SARANAC LAKE — On Election Day, the basement of the Harrietstown Town Hall was filled with voters participating in democracy. Upstairs, in the village board room, where the village board and Housing Task Force held a public meeting on vacation rental regulations, locals participated in democracy another way — letting their elected officials know they are desperate for more housing here.

It was a time for the public to vent frustrations with what they see as the village’s lack of action on housing, and for village leaders to grapple with a tenuous future and reckon with the soul of the village. Both groups described a fight to keep the soul of the community alive as the high costs and low quality of housing threaten it.

While residents are frustrated by what they see as delayed action by the village, village officials said they have been working behind the scenes, and that they believe they’ve actually been making good time on such large changes to the code.

Young adults at the meeting said they moved back to their hometown of Saranac Lake after college to bring their new skills to their community, but to do so, they have to live in “dilapidated” apartments. Other professionals said they found a community they love in Saranac Lake, and want to tell their friends to move here, too, but can’t promise that they’ll find a place to live.

Jessica Shumway said she works at the Adirondack Medical Center hospital and she’s worried about its future. The hospital has been struggling to hire due to the housing shortage.

“How long before they’re not here? How long before we don’t have a hospital?” Shumway asked.

“You’ve been working at this for two years. We are in a position where we no longer have the time,” she told the officials. “Housing is a finite resource. If we don’t protect it now, it’s going to be lost.”

“I thought the board was actually going to discuss these regulations and we are still at the point where we are discussing values,” she said after the meeting. “Those have been clearly stated. … We’re looking for action.”

The village board is pledging to have a draft of short-term rental regulations for the public to review after the holiday season, but said STR regulations don’t create new housing. After the task force finishes its work on the regulations draft, it can finally turn its attention to new housing solutions, members said.

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The cost of rebuilding

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The village has limited land to build new homes, village Mayor Jimmy Williams said. The only ways he sees to improve inventory is to rehab old properties or subdivide land.

Williams said the 70-unit Saranac Lofts housing development getting underway on Broadway is “impossible” without a PILOT agreement with the local governments and every state and federal grant it could get. To him, this means building new is next to impossible to get a return on investment.

He does not want to subdivide. He said it changes the “character” of the village to make housing more dense.

Rehabbing is also unattainable for a lot of people because of the costs, he said.

Task force member Joe Gladd said there are plenty properties available for sale — run-down ones. And the cost to make them livable again is too much — sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Task force member Trevor Jackson suggested 203k mortgages can support redevelopment — what he called “sweat equity,” or putting money into home improvements to get more value out of it. These mortgages factor in the cost of rehabilitating a home to help finance the full effort of buying it and restoring it.

He did this himself when he moved back to Saranac Lake six years ago. He bought a home on foreclosure that needed a lot of work, put in that effort and sold it for more than he bought it for.

But the state has a restrictive energy code, he said, and the village is very thorough in code enforcement. This isn’t bad, he said, but makes construction expensive. And building material prices are up, he added.

“I don’t think an investor would buy a dilapidated multi-family house and make it liveable and be able to cash flow long-term rentals,” he said, at least, not in the current market.

Jacob and Sophie Agostino were itching to talk throughout the meeting. They recently purchased a multi-family building in town and to afford the cost of making it livable again, said they are converting three of the four units they aren’t living in themselves into STRs.

They were both worried the village would be regulating them out of their dream plans.

The couple moved to here from Virginia in January and got a fixer-upper building at a low price, but it needs well over $100,000 in work, Jacob said.

“We bought the place with the purpose of doing Airbnb because we knew that’s the only way you can afford a home here,” he said.

He said they can’t make the same money on long-term rentals, and sees STRs as the only way to make their plan work.

Jacob said they love the community they’ve become a part of.

“But if you put a knife in short-term rentals, then our option isn’t going to be to switch it to long-term … because we still can’t afford the house then. So we’re going to have to sell the house, move away and you’re going to lose certain people like that,” he said.

Williams agreed that running STRs is likely the only way for many people to afford to rehab a property. He suggested once the Agostinos are stable, have paid off debt and got a return on their investment, they should consider making the units LTRs.

“It doesn’t have to be short-term rental forever,” Williams said.

The task force said the Agostinos were in the “owner-occupied” category so their building is not seen as a problem or something the village wants to heavily regulate.

Williams said if the village caps the number of STRs allowed in its limits, that would drop the demand to buy land from investors, which would potentially drop the price of real estate.

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The struggle is really real

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A group of young professionals from the Adirondack Health hospital, the Saranac Lake Central School District and the Adirondack Park Agency attended the meeting. All spoke about the struggles they and their friends have had finding housing here.

