The Center is helping eight property owners advance their visions for housing development, thanks to a DEC Adirondack Smart Growth grant awarded in 2024. The grant allows the Center to leverage its experience as a housing developer to help others seeking to address the region’s housing crisis. 

For years, individuals and municipalities have approached the Center with viable properties for housing development, but no clear roadmap for how to proceed. This grant funding has enabled the Center to engage with these projects to help move them from good ideas to actionable, fundable developments. 

“It’s really exciting to extend the impact we can have to projects beyond just our own,” said Leslie Karasin, Adirondack program director. “We can take on only a finite number of our own projects, but by empowering others to move forward with their projects we can amplify our impact region-wide.”  

The Center’s approach with this support is phased: initial due diligence on the properties with housing in mind, and then, as funding permits and projects warrant, support for consultants to complete some necessary pre-development work. By the end of the process, we aim to confirm assumptions and lower risks and costs, making the projects more appealing to a developer. 

Through the project, the Center is contributing resources and hands-on assistance to address community priorities. The response has been robust from the people and organizations that have requested assistance with their projects. Many have expressed their gratitude for this free technical support. 

“I think the technical assistance is just the thing we need to move ahead,” said Christine Pouch, who works for the Town of Indian Lake and applied to the program on behalf of a municipally-owned site in that community. 

“This report will be very important to help us leverage other funding, even if the project isn’t shovel-ready,” offered another project sponsor. 

After requesting proposals in late 2024, the Center chose to partner with eight projects in seven different towns spread across four counties. In addition to being geographically diverse, the projects represent a range of project sizes and applicant types. The program is open to municipal applicants, individuals, and organizations. Some of the applicants anticipate developing the sites themselves, and others will need to identify and partner with a developer to bring their projects to fruition.  

“We’ve provided each of the potential projects with a full due diligence report that assesses the project’s feasibility, identifies where it stands in terms of needed pre-development work, and lays out a comprehensive action plan to move the projects forward,” said Karasin.  

Over the coming year, the Center will work with the project sponsors on implementing their action plans, based on identifying appropriate and high-priority actions for the Center to support with limited grant funding. This will include supporting specialized services such as site surveys by third-party professionals in some cases. Several of the projects will ultimately involve issuing Requests for Expressions of Interest to identify developers interested in partnering on bringing these projects to life.  

“Ultimately, the project aims to bring new housing units online that would otherwise be unlikely to happen because of the daunting initial hurdle of this pre-development phase,” said Karasin. “Since most of the projects are located in hamlets according to the Adirondack Park Agency’s Land Use and Development Plan, and since many of them are in walkable, bikeable locations currently served by water and/or wastewater infrastructure, the additional goal is to maximize the smart growth-related benefits of where we locate new housing units.” 

“These projects represent promising opportunities for infill development in our Adirondack communities,” said Karasin. “As a region, we will go much farther in addressing our housing challenges if we make the most of these kinds of infill opportunities. We are glad to be helping these projects, with this goal in mind.”