Transformation ongoing
Hillside Crossing part of ambitious effort to revitalize neighborhood
What was once a neglected cluster of dilapidated structures at the corner of Craig and Albany Streets is now a strip of sparkling new buildings awaiting tenants.
Development is continuing to ripple across Hamilton Hill with the next phase of an ambitious housing effort on track to be completed this spring as part of a project that has dramatically reshaped the contours of the neighborhood, one of the city’s poorest.
Dubbed Hillside Crossing, developers have constructed 85 units across seven buildings on three sites, with the focal point a mid-rise apartment building at the foot of Hamilton Hill.
The five-story structure located at the corner of Albany Street and Germania Avenue has a V-shaped entrance designed to present a symbolic gateway from downtown into the neighborhood, according to the developers.
“We wanted to show that development didn’t stop at Nott Terrace but continued to flow up Hamilton Hill,” said Janis Stewart, real estate development project manager for the Community Builders, referring to the sustained spurt of downtown development. “We tried to be transformative.”
Murals will later be painted on the edifice based on community feedback.
The 54-unit building is part of a broader effort by the Boston-based developers to revitalize the neighborhood, which has long suffered from disinvestment and urban decay.
Community Builders demolished 19 blighted structures, 11 of them city-owned, as part of the project’s second phase, which started in late 2019.
“We wanted to take down the worst of the worst,” Stewart said, echoing a phase often used by city Mayor Gary Mccarthy, who has made eradicating blight and promoting first-time homeownership a focal point of his administration.
The city sold 71 properties in 2020 and demolished 34, work that is on track to continue this year.
Seventy-five percent of the city’s housing stock was constructed prior to 1960, according to a 2020 report by Schenectady Community Action Program, with 56 percent built before 1940.
Community Builders are also putting the finishing touches on a threebuilding complex with 21 units just up Albany Street from the mid-rise, and completed construction on a cluster of townhouses at the corner of Stanley Street and Delamont Avenue last fall. Seven of the 10 units are now leased.
All work is scheduled to be completed by June, with construction costs clocking in at $27 million.
Once finished, the developers will have driven investment into an increasingly widening strip of the Craig Street-main Avenue corridor, which will be complemented by $7.3 million in proposed federally-funded projects by the city, including cosmetic upgrades, park improvements and bicycle and pedestrian lanes.
“There’s a lot of money being pumped into this neighborhood that is desperately needed,” Stewart said.
The first phase of their effort, Hillside View, was completed in 2018.
That portion included 58 apartments in eight buildings, including two conversions of mothballed schools on Craig Street: Horace Mann, now known as the Electric City Barn, and the former St. Columba’s School located nearby.
Construction clocked in at $16 million, with funds cobbled together from state, local and federal funding sources, including historic and housing tax credits.
“We generally have 95 percent occupancy,” Stewart said.
Converting historic structures, demolishing blighted buildings, remediating industrial pollution (one building occupies the footprint of a former laundry where contaminants leaked into the soil) and building new structures can be tricky and often dissuades other developers, Stewart said.
“We don’t really do easy,” Stewart said.
The new apartments are a welcome addition for a city where 39 percent of households are cost-burdened, according to the SCAP report, a number that climbs to nearly 53 percent of all renters.
Income needed to afford an apartment defined as “affordable” is no more than 30 percent of gross income spent on housing costs.
Those with incomes at or below 30 percent of the federally-defined Area Median Family Income experience at least one of four “housing problems,” including incomplete kitchen and plumbing facilities, more than one person per room and a cost burden greater than 30 percent.
Monthly rents at Hillside Crossing will range between $426 and $1,159.
“No resident will pay over 30 percent of their income to live here,” Stewart said.
Units have been tastefully designed, she said, and developers were careful to avoid the optics of cheaply-constructed housing.
“We want to make it look like a market rate apartment,” Stewart said. “We don’t want you to drive by and say, ‘This is for poor people.’”
Organizations like SCAP are buoyed.
“The ability and right of choosing where you want to live is so often limited for households who have a low income,” said Elise Martin, director of community services. “New affordable housing in the community is a vital step in restoring that choice.”
The intersection of Albany and Craig streets hosts several non-profits serving income-challenged residents, including a heavily-trafficked food pantry run by Schenectady Community Ministries.
Yet Hillside Crossing isn’t a final panacea.
The fair market rate for a two-bedroom unit in Schenectady County is $1,054, according to a 2019 report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
That means a family would need to earn at least $44,600 annually with an hourly wage of $21.44 to afford a twobedroom rental unit at fair market rent.
However, the county’s hourly mean renter wage is $15.16, which means the units may remain out of reach for some families.
Neighborhood concerns
While Community Builders hailed the transformative nature of their effort, it hasn’t come without friction.
Some residents have grumbled about the size of the tower, said city Councilwoman Marion Porterfield.
“I’ve heard a lot of feedback that people aren’t happy with the high-rise,” Porterfield said. “They feel like it’s more ‘projects’ as opposed to apartments and two-family houses.”
Porterfield also said she has fielded complaints about property maintenance issues at the Electric City Barn and 400 Craig Street.
The mid-rise at 736 Albany St. will have a property manager on site during the week, Stewart said.
Following quality-of-life concerns that reached a boiling point in 2019, Community Builders boosted security measures, including surveillance cameras and security patrols.
Molain Gilmore said the development has the potential to be a “major boon” for the neighborhood. But the Emmett Street resident is among those who hoped to see more local people offered jobs on the construction crew, which is led by Troybased contractors UW Marx.
She’s spotted just one kid from the neighborhood.
“Along those lines, it’s a disappointment from a construction point of view,” Gilmore said.
The developers shored up community support a half-decade ago by promising to outfit the Electric City Barn with a police substation order to strengthen community engagement efforts and bolster public safety, a presence Gilmore said has since been downgraded to a “cubbyhole.”
“That was downsized,” Gilmore said. “That was never the intent and it wasn’t what we bought into.”
Community Builders said as coronavirus restrictions continue to relax, use of the substation will increase.
The cluster of threestory buildings across from the food pantry will contain 1,000-square-feet of ground-floor commercial space.
While they’re eyeing a laundromat, Community Builders has engaged a number of potential operators to fill the space, including the city Police Department, which said they want to establish substations in Hamilton Hill as part of the recently-adopted package of state-mandated police reforms.
“No lease has been signed for the space as of yet,” Stewart said.
To date, 50 city residents have worked on the site, Stewart said, and developers worked with Mission Accomplished Transition Services, the city’s Affirmative Action Office and the SEAT Center to refer city residents for jobs.
Mission Accomplished were also able to successfully city residents find employment on other construction sites in the Capital Region, Stewart said.
Activist Shawn Young acknowledged there was outreach by Community Builders to attract people of color — and that affordable housing is needed for the neighborhood — but he felt like efforts were delayed and only after concerns mounted.
The project would have provided a better pathway to bring local residents out of poverty if they engaged in those efforts from the beginning, he said.
“I felt like it was a missed opportunity,” Young said. “It was already too late.”