Molly Jordan said this has contributed to the workforce problem — the APA, Adirondack Health and SLHS are all struggling to hire.

Jordan said she works at the APA. She said she could easily find a job where she works remotely and make a lot more money to afford a better home, but she cares about the area and wants to protect it.

Jordan said she’s grateful for affordable homes, but “affordable” often means very low quality.

She and her partner want a family here, she said, but $149,000 would buy them a “very small” home with plywood ceilings.

“People shouldn’t be maxing out their housing budget … to buy something that’s a fixer-upper,” Jordan said.

Her coworkers and herself are all locked into salaries with the state, she said.

She has a co-worker who was pushed out of their apartment to make way for an STR. Jordan felt that landlord was putting money over community. She said this person moved to Tupper Lake because they couldn’t find a place to stay in Saranac Lake.

Shumway mentioned that on-call surgery nurses need to live within 20 minutes of the hospital in the case of an emergency, so they can’t get homes in other communities, or if they do, that could carry serious medical implications.

Jordan said she represents people who support local businesses, saying Williams probably recognized her group from his bar.

“We are the people that you love seeing walk through your community,” Jordan said.

Amanda Jones said she was grateful to move back to the Tri-Lakes to find a job doing what she loves, being a reading teacher at SLHS, her alma mater, but she struggled to find housing and currently lives in a “dilapidated” apartment in Lake Placid.

Jones said her apartment has not been inspected and a large portion of her money each month goes into it.

“I’m paying a steep rent and I want my money to go to my own property,” Jones said. “But if I were to buy something, the amount of money I would sink into it would sink me.”

She said she’s put offers in on houses and been outbid in all cash.

“We’re running out of time,” she said.

Williams said he understood the severity of what people were saying.

“We really don’t survive on tourism,” Williams said. “We survive on schools, hospitals and prisons.”

But wages in those jobs aren’t rising, he said, so the people working there are getting pushed out of the area. Williams said he has been losing friends, family and community because of this.

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“Painfully slow”

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A man who spoke at the meeting but requested to remain anonymous for fear of losing his job said he was “frustrated.” He felt STR regulations have been kicked back-and-forth between the board and task force with no passage.

“When’s something going to get done?” he asked.

In May, 2021, the former village board voted to postpone STR hearings until it got more data from an STR data software it purchased around that time. Trustee Rich Shapiro said he and Trustee Tom Catillaz were the only two board members who voted against this, believing it would delay STR regulation.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

During the mayoral debates this spring, Williams said the studies are great but the village had to act. He feels he’s been acting and getting it done soon.

Williams said government is a “slow-moving beast.”

Village Trustee Kelly Brunette acknowledged that this is “painfully slow.”

“This is the first time the board has really discussed the short-term rentals, and to involve the housing task force,” Brunette said.

Trustee Matt Scollin, the board’s liaison to the task force, said there has not been much public coverage of the group’s work in the past months, but that it has been making progress.

Jeremy Evans, who also ran for mayor against Williams in the spring, spoke at the meeting on Tuesday. He said the faster the task force gets out of this STR discussion, the faster it can get onto everything else. The task force members didn’t sign up to be “STR kings and queens,” he said.

Evans said the regulations are not close to passage yet. He called the document an “embryo.” He said now that the task force has set its values and objectives, it’s time to call in the “nerds” who write code and law.

“You need to turn it over to the land use and legal nerds and say ‘This is what we’re trying to accomplish. You go write and implement it for us,'” Evans said.

He asked the board to do that fast.

He pointed out that all three mayoral candidates — himself, Williams and then-trustee and housing work group leader Melinda Little — identified housing as a crisis.

Evans said he can’t understand why the $550,000 the village got in American Rescue Plan coronavirus aid funds are going to upgrading its water wells. He said other communities are doing “creative things” for housing with this “one-time infusion of flexible funds.”

“To see ours dumped into our water plant, I don’t think the village is taking this seriously,” Evans said.

He felt this is why people at the meeting were mad — he felt there was a “disconnect” between the board’s actions and statements.

“My request to the village board is to get every last board member and every last village employee on board with the idea that this is a crisis,” Evans said. “It’s not a crisis for the community development department only. Every single employee from the department of public works to the police department to here in this office needs to understand that this is a crisis.”

Evans got applause from the crowd for his speech.

Task force members said they are ready to be finished with discussing STR regulations and move on to creating housing solutions for new and vacant properties.

Tonight, the village board has invited housing task force members to attend a board meeting scheduled for 5:30 p.m. in the village office in the upper room of the Harrietstown Town Hall.