflan.
Other Recommendations
In her testimony before the budget committees, Bellingham cited the Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board’s April, 2023 analysis, “Building Balanced Communities for the North Country: An Economic Analysis of Housing Needs,” which found that local housing starts have declined by 39% over the past 10 years.
According to the Board’s Senior Planner, Alison Gaddy, the area will need 7500 new housing units over the course of the next decade to support the workforce that the region will require. More long-term rentals will help, Gaddy noted.
(Last summer, the Northern Border Regional Commission (NBRC) awarded $500,000 to the Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board to establish a Revolving Loan Fund to construct long-term rental units in Warren and four other counties.)
Among the recommendations for the creation of more housing to have emerged from the Adirondack Common Ground Alliance’s 2023 forum, held October 20 in North Creek: imposing a transfer tax on the sale of houses worth $1 million or more and allocating the revenues toward affordable housing.
(In Massachusetts, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey has introduced legislation that would allow cities to impose their own tax on the sale of homes above $1 million to support affordable housing.)
The Common Ground Forum also endorsed a proposal to appropriate $7 million for the state’s Small Rental Development Initiative (SRDI), one of the few housing initiatives scaled to the hamlets and villages of the Adirondacks.
According to Bellingham, funding for that program has been omitted from the executive budget, and in her Feb. 14 testimony, she urged the legislature to restore the funds and, in fact, increase the appropriation to $20 million.