Gov. Kathy Hochul’s State of the State address contained two priorities that FoothillsBusinessDaily.com has been following for a year: broadband internet access and housing.
Hochul has a $25 billion housing plan to create or save 100,000 affordable homes statewide, increase construction of new homes, and tackle inequities in the housing market over the next five years, her press office wrote at the start of January.
The plan includes a focus on allowing transit-oriented development and easier conversion of commercial real estate, such as hotels and offices, to residential, among a handfull of other ideas.
On the Broadband side, Hochul announced a $1 billion ConnectALL initiative.
The press materials say it will "transform the state's digital infrastructure.” This program ties into a current program that is mapping broadband infrastructure throughout the state, learning down to street-level which homes do or do not have access to affordable, high speed internet. The map will lead planning and development, officials have said.
The ConnectALL plan will also aim at equity in broadband service and: support local efforts to expand broadband especially to underserved areas; offer a $30 per month subsidy to those in need; tie broadband access to development of affordable housing; and remove fees and regulations that make it hard for infrastructure projects to move forward, the press materials say.
FoothillsBusinessDaily.com spoke with Jim Siplon, the executive director of the Warren County Economic Development Corporation, and Elizabeth Gilles, the executive director of the Lake Champlain-Lake George Regional Planning Board about the governor's plans. Both have been at or near the front of the fight to increase housing and internet access.
Both were happy to see the governor make this a focus.
"It's right in line with the work we're doing," Gilles said of the two priorities.
Last year, she led a six county grant application, the NTIA grant, looking for federal funding to help pay for broadband expansion in the North Country. It was the first time the counties and private investors worked together on a single grant in this way.
The federal government was overwhelmed with applications, she and Siplon said, so grant winners have not been announced, but they are hoping to hear this year.
Gilles said her group is also conducting a workforce housing survey, what she called “availability mapping," especially in Hamilton, Essex, Clinton and Franklin counties that will take the better part of the next two years.
They are looking not just at the number of housing units and type of housing in those counties, but at the length of a person's commute and whether the housing is actually affordable.
"We're really interested in vacant housing as well” and whether there are programs to redevelop the structures for use, she said.
Siplon also sees the positive sign that the state is looking at housing. He and the WarrenEDC have held a series of public meetings about the housing crunch over the past six or more months, meetings that Siplon, a bit tongue-in-cheek, has said he will continue until everyone has heard about the issue.
Nationwide for 10 years new housing starts have been dropping, he said in a recent interview and in the public meetings.
"That underinvestment hobbled us all," he said. This is affecting buyers and renters both. People making $100,000 a year have a hard time finding a place to buy in Warren County, nor can people find places to rent. The inventory is just too low, and that is driving up prices.
[Read more about the data and the situation here, here and here.]
He especially agreed with the policy connection of the two issues: housing and broadband.
"Expand our housing stock and make sure that anyone living in that housing stock is connected,” he said. “Done together, you generate economic value immediately.”
And he was happy he said that the Hochul Administration recognizes that the early declaration of broadband victory just a couple years ago in the Cuomo Administration “wasn’t serving us.”
Under a the previous governor's broadband expansion program, a location was considered “served” by broadband if anyone in a local voting district had any sort of high speed internet connection. The Cuomo Administration was able to say that almost all of the state was covered using that metric, but it left many in "covered" districts without any internet access.
Right-of-way fees that internet developers pay to run cables along highways and railroads have kept them from building at all, Siplon and others have said. The fees made development too expensive for the relatively few homes and businesses the cables would reach. Hochul's plan relaxes those fees.
Siplon said: “To me, that’s a huge, positive development.”