Joy Tract Road Housing Feasibility

After months of processing, the Herkimer County Industrial Development Agency has released a Housing Feasibility Study about Joy Tract Road.

John Piseck, the Executive Director of the Herkimer County IDA and Don Hall the Consultant and CEO for Opportunities for Upstate released the document to the Town of Webb board as well as a presentation with suggestions as to how to proceed.

The main takeaways from this study were that affordable housing is, of course, scarce in this region of the Adirondacks.  The Joy Track Road was approved for the Department of Environmental Conservation for development.  The plan recommended a building or multiple dwelling buildings with between 36-44 units.  That the average build cost for a new single family home is now over a million dollars in 2021.  That based on the last census nearly 80% (79.7%) of housing in Town of Webb are second homes where people live in a primary residence elsewhere.  Another 15.8% of the homes are already owned by a person as a primary residence.  As of 2019, 9% of housing in Webb was classified as rental so inventory is just no existent.  

The recommendation was to create a Public Housing Authority to aid in developing more multi use housing in Webb to ensure that the community can sustain families and year round residents into the future.  That this PHA would oversee any Town built housing, as well as run things like voucher programs, help create loan programs for first time homebuyers, help drive policy that will allow more affordable housing unit construction in the future and to work with private developers to further move in the direction of the towns housing goals.

The board is digesting this document and will convene in future meetings to discuss a path forward.  The LivingADK Housing Committee will also be using this document as a potential guidebook and further research its findings in ways as to give the town board new perspective.