As housing costs continue to increase, issues like affordability and Good Cause Eviction are grabbing headlines across the country.
To learn more, Capital Region Bureau Chief Grant Ashley spoke to Matthew Nelson, the CEO of Better Community Neighborhoods, Inc., a Schenectady nonprofit housing organization and developer.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ashley: What would you say is the biggest problem in housing for Schenectady right now?
Nelson: I think one of the biggest challenges is not surprising. It's affordability.
Whether it's on the home buyer side and individuals and families who are looking to purchase a home being priced out of the market, or renters faced with the challenge of both availability and price. On the availability side, we're a community with lots of families, and there aren't as many larger apartments that are available for folks with larger families. So that's a challenge. But so too, of course, is the ever-increasing cost of rent.
Ashley: Schenectady just put out this Housing Stability Task Force, and one of the big recommendations there was Good Cause Eviction. Could you tell me what that is, and some of the positive and negative effects that would have on the area?
Nelson: It essentially, from my perspective, takes existing law around rental property and enhances it within jurisdictions that choose to adopt it.
There's some some definite benefit that can be derived from Good Cause Eviction policy that's properly mapped out and implemented in a community for tenants, and on the flip side, can be challenging in terms of both the implementation and the oversight of that policy in a local community.
It does add more administrative burden. It's yet another regulatory piece that a local government would have to absorb, and the City of Schenectady has recently identified budgetary constraints, limited personnel in various departments like the Building Codes Department.
That's a potential regulatory downside to it, and then on the flip side, rental property owners have their own concerns about what it would mean for them in terms of cost and process and impact on their ability to maintain and operate their property, so I think it's all a matter of perspective too.
I think there's some things in there that property owners may also find as beneficial as well, but I think there's lots more conversation yet to be had, and I think that the task force acknowledged that in their final report that they were not in in unanimous agreement on next steps.
Ashley: I did want to turn to the other big housing news item in Schenectady, which would be the proposed Hamilton Hill development project.
Nelson: What we've proposed for this site is going to be really transformative. Not only to bring a community-centered grocery store that will help eliminate the food desert that exists for the residents of the Vale and Hamilton Hill neighborhoods and the surrounding community, but the addition of 171 units across multiple buildings in various forms of new housing will help revitalize and extend the ongoing revitalization of the neighborhood.
There's a lot of work underway over there right now, and this is one piece of a bigger puzzle that's been put together to help move the growth from the downtown core into the neighborhoods and up through other key sections of the city.
Ashley: Hamilton Hill is historically a neighborhood that hasn't gotten a lot of investment, but there's also a lot of people who call that home and want to stay there. How do you improve the housing stock in a neighborhood like Hamilton Hill without pushing those residents out?
Nelson: I think the first thing you do in any project, whether it's Hamilton Hill, Mount Pleasant, or anywhere else, is, you engage the community in the process of redevelopment and revitalization to make sure that we're addressing the needs of the folks that live there and providing opportunity for them as well as other individuals and families who might like to make these neighborhoods their home.
The second piece is, you have to diversify what you do to ensure that you have strong neighborhoods that will grow over time.
It can't simply be building large quantities of apartments, providing more affordable housing opportunities for first-time homebuyers within the neighborhood where a family is currently living means that they can stay there, right? It means they don't have to relocate their family and have an impact on where their children go to school or where they work and how easy or difficult it may be for them to get to work. By only doing apartments or only doing for sale development, large scale or small scale in any neighborhood, really just it limits the options that folks have.
