Tannersville Company Housing Is A Bad Model!

Policy Note: July 2025

I have been watching eagerly to see how Tannersville, NY (a neighboring town and village to Windham), handles the housing crisis on the Mountain Top. And I applaud them for effectively tackling this problem. However, I have many concerns as to the overall implementation of this project as described in the Pocupine Soup News article “Construction begins on Tannersville apartment development”, as written on July 2nd, 2025. Here are my concerns:

• Households up to 90% of the median area income

• Location is off Main Street

• No Incentive to create mixed-use in this complex

The first problem is that by putting an income requirement on the housing of up to 90% of the median income, which is currently roughly $ 64,714.00 according to censusreporter.org, this effectively locks these units into being low-wage worker units with limited mobility. This is a terrible mistake if you want to see a growing economy. It will taint these properties with the idea of catering to undesirables, and that is exactly what we in Windham don’t want to do with our affordable housing to be tainted with. The facts are simple: affordable housing must not be viewed in this way. Affordable housing should be a building block in our economic plan that allows people from low-income to middle-income to obtain quality housing without stigmatization. It should also be a tool to grow the population’s median income without locking people into low-paying jobs that will not provide growth. We want affordable housing that grows with residents as their income levels increase.

We also want affordable housing that places positive pressures on the entire housing stock to reduce the overall costs of housing. The next part of affordable housing is that it must be part of a bigger and mixed-use complex. Placing affordable housing off Main Street is a big mistake. It makes it harder for these units to interact and build in the community. We want our new residents to embrace our community and build strong ties to the small businesses in our community. The only way to do this is to build affordable housing into our mixed-use properties that house new business opportunities. We also want our mixed-use properties to bring in a broad base of people.

I don’t see that occurring in the Tannersville plan. They are essentially creating low-income only homes that will, unfortunately, lock these new residents into living in these homes with no hope of real career mobility. These types of solutions are a common trap in affordable housing that is designed this way. Essentially, they’ve created a great way to maintain workforce housing for Val Group’s needs, and not a viable solution to the crisis with their income requirements.

By placing these units off Main Street, they are creating a low-rent district instead of building a complex at the heart of their community that is designed to increase walking traffic and reduce car usage. These are all ways to stigmatize and reduce the viability of this project. We should learn from these mistakes. This type of affordable housing will not create a vibrant growth pattern in our community, nor will it provide one in Tannersville. Like the town of Prattsville (also a neighboring town) and its affordable housing project still shows no sign of real economic growth on Prattsville’s Main Street. Why? Because it is not the main street and it’s not part of a mixed-use complex. These critical developments will not occur if affordable housing is not coupled with vibrant job creation.

If we follow the models of Prattsville and Tannersville, we will end up in the same position with an expensive project that creates marginal economic impacts in our community. On the other hand, if we start our affordable Housing Project with smaller pre-built apartment homes that we refurbish in our community that already exists, we will save money and resources while creating far more economic impact if these homes are made available to better-paying jobs, such as expanding our Public Works Department. This is the type of project I envision in our community. A much more holistic approach to the issue. Certainly, we might not create 56 units, but we will create the appropriate number of houses for the appropriate number of jobs we can create immediately, along with developing long-term economic growth in the community. Not to mention, my plan will use local contractors for the renovations. This will create an added boost to the economy in that instead of leaking money out of our economy to outside contractors, we will keep it internally with local labor.

The Mountain Top region suffers from a housing crisis and job crisis that make affordable housing like that in Tannersville and Prattsville ill-suited to our economic needs. What our communities need to do is start to create housing stock that is reflective of the median household income range of $64,714.00 to $74,773.00 [Windham’s median income] is certainly not enough to afford a home that is $490,000 to $2.2 million. So that means any affordable housing project that ties income to eligibility is never going to allow this segment of residents in Tannersville to become upwardly mobile. Instead, these residents will become trapped in low-income jobs in what is little more than Company Housing. Affordable housing has to be flexible enough to support the growth of the occupants as they progress from low to middle-income households to higher-income households.

Which is my plan for affordable housing is designed to grow with the occupants as they increase their wages and develop local jobs that create true careers.