how can a rural lakefront county respond to its housing challenges?

SUMMARY

Seneca County, NY is located in the heart of New York's Finger Lakes Region. The county sits directly between Cayuga Lake and Seneca Lake, and its many miles of lakefront property on both sides make it desirable as a vacation and second home market. Meanwhile, off the lakes, historic village centers struggle with disinvestment and the rural county interior generally lacks modern infrastructure to support new housing development. These are the conditions within which the County government is seeking to address housing-related issues of both affordability and economic development. 

Though the county is near the growing outer suburbs of Rochester and Syracuse, next to a thriving Ithaca, and between the two largest Finger Lakes, it had experienced very little housing investment in recent years. County leaders wanted to know why this was the case and what to do about it especially given its potential impact on economic development and workforce retention.

While many suspected that outdated regulations were to blame, czb’s analysis revealed that soft demand for non-seasonal housing was the main culprit. An analysis of six housing development prototypes showed that there was a consistent $100,000 financing gap, per unit, between what it cost to build or substantially rehab housing and what the market would bear. This finding was the building block of a strategy that calls for a $1 million annual commitment of local resources to help fill those gaps on specific types of projects.