LAKE PLACID — There’s a new housing project in the works on Main Street that will add four long-term rental apartments for Lake Placidians to the market.

Lake Placid-based developer Patrick Ledger, who runs Viking Chieftain, LLC, has started laying the foundation for an apartment building on the corner of Main Street and Morningside Drive, just behind the Man and Beast pet supply store. Ledger said the project, fully funded by his company, is on hold for now as the winter weather hangs around. He hopes the apartments will be done sometime at the end of this year or early 2023.

The project was approved by the Lake Placid-North Elba Review Board last fall. A project rendering shows a condominium-style building with four two-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath apartments that are side-by-side, with separate entrances. The original application included an underground, climate-controlled storage unit system beneath the apartments, but that was eventually removed from the plans.

Ledger said the apartments would have two stories. The first includes a living room, kitchen, dining room and a half-bath, and the second floor has two bedrooms, two bathrooms and a laundry area. He said that tenants would be responsible for paying their electric and Wi-Fi bills, and Viking Chieftain would cover the cost of water and sewer.

Ledger is juggling construction plans as inflation and pandemic-related supply chain issues impact lumber prices and delay materials delivery — he ordered windows for the building last week that aren’t due to arrive until July — which is why he said it’s hard to pin down a timeline for the project’s completion.

The fluctuating material prices are also putting a damper on rent estimates, he said. Once he gets closer to the end of construction, he said he’ll have a better idea of what the monthly rent will be. His goal is to create housing for the Lake Placid workforce, which is the demographic he said is served by another long-term rental unit built by Viking Chieftain on Sentinel Road. He said the apartments there rent for around $800 to $1,800 per month.

“We’re shooting to continue that market,” he said. “Our objective is to have long-term worker housing.”

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Long-term goals

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Ledger understands the struggle of finding long-term workforce housing in Lake Placid. He said he has around a dozen employees, and only one lives in Lake Placid because of the rising cost of living here.

Ledger lives in the town of North Elba, in Fawn Ridge, and he said his experiences with short-term vacation rentals in his neighborhood have inspired his goal to create more long-term housing for residents and workers.

He said there’s a four-bedroom house a couple of doors down from him that’s used as a vacation rental and houses nearly 20 people.

“It’s a giant disruption to our neighborhood,” Ledger said, adding that it’s put a bad taste in his mouth for the short-term vacation rental market.

He said he knows it’s hard to write up short-term rental regulations, but that he believes the vacation rentals have created a housing crunch for people who work in the area. He thinks more could be done to regulate the rentals.

Ledger said it would be easy to make more money renting the new apartments on Main Street for vacation use, especially since the area is zoned for unlimited short-term rental stays. He doesn’t think that would be a sensible move during the housing crisis though, and he believes long-term rentals can still be profitable while contributing to community needs.

Ledger doesn’t have any other long-term housing projects planned after the Main Street building, but he said he’s “actively always looking.”

“It’s a long-term growth scenario to fix the (housing) problem, but we’re going to try to help,” he said.