Some Thoughts On A Journey Upstate
I recently visited some friends upstate and had some interesting conversations, and made some observations about the economy and life in general. Here’s some thoughts.
Hello, friends,
I hope you’re all doing well. Last week, we talked about the governor of Texas de-facto legalizing the murder of Progressive protesters. It was an intense article.
Also: We hit 50 “followers” on Substack! That’s not subscribers, of which we have 45, and I don’t honestly know the difference, but it’s still a very good thing! So, thank you all for being here; and, if you’re new, join up!
This week, I want to talk about some things I learned from a recent trip to the Adirondacks in New York State. It was an interesting trip to say the least, and I learned a lot. I spoke to regular folks, business owners, and the like from Warren County and beyond.
I need to stress that this is a synthesis of three days worth of conversations, appointments, and observations. It is not meant to single anyone out, nor is it meant to be a perfect encapsulation of anything but what I learned. If you think I’m talking about you, I mean, our chat was pleasant and it’s part of these observations, but that doesn’t mean I’m talking about you in particular.
To be quite honest, a lot of the feedback was relatively consistent, and enlightening.
So What’s Up Upstate?
It was beautiful, thank you.
Upstate New York is fairly rural, especially once you get north of Albany. It isn’t strictly wilderness, but there’s a lot of room between neighbors, especially in the Adirondack Park proper.
There are definitely tensions, such as questions about what our tax dollars are going towards (a common refrain, especially in the context of the Buffalo Bills stadium giveaway we’ve talked about before) as well as a tension between engines of progress and the building permitting process.
There is also - and, this is gonna be weird to say - a vicious cycle that’s crippling business owners. They cannot (for what they described as a genuinely fair salary, sometimes topping $30/hour) find people to work for them, in large part because people can’t find places to live due to housing shortages even though there are plenty of old, crumbling buildings that could be replaced.
Are all of these concerns well-founded? It’s hard for me to say. I don’t live there, I don’t run these businesses, and I don’t work for them, either. Some of the complaints sound like the usual “I just don’t like red tape” that people talk about, but much of it made sense.
The construction-and-development minded folks want to build stuff. There are restrictions in place on what can be built. Some of these restrictions are totally reasonable - Say: You can’t put a well within 100 feet of a septic system. Some of them are not, such as an overbearing restriction on how land parcel subdivisions work so that you can’t sell off property under, if recollection serves, 1.3 acres in an area where most subdivisions are about ½ an acre.
Kinda weird, huh?
The sum effect of this situation is to make it very hard to build anything new. That’s okay: Builders, engineers, and the like have wait-lists anyway. It can take two years or more to get a house built, and that’s not just because the permitting process has so many sometimes-conflicting layers to it (you’ve got the Town, the Adirondack Park Association, and the County to deal with). There simply isn’t anyone there to work.
Fuck, I sound like a conservative. Let me explain.
I went to multiple restaurants where there were one or two wait staff members managing the entire crowded thing. They were going left, right, and center busting their asses, begging for apologies and bribing customers with on-the-house snacks just because they knew they’d be slow at getting to everyone since they were understaffed.
I spoke with homebuilders who used to have a team of seven or eight and were down to three or four.
I spoke with facility managers that had large-seeming staffs, but still couldn’t keep up with all the work they were given because the workload up there is just so much.
I spoke with motel owners who work 24/7 during the “on” season and can only get so much work done because they’re just plain shorthanded.
So How Did Things Get This Way?
CoVID.
Okay, so, let’s dissect that a bit, because - again - I’m sounding like a conservative.
CoVID showed the world that many people could work from home, or only go to the office once or twice a week. This is indisputably a good thing. If you can do your job from your house, you aren’t taking up a spot on public transportation or driving a vehicle in and spitting out carbon all over the place while busying up traffic.
Here’s where I repost a visualization (forgive the hyper-Capitalist-sounding source) of Manhattan’s population changing during the workday.
So: If you’re a data specialist or a stock broker in modernity, chances are your presence at the office isn’t necessary on a day to day basis, right? And that’s a good thing for pretty much everyone who isn’t in a long-term office space lease:
Employers don’t need to rent out as much office space.
With less office space needed, some of that can be converted to or rebuilt as housing in high-demand areas.
Some workers don’t have to commute, which I know first-hand can destroy the worker’s body.
Less commuting is better for the environment.
Clients and customers can do appointments via the internet, saving them trouble.
Even some medical professionals, like psychotherapists, can conduct business remotely and help people via telehealth.
So, overall, work-from-home is a blessing, right?
The Trick Is…Where’s “Home?”
For many - especially those with some financial clout - the answer was to move to one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been: The Adirondacks.
It’s an idea worth pursuing.
With that said: This influx of people wanting to live there strained a lot of resources. Suddenly people were snapping up once-cheap houses and having them rebuilt to their liking. Little lakeside bungalows and hunting cabins were being purchased and transformed into year-round homes. Internet infrastructure was hard hit, but so was physical construction.
After all, most of the people moving up to live and work remotely weren’t exactly helping to build their own homes.
With more jobs going around, some of the people I spoke to reported that their previous staff and even some of the people they were looking to hire decided to split off and form their own businesses. While that gives consumers more choice in project managers, it doesn’t actually increase the number of workers who are on the jobsite. In fact, one could argue that - as a ‘grunt’ construction worker forms their own firm, suddenly they’re doing paperwork instead of building.
Who-so-ever said Capitalism was actually efficient?
Anyway, with all of these new people hoping to move to the area, and often doing so with boatloads of cash (I toured a million-and-change dollar home under construction that was part of a family set of homes in the same price range, all owned by multi-multi-millionaires), what happens to the locals?
So Where Do The Workers Live?
With the price of housing jacked up, there’s really nowhere for them to live. After all, as I mentioned, getting permission to build anything is tricky - and getting permission to build tall is extremely tricky. I heard about a planned townhouse that got shot down because…Well honestly because the would-be owners weren’t exactly honest with their plans for what was going in those buildings, especially given that when one idea got shot down, they started asking about other things like they had no idea what they actually wanted, and they just wanted something.
A lot of the area is a summertime tourist trap with a niche for winter ski bums. That means there’s hotels a-plenty in the summer, but they aren’t exactly cheap, either. There’s RV parks, but those have their own problems and generally only serve well as temporary housing. There’s even an intrusion of AirBNBs - much like how they drive up NYC rents, the purchasing-and-repurposing of houses into vacation rentals is driving up costs there, too.
So unless a worker is really only planning on a temporary stay, their options are somewhat limited unless - say - they know someone who is (likely quasi-at-best-legally) renting out a room.
What’s more, the combination slowdowns caused by the construction worker shortage and complicated-if-not-restrictive building regulations means it’s hard to get more workers up there to do much of anything!
Weird, right?
Are The Adirondacks Alone?
Actually: No.
While this Wall Street Journal article about West Virginia is paywalled, I somehow - I don’t honestly remember - read an unpaywalled version of it. To sum it up: There simply aren’t enough workers who want to live in, well, West Virginia, and so vital work doesn’t get done. Contractors can’t bid on jobs because they don’t have a staff; the sick can’t get medical care because there’s no doctors. You get the vibe.
Their issue is - rather stupidly, if you asked me - complicated by the fact that much of this work could be done by one group of people who might be willing to move there: Migrants. And guess what? West Virginia doesn’t want them. They’re suspicious enough of any old American outsiders who they fear may want to change their community.
They want nothing to do with immigrants from a foreign nation.
Now, here is a line of demarcation between Upstate NY and West Virginia. I spoke to business owners who, while certainly suspicious of efforts to change the area, wanted to bring people up. See, they were more concerned about the other immigrants to the area - the wealthy people from the big city who worked remote and wondered where all the concrete was.
They didn’t care who was coming up, so long as they could work and wanted to be part of the community. They just didn’t want severe urbanization.
So What’s The Solution Here?
As always, I like to give some kind of path forward to solve a problem, and this one isn’t as hard to solve as it might seem. There are an awful lot of old historic buildings, as well as a lot of simply old ones, as well as flat-out decrepit ones. One I can think of sits across from my favorite restaurant on the main drag o my favorite town.
It’s this big ‘ol building that is three stories tall with rotted timber.
Image Credit: Google Maps.
Now, I can’t say for a fact this isn’t lived in or used, but it doesn’t look lived-in or used. If it is, it definitely needs to be better maintained. But it’s not alone. There are other buildings, either in town or in the area, that are on the side of the road and halfway falling apart.
That building could be taken down and replaced with a modernized version of itself. It might cost a lot; it might take time to get built given the lack of a workforce to build it; it might require variances for septic and water systems; and parking might be an issue! But a building of that size and that much space could probably fit at least six one-bedroom apartments (two on each floor), if not some two-bedroom ones.
True, it’s not the most glorious living, but new arrivals to the area don’t need glorious living. They just need living. You can’t move to an area if there’s nowhere to live, and nobody wants a long commute just to have to work a demanding job. Young people looking to escape the city and live in a beautiful place with a well-paying, if indeed demanding job want to save up money to eventually afford a better life, and here’s a situation where there can be six little apartments with one key fact in mind:
They wouldn’t significantly change the landscape of the area!
We’re not talking about bulldozing a forest and gouging out a mountainside to build a huge place, here. We’re talking about tearing down an old and slowly-decaying building to replace it with a new one with the same footprint, if not possibly a bit smaller.
It’s worth noting that this building is squarely within walking distance to the town’s grocery store, several eateries, and several shops, the post office and a bank - all of which is to say it’s an attractive place to live. Sure, you’d need a car to get around the area overall, but that’s just how life is in a rural area. This isn’t a big city we’re talking about, it’s a one-stoplight town.
The immediate term would be rough, though. Workers, especially the number needed to build larger structures like these, need a place to crash while they actually do the work. There’s no easy solutions in sight for that problem, given that a housing shortage isn’t exactly solved by creating a population spike.
In fact, that sounds laughably counter-productive.
I suppose it might be possible for the government to rent out some of the hotel/motel space that might otherwise go vacant during the winters, and for the work to be done during the “off” season, but one motel owner I know has said she can’t really stay open in the winter because she pumps a lot of water underground and the pipes can easily freeze up. Stuffing her place full of migratory construction workers means she’d need more staff to work the “off” season (when she’s got other things she’d rather be doing, since she does all the work for the motel herself), not to mention the fact that any damage done by them is long-term damage to her property. Plus, any delays to the project would push the timetable back into the “on” season, thus royally fucking up her business.
Furthermore, none of this guarantees that the finished buildings (our hypothetical new apartment building as well as other structures in the community) wouldn’t simply be bought up either by an AirBNB’r - or, possibly worse, a megacorporation interested in eternally renting housing but never selling housing.
Still, I’d like to think I’ve presented something of a path to revitalizing one small part of our country, with references to how other parts of the country could benefit if they adopt a similar mindset. This is definitely not an apocalyptic scenario, it’s just one that’s going to require some time - and patience - to work out.
Thank you for reading.
In Other News
Next week, the Trump ‘hush money’ (AKA business records falsification/election interference) trial has closing arguments followed by jury deliberation and, hopefully, a verdict. Just…Know that that might dominate the news next week, if it’s as quick as I honestly hope it is.
Louisiana has labeled certain reproductive health care medications as controlled substances, as signed into law by their governor. This is bad for all the obvious reasons, as it’s taking laws meant to protect people from harmful substances and using them to commit harm to those who need reproductive medication. I can’t speak to the likely impacts (Can all doctors still prescribe them? What changes does this inflict upon that prescription practice?), but it can’t be good - and it is highly unlikely for them to be the last ones.
Our Speaker Of The House, as well as one of our Supreme Court Justices, likes to fly a Christian Nationalist flag. Ain’t that great? There isn’t much we can do about Johnson, since he’s a Fascist ghoul. Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee is doing…Next to nothing about Alito, just holding some low-stakes sounding meetings. Great.
In the “environmental catastrophe” department, a massive survey of men’s balls - yes, our testicles - has revealed that, actually, microplastics are inside of us - Inside of all of the samples tested, in fact. George Carlin wasn’t kidding when he said that Earth guided us to evolve just to give it plastic.
In something more uplifting, the Justice Department - though slacking on bringing Trump to justice for things like January 6th (it’s been three and change years!) - is finally taking on Big Ticket in a lawsuit against Ticketmaster. That’s a nice thing.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.