Dan Stevens: If you go back 10, 20 years, housing is not one of the top economic development issues, but fast forward today, it’s one of, if not, the most pressing issues. Looking ahead, we’re going to need to be focused on things like adaptive reuse and how do we make this adjustment as we don’t need certain spaces and we need other spaces more. We’re going to need to be thinking creatively about how do we repurpose this space.

Amanda Ellis: That’s the voice of Dan Stevens, Director of Real Estate Development Services at Camoin Associates. From housing shortages to a sudden surplus of office or retail space, economic development at this point in time means dealing with some real estate challenges. Settle in to hear from our expert on how real estate concerns might evolve for communities in the coming years and how you can be prepared for whatever the future brings. I’m Amanda Ellis and you’re listening to Inside America’s Best Cities, a podcast for chamber, economic development and talent attraction professionals on how your community can be an even better place to live. Learn more about this podcast at livabilitymedia.com. And with that, let’s jump in. Dan, welcome to Inside America’s Best Cities. Thanks so much for hopping on today to give our listeners some great info on real estate. To start us off, can you just tell us a bit about Camoin and your role there directing real estate development services?

Dan Stevens: Yeah, thanks so much, Amanda, for having me on today. So Camoin Associates is a full service economic development firm. We’ve got our roots in upstate New York, although we do work nationally these days. We do work across the spectrum when it comes to economic development, things like strategic planning, economic impact analysis. We do lead generation and work with communities to connect them with businesses and we do a lot of work on real estate development services and housing, which is my role in the company. And I work with a team that’s really focused on economic revitalization through helping communities implement development and redevelopment projects. On the real estate side of things, we do a lot of market studies and feasibility studies. We’ll do development strategies for particular areas, downtowns, waterfronts or any specific sites or properties, buildings and those types of things. Financial feasibility analysis, getting into how projects pencil out or do not pencil out, and we spent a lot of our time, particularly these days, working on housing needs assessments and housing studies for communities as a pressing issue.

Amanda Ellis: Gotcha. So lots of wide ranging expertise it sounds like. What are some of the real estate challenges that you’re seeing communities facing at the moment, some common threads there?

Dan Stevens: Yeah, there are a number. I just mentioned housing, so that’s probably a good place to start. If you’ve picked up a newspaper at any point in the past couple of months, you know what a big-

Amanda Ellis: Lots of craziness.

Dan Stevens: Absolutely.

Amanda Ellis: Yes.

Dan Stevens: The market has gone haywire, particularly as we’ve hit the pandemic, although lots of things were building to where we are, but it’s something that we’re seeing communities continue to struggle with, particularly workforce housing issues and so that middle income, middle of the road housing where it’s a little bit above affordable, but it’s a little bit below market rate housing, just an incredible short supply and a lot of communities are really hurting because of it and a lot of households are hurting because of it. We’ve seen prices dramatically outpaced the way that wages and household incomes have been rising. It’s putting a burden on individual households making that decision between things like heat and groceries versus housing costs. We’ve seen a lot of places where the economy is really constrained and there’s a lot of issues factoring in. Of course, the workforce availability issue that’s also going on now, but housing is a big piece of that for many places. Most of the time we’re not having conversations with communities about what should go on this a hundred acre farm field? It’s, what do we do with this gas station that’s falling apart? What do we do about the strip mall that has lots of vacancies and nobody’s invested money in for decades? How do you go about redeveloping these properties, bringing new investment to them, new investors or interest when these spaces are sometimes no longer needed in the market? You have problematic private owners, disengaged owners, brownfield properties with environmental issues. All of these things are issues that we see a lot of communities grappling with. The other thing I was just going to mention is cutting across all of the issues facing communities with how to catalyze and bring in new investment for development and redevelopment or issues around funding and financing. So a lot of what we do is help communities figure out how to make projects happen in partnership with developers, whether they’re private developers or nonprofit developers as well.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a super wide ranging area of economic development, even more than I was really aware of and something that every community in some capacity dealing with whatever their exact issues. Can you talk about some of your favorite examples, Dan, of some communities and what they’ve done to address and work on improving some of these things that we’re talking about?

Dan Stevens: I would say some of the more innovative and interesting things that we’ve seen have been around adaptive reuse, a lot of places thinking creatively about things like those former industrial properties that no longer serve their original functions. So a lot of mills around the Northeast have been repurposed for interesting things. There was one in Brattleboro, Vermont where the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation actually started an incubator, a business incubator for small businesses and a former mill there. You’ve seen communities be partners in development and bring things like incentives and infrastructure and all of these things to the table to make these projects happen. With the infusion of ARPA money, we’ve seen creative things being done with that. We have been working down in Florida with the City of North Port. You use some of that influx of money to really focus on their high priority development sites. The ones that are ready to go are feasible for development, but for the lack of infrastructure. And so they’ve made a decision to invest those funds to make those projects happen through investment in infrastructure. Other examples, I think, tend to be effective and creative are ones where local government, local communities and partners are really looking to change market dynamics and so not accept that maybe the market information says, “Hey, there’s not a lot of potential here. This isn’t a great growth opportunity.” But thinking about how do we change that? And a lot of that comes through public improvements, placemaking, and those types of things. And one example in East Providence, a little area serves as a gateway to their waterfront, underutilized, an interesting mix of uses, but not attracting investment, area gateway to the waterfront. The route that the city took was to really focus on the arts and entertainment aspect as a way to drive new investment. So things like public art installations throughout, creating a designated arts and culture and entertainment district there. Rutland, Vermont in the northeast here, thinking about their main street in the center of their downtown, overhauling that and making it pedestrian friendly and providing spaces for outdoor dining and those types of things. And with the hope of producing development on a couple strategic sites that they have kind of adjacent to this. And so those are the levers and things that we often encourage local governments to look at, what public improvements can you make to bring in that investment that you’re looking for?

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, and what I love about a lot of those examples you gave is how many partnerships they involve within those communities. I feel like that’s something we see over and over in our field, that that is so key and then just another area that shows. What are some common misconceptions, Dan, in our field about real estate development that you would call out?

Dan Stevens: Yeah, I think one of the ones that we come across, and probably isn’t all that surprising, but this view that the real estate developers out there are the bad guys, that they’re the profit seeking villains. And certainly not to say that there aren’t bad actors out there, but there is this often misplaced tension between local residents, even local government and that development community, it’s very adversarial and there’s that tension. I think that’s misplaced quite often. And most of the time we see that developers want to be engaged as partners. They see themselves as community builders and there to help revitalize neighborhoods. And I think there’s also a hesitation that we see out there, a belief that there isn’t a role for the public, for the local government or other public sector involvement, maybe beyond say the approvals process and I think that’s a misconception and I think it’s detrimental in a lot of places because it’s not addressing a lot of the challenges and barriers to development that need to happen to make projects happen. So we always encourage local government entities and others and partners to be proactive in thinking about how to make projects happen because this is a big part of economic development and revitalization, and that can take a lot of shapes and forms, things like land use regulations, which are often misaligned with the type of development that communities want to see and need in their communities, things like bringing land and infrastructure to the table through partnerships or being proactive in making sure that priority development areas and sites are served by that infrastructure. Funding and incentives, having all of that in place. Direct incentives and certainly the things that are available to communities depends a lot on where they are, but things like tax increment financing or density bonuses, but even when some of those tools might not be available, you can get grants to do things that a public developer may not be able to do, some of those placemaking and infrastructure investments.

Amanda Ellis: That makes sense. In this same vein, it often seems like real estate topics seem to be something that can generate quite a bit of controversy within communities. Why is that and how can communities go about reducing that, making sure they get buy-in from the right people and so on?

Dan Stevens: Oh, absolutely. Always a hot button topic when a major project or any project, it feels sometimes, is proposed. We all have an emotional connection to the place that we live and work. And it’s not always things that we hear from community members when projects are proposed or being discussed. I mean, they’re pragmatic concerns as well. How is this project going to affect traffic going by my house? Are my property taxes going to skyrocket? What about noise, environmental impacts, all of these potential negative things that maybe could happen, right? Fear of smells from industrial facilities, visual impacts, all of those things are reasonable to be concerned about, to want answers to. I mean, there’s also competing views for what should happen and what should happen where. And so what is the highest and best use of that property is very subjective and then wrapped up into this conversation, of course, the stigma attached to things like affordable housing where typically see a lot of that controversy and resistance that stems from ingrained misperceptions. One of the