According to HousingWire, a historic factory in Tupper Lake, a village in New York's Adirondacks, is being transformed into affordable housing. Developers recently broke ground on the former Oval Wood Dish Factory, which operated from 1916 until closing in 1964. The project will create eighty apartments designed to serve both low-income and working families in a region that has struggled to house its workforce for years.
The financing structure shows how creatively this project came together. The development received over twenty-three million dollars in state low-income housing tax credits from New York, along with federal and state historic tax credits totaling nearly thirteen million dollars combined. This layered funding approach allowed the developers, a partnership of Housing Visions, Braxton Capital and Lahinch Group, to make the numbers work on a building that had sat largely unused for decades.
What makes this project particularly notable is the smooth path it had through the approval process. Unlike some resort towns out West where voters have recently rejected affordable housing measures due to concerns about density and character, Tupper Lake's location within state parkland and strong support from local and state officials created fewer obstacles. The local community embraced the vision rather than resisting it.
The housing shortage in this region is real and measurable. A recent study found that nearly two out of five employers in the surrounding North Country counties had lost potential hires specifically because of the lack of available housing. Short-term rentals and vacation homes have pushed prices up while local wages have remained flat, creating an impossible situation for service workers who keep the seasonal economy running. Currently, Tupper Lake has just four affordable housing properties, and even those have waiting lists.
The adaptive reuse plan goes beyond just apartments. The converted building will include brewery space, co-working areas, and storage units, creating a mixed-use neighborhood asset rather than just a residential project. Construction is expected to finish by the end of twenty twenty-seven, with residents moving in the following year.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and around the East Bay is that we face our own versions of this same challenge. While our market dynamics differ from the Adirondacks, many of our communities struggle with workforce housing and young professionals getting priced out. Projects like this one show that taking old industrial sites and reimagining them through creative financing and community partnership can actually work when all the stakeholders are aligned on the goal.
