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Effort aims to revive Schenectady neighborhood
Sunday, October 26, 2014
By Bethany Bump (Contact)
Gazette Reporter  

SCHENECTADY — Plans are underway to infuse one of Schenectady’s neediest neighborhoods with a bounty of new housing for low-income families, veterans and seniors, a first phase in what would amount to a multimillion-dollar, multiphase redevelopment of Hamilton Hill.

The Community Builders, an Albany-based developer, is leading the redevelopment charge with the help of local and state officials. The first phase will include converting two old school buildings on Craig Street into affordable housing and renovating, demolishing and reconstructing nearly a dozen homes. Later phases call for redevelopment along Albany and State streets.

“This fulfills our mission, which is to build and sustain strong communities where people of all incomes can achieve their full potential,” said Jennica Petrik-Huff, project manager for The Community Builders’ Capital Region office. “We’ve been witness to the changes happening in Schenectady and just want to continue working with the city and the local stakeholders to

not only develop housing, but on some of the other priorities within Hamilton Hill.”

The nonprofit, mission-driven developer has developed and managed high-quality, affordable housing in more than a dozen states, collaborating along the way with neighborhood groups, residents, public and private agencies, and philanthropic interests. It opened an office in the Capital Region 13 years ago and was responsible for a $6 million rehabilitation of 20 buildings into 40 rental units in Schenectady’s Vale neighborhood nearly a decade ago.

Now, it’s embarking on a much larger project. The first phase of the Hamilton Hill project would cost about $17.5 million, officials say. It’s contingent on state funds and tax credits, with financing expected from a number of sources.

The old Horace Mann Elementary School at 602 Craig St. would be converted into 34 affordable housing units for seniors and veterans as part of a development called Hillside View. The three-story building was previously home to the Carver Community Health Center (known later as Schenectady Family Health Services, then Hometown Health Center). It’s been vacant since 2005, and now requires substantial rehabilitation to ensure its long-term viability, the developer says in project materials obtained by The Daily Gazette.

“Conversion to a housing use is critical for the historic preservation of one of the many abandoned schools that should be saved in the Capital District,” it says.

The $10 million rehabilitation would be extensive, requiring layout reconfiguration, updating all mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, upgrading the building envelope and the addition of a fourth story. The developer would use sustainable design, construction techniques and materials. Once complete, it would feature permeable paving, photovoltaic panels and a community room with a computer lab.

The Community Builders submitted applications for state funding in December, including requests for $2.4 million from the Housing Trust Fund and $6.1 million in Federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits. Other financing would come from the developer, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York.

The old St. Columba’s School at 400 Craig St., known today as the Boys & Girls Club, would be converted into 17 housing units on the second and third floors. The first floor would remain community space. Outside, a six-unit housing rental would be built fronting Stanley Street and a two-unit housing rental would be built fronting Emmett Street. These units would be open to income-eligible families.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of Schenectady currently houses a clubhouse and administrative offices at the building. Executive Director Shane Bargy says the organization is preparing to move its administrative offices to a temporary home sometime next year, though it’s unclear where that will be just yet.

For the past year, it’s been looking for land close to Mont Pleasant Middle and Pleasant Valley Elementary schools, where it can build a new clubhouse that features a center for teenagers. More than 500 children from the 12307 ZIP code attend these schools, he said.

“We’re in nine schools,” Bargy said, “so in the interim, once we’re out of the building, we will redirect any children that want Boys & Girls Club programming to our school sites, which are in our neighborhoods.”

The developer is also in the process of buying up 10 individual parcels in the vicinity for redevelopment. Four have been identified so far for redevelopment. The developer is requesting area and use variances from the Schenectady Board of Zoning Appeals to demolish vacant two-family homes at 716 and 720 Stanley St., combine the lots and build two new attached, two-family houses in their place. It’s asking permission to do the same thing at 310 Craig St. and 807 Emmett St.

Almost all the properties involved in the first phase of the project don’t currently pay any taxes. Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority Chairman Ray Gillen said payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreements could be negotiated for some of them.

“These are old schools that have never been on the tax rolls,” he said. “If we do PILOTs, they would be paying far in excess of what they’re paying now.”

Metroplex and city officials offered a tour of the neighborhood to The Community Builders in August, but plans have been in the works since at least late last year.

“This has the potential to be transformative,” said Mayor Gary McCarthy. “It’s somewhat preliminary, of course, but I see it as kind of the progression of coming out of downtown, where we’ve had really a remarkable transformation.”

Although Metroplex and city officials have focused redevelopment efforts in some city neighborhoods over the years, the bulk of Schenectady’s redevelopment and revitalization has occurred downtown. Residents and officials of distressed neighborhoods regularly expressed hope that the attention would turn their way soon.

Work got underway this summer to clean up blight along Eastern Avenue, a long-distressed neighborhood that serves as a gateway to downtown.

Hamilton Hill Neighborhood Association President Marva Isaacs said her organization was approached several months ago about the revitalization project. They have a meeting with the developer next month to discuss the affordability of the planned new housing.

“We want to know about the rent, like how much they’re going to charge these people, because these people cannot pay a lot of rent,” she said. “There’s definitely a need for new housing and better housing, because there’s a lot of homeless people right now who need housing. I hope when they build these houses, there’s rent that is reasonable.”

The project has generated interest in the neighborhood from other developers, local officials said. Gillen confirmed that DePaul, a Rochester-based developer, is eyeing affordable housing possibilities along Albany Street, but declined to offer more information, citing the preliminary stages of that project. Company officials could not be reached Friday.

“We’ve been able to generate a lot of interest,” McCarthy said. “In terms of potential impact, it has the potential to be a transformational undertaking that gets people rethinking their options and the value of living in that neighborhood.”

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October 26, 2014
7:10 a.m.
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wmarincic says...

You mean like they did in the Vale neighborhood. Where their subcontractors charged $250,000 to rehab a house and hired crackheads to do the work, and once they were done they filled them up with drug dealers who then destroyed them again. What changed in the last ten years?
October 26, 2014
7:13 a.m.
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wmarincic says...

Drive down Close St and Victory Ave and see what a great change they created with their millions of dollars wasted. I've seen Central American ghettos in better shape and safer to walk in.
October 26, 2014
8:45 a.m.
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jackorgel says...

Its like placing a High Priced book cover on the same problem. The crackheads and entitled people will still be there.
October 26, 2014
8:49 a.m.
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FlyPTi says...

This is not a plan to revitalize anything! This is a plan to allow the Boys and Girls Club and Hometown Health,(former owner of Hometown Health on Craig Street)and BNI to cash in/cut and run after deliberatly flooding the Hamilton Hill Neighborhood with failed programs, crime and unmet promises sending local property values into the toilet. Don't forget that Schenectady Municipal Housing/Section 8 will benefit from the increase in the number of Section 8 units in the city. Cities like Troy and Saratoga limit the number of Section 8 units to maintain a balance in their housing mix. Craig Street is referred to by the locals as "Kids Corridor" This is the main walking route to a campus of schools, Martin Luther King, Mont Pleasant, Pleasant Valley, Steinmetz, and Washington Irving School. The Schenectady School District plans to redistrict. I have been told that they will try to keep the children closer to where they live. Read the grant. It is horrible! I wonder what the veterans will do when the gaslines explode rocking the neighborhood like an earthquake hit, or on the 4th of July when the fireworks are more like mortars and bombs than a show of patriotism and sparklers. If the local, county, state and federal legislators don't get this than we need to vote in some that do. And, wmarincic is right on target. Get in your car, better yet park your car and walk the Vale Neighborhood and see what Community Builders did for that neighborhood with your tax dollars.
October 26, 2014
9:10 a.m.
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FlyPTi says...

The previous comment was posted by Darlene Lee. The Hamilton Hill Neighborhood, no longer has a library, the Schenectady Police Department Traffic Center, the Charlie Mills Neighborhood Network Center, Schenectady Fire Department Call Boxes, Pay Phones, United States Postal letter box, a Catholic Church, a Methodist Church,and let's not forget that the city tried to foreclose on most of the African American Churches, a laundramat, and on and on.
This plan begs for regulation and transpancy in grants. All grants should have to file for a permit. (for a fee) All grants should be published and available in public places for the public to view. All parties and letters of support provited by politicians should be public information. All too many politicians sign letters of support without reading or comprehending the financial burden on the residents of the city and as a favor for a friend without any accountablilty. Oh yes, does everybody remember that the first thing Community Builders did when the Vale Project was done was to ask for a correction of their tax assessment?
Darlene Lee
October 26, 2014
9:25 a.m.
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FlyPTi says...

Versions of this grant have been rejected at least twice. How many time do they get to keep resubmiting a bad idea? I can think of 10 things this neighborhood could benifit from instead of more people that have special needs and no one or plan to care for them.
October 26, 2014
9:35 a.m.
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mezz3131 says...

I'll take your word for it, wmarincic. I'm not driving up there and certainly not getting out of my car. I'm afraid of maybe having to defend myself and then getting criticized for it. Stay away and don't go there unless you need to. The housing is not the problem. It's the people. Not all, it's actually just a small percentage. But the good people are not the one's you see on the streets. They are better off evacuating the good people then putting up a fence around it to keep it contained....too late though, like Ebola, it has spread too far

Quoted from Henry

The city doesn't need more low income housing apartments, it needs to cut taxes to fill the hundreds of houses now boarded up and get them off the market. Create a market where the low income could afford the taxes to actually buy a house in the city. This might also create a group who actually cares about their property, right now low income housing apartments are trashed because the people don't care about it, I wouldn't rent out a tent to some of these people

Quoted from Parent

Spot on! There are plenty of empty houses in my neighborhood right now. Another was just boarded up last week, maybe the week before. What's left of my home's value is going down the tubes by the week. And I got another notice that my escrow amount is going up, up, up to cover tax increases.

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

The project should be aimed at bringing middle and upper income family units back into the city.  The city and Metroplex should be targeting Hamilton Hill to become like Federal Hill in Baltimore.

Quoted from Libertarian4life

People are fleeing the Hill.

You couldn't bring middle class people there if you let them live there tax free and gave every member of the family kevlar bodysuits.


Cut taxes of you want to revive neighborhoods.

Spending more money when people are tax poor is like shooting yourself in the other foot after you lost the first one with ten bullet holes in it.

Quoted from DemocraticVoiceOfReason

Federal Hill in Baltimore was much worse than Hamilton Hill.  The naysayers didn't think that it could be turned around.  It was turned around.  Hamilton Hill can be turned around as well --- just follow the Federal Hill model.

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Recent history[edit]
Question book-new.svg
This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2007)

View of sunrise from Federal Hill.
In the 20th century, Federal Hill was a working-class neighborhood, and by the late 1970s was yet another struggling Baltimore inner city neighborhood, with increasing crime, racial tension, depressed property values, and an aging and decaying housing stock. Many of the industrial jobs, particularly in the shipyards and factories along the south shore of the Patapsco River, which had long provided the main source of employment for neighborhood residents were in the process of disappearing. The Bethlehem Steel shipyards on the east side of the hill were one of the last to close, in the early 1980s. The nationally recognized urban homesteading program in nearby Otterbein, begun in 1975, helped spur interest among individuals and businesses in rehabilitating homes in Federal Hill, and it soon became a hotbed of investment and rehabilitation, particularly by young professional baby boomers who had grown up in the suburbs but worked downtown.

The investment and growth throughout downtown and especially at the Inner Harbor through the 1980s and 1990s only increased the popularity of Federal Hill living over the decades following the initial reinvestment period. A second period of intense investment and rising property values began in the mid 1990s. This second stage of neighborhood investment has included not just single-family home rehabilitation but increasingly large development projects on former industrial sites, particularly on the edges of the neighborhood around the water's edge. Within the core of the neighborhood itself, there has been an influx of new restaurants and shops. The city's population grew 0.6% in 2006 for the first time since the 1950s with much of the growth focused in Federal Hill. Streets that used to have vacant houses on every block have now been fully renovated. Many families have moved into these houses.