A new survey outlines a target market, 121,000 households strong, very open to the idea of moving to the Adirondacks. Economic development offices would do well to think of that group as a bloc, not as individuals looking to move, said one official.
“Look at it as an industry, sort of,” James McKenna, the executive director of ROOST said in an interview yesterday. Unlike other industries, "we don't need to build factories. We need to have housing for them."
This is how McKenna, CEO of the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism, has been interpreting a survey his group commissioned with the Warren County Economic Development Corporation. Camoin 310 of Saratoga Springs conducted the survey in January.
The survey's report was released earlier this week and calls the 121,000 a “demand pool” of households made up largely of people from Northeast states. The report does not claim that all will move to New York's north country but they are a target group of interested people. The number is extrapolated from a survey of 6,733 people.
About 10% of those surveyed said they were “very likely” in the next five years to move to the Adirondacks--especially Lake George, Lake Placid and Saranac Lake--if they have access to high-speed internet, health care, dining and shopping. The majority of those households, about 51%, have incomes over $100,000 a year, and about 80% of the likely migrants earn at or above the Area Median Income. Most have jobs that can worked remotely or are retirees.
McKenna thinks of this in the way that one would think of luring any industry. Build the infrstructure the industry requires, he said. In this case: housing.
With the data from this survey, McKenna said he now has evidence that housing production is worth a developer’s money.
"There's development possibilities in the hamlet areas in the Adirondacks," he said. The hamlets are the villages where development is least regulated and houses can sit on less than one acre. Much of the rest of privately-held land in the Adirondack Park requires multiple acres per house.
McKenna said there is plenty of opportunity for new housing development or redevelopment in the hamlets.
"If we're going to keep the Adirondacks a nice place, we do have to concentrate development in the hamlets,” he said.
Both he and Jim Siplon, president of the WarrenEDC, speak of planning for the influx of people.
“We have known professional relocation to our area was under way,” Siplon said in the press release that came with the report. Noting in an interview last week that work, doctors appointments and schools are shifting online, he said, broadband access "is a make or break on whether or not people come...[The pandemic] was like this little turbo boost that accelerated that dramatically.”
The report notes that affordability of taxes, housing, and living costs was a top concern. Housing costs naturally rise if people come to an area with a limited housing supply.
McKenna said he works with many communities in the park, and named a few developments already creating housing at mixed levels of income. Tupper Lake is getting 60-plus, mixed-income units. A developer in Lake Placid is building 260 units that McKenna says will be more affordable especially for families at or just above the median income level.
"That sort of fits the need exactly,” he said.
The Area Median Income for a household, as calculated by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, is $64,300 for non-metro areas of New York. For Essex County alone it is $73,700; for Hamilton County, $68,400; and Warren, which includes the Glens Falls metro area, is $76,600.