The Division of Human Rights, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, New York State Homes and Community Renewal, and the New York State Department of State will celebrate Fair Housing Month by hosting fair housing webinars to educate New Yorkers about their rights. The virtual programs will cover the legal protections against discrimination that are afforded home-buyers and the fair housing obligations of professionals in the real estate industry. [Read more…] about ‘Fair Housing 101’ Sessions Mark Fair Housing Month
Housing
Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
Located on the grounds of the former Freedomland Amusement Park on the northeastern edge of The Bronx, Co-op City’s 35 towers and 236 townhouses have been home to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and is an icon visible to all traveling on the east coast corridor.
In 1965, Co-op City was planned as the largest middle-class housing development in the United States. It was intended as a solution to the problem of affordable housing in America’s largest city. [Read more…] about Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York
Blueprint for Adirondacks Issued by Common Ground Alliance
The Common Ground Alliance of the Adirondacks (CGA) recently released its 2022 Blueprint for the Blue Line, a summary of state policy recommendations largely informed by dialogue and ideas generated during the group’s annual summer forum. [Read more…] about Blueprint for Adirondacks Issued by Common Ground Alliance
Albany’s Clinton Ave Historic Apartments Wins Preservation Award
Albany’s Clinton Avenue Historic Apartments have won a 2021 Excellence in Historic Preservation Award from the Preservation League of NYS.
The Clinton Avenue project involved the careful rehabilitation of 70 historic rowhouses spread across a one-mile span in Albany’s Clinton Avenue and Arbor Hill Historic Districts. The development includes 3 studios, 123 one-bedrooms, 68 two-bedrooms, and 16 three-bedrooms – a total of 210 apartments.
Tenants include households who earn from 50%-90% of the area median income, providing much-needed affordable housing in the city of Albany. Supportive housing has also been included, with 40 units reserved in partnership with DePaul, who provides services under contract with the Office of Mental Health. [Read more…] about Albany’s Clinton Ave Historic Apartments Wins Preservation Award
The Theatre District & Hell’s Kitchen Revival
With the recent reopening of Broadway and the Theatre District in the city of New York, which is claimed to be a $1.8 billion industry, it’s appropriate to remember James R. McManus’s role in the efforts to bring Broadway and the adjacent Hell’s Kitchen district to what it is today.
Around 1972 economic and social conditions in Hell’s Kitchen and the rest of the city of New York were beginning to deteriorate. At the time that Jim’s father and great grand uncle had been the District Leaders, living conditions in the once notorious slum had improved for most residents.
This was partially because of improvements in the city’s manufacturing economy during the two world wars, and because of the New Deal social welfare policies pioneered by Al Smith and Frances Perkins. [Read more…] about The Theatre District & Hell’s Kitchen Revival
Modernist Architecture, Literature, and the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium
Edward Livingston Trudeau was born in 1848 in New York City to a family of physicians. During his late teens, his elder brother James contracted tuberculosis (TB) and Edward nursed him until his death three months later. At twenty, he enrolled in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia College (now Columbia University), completing his medical training in 1871. Two years later, he was diagnosed with TB too.
Following current climate-therapeutic theories that promoted the relocation of patients to regions with atmospheric conditions favorable to recuperation, he moved to the Adirondack Mountains. Seeking as much open air as he possible could, almost continuously living outside, he subsequently regained his health. In 1876 he settled in Saranac Lake and established a small medical practice. It was the beginning of a remarkable career and a new chapter in American medical history. [Read more…] about Modernist Architecture, Literature, and the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium
Adirondack Gentrification: No Country for Young Women (Final Installment)
Since environmental preservation has in part contributed to the gentrification of wilderness, it may seem logical to conclude that deregulation is the solution to the Adirondack housing crisis. It is not.
While the peculiar form such administration has taken in this part of the world leaves much to be desired, the accomplishment of the Adirondack green movement is still nothing short of remarkable: it has compelled the State to discipline capital’s monstrous appetite for profitable nature, and it has held the line even amidst the neoliberal feeding frenzy that has consumed much of the world in the last half-century. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: No Country for Young Women (Final Installment)
Adirondack Gentrification: Seasonal Development & The Rent Sink (Part 5)
In the spring of 1989, the Adirondack working class received an alarming wake-up call in the unlikely form of Robin Leach. The Adirondacks, according to the garrulous host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, were a hidden jewel just waiting to be discovered by travelers with a taste for wilderness and the purchasing power to claim a slice of nature-at-its-moneyed-best for their very own. The show had even gone so far as to list the remote and rugged mountains as an “upcoming hot spot for jet-setters” in its “Guide to the World’s Best Places.”
Leach’s prediction had been well borne out by the mid-1990s. “Rough It Like A Rockefeller,” proclaimed one strapline in the travel section of the Wall Street Journal, while an article in Vanity Fair encouraged readers to go “camp hopping in the haute Adirondacks” and Travel and Leisure billed it as a place where “the notion of escape endures.” Such articles, liberally sprinkled with posh photographic layouts depicting the rich at play in tastefully rustic lodges nestled on the shores of gleaming silver lakes, recommended such accommodations as The Point in Lake Placid, where guests could take in the clean mountain air for a mere $1300 a night.
Beemers had been traded for sport utility vehicles, and the Adirondacks, it appeared, had become an exclusive retreat for well-heeled consumers seeking respite from their taxing cosmopolitan lives in the newly fashionable wilderness. [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Seasonal Development & The Rent Sink (Part 5)
Adirondack Gentrification: Dispossession & Chronic Displacement (Part 2)
The shortage of children that closed the Raquette Lake School a decade ago was not due to a housing deficit. On the contrary, Raquette was chockablock with housing when the school failed, much of it sitting empty for most of the year.
While Raquette boasts some unusual features – some of its structures are accessible only by lake – it shares this same predicament with most other gentrifying Adirondack places, lake-locked or otherwise: plenty of lodging and nowhere to live.
How can any community with so many vacant dwellings suffer from a housing crisis? [Read more…] about Adirondack Gentrification: Dispossession & Chronic Displacement (Part 2)
The Devil’s Due: Adirondack Gentrification & Environmental Justice (Part 1: Displacement)
“Just close the fucking thing.”
These words of quiet despair were uttered twenty years ago in the aftermath of a meeting at the Raquette Lake School, whose imminent demise was increasingly apparent to the people of the village. The atmosphere at the Tap Room, the unofficial community center where attendees had decamped to face the inevitable over a beer, was raw.
The man who issued the fatal prognosis relished it neither as a parent nor an alumnus. But the writing was on the wall. Pupils had dwindled to single digits, too few for a play or a baseball team, never mind the district budget for utilities, maintenance, transportation and salaries. With no babies on the horizon, the current crop of children would age out, and there would soon be none left to educate. [Read more…] about The Devil’s Due: Adirondack Gentrification & Environmental Justice (Part 1: Displacement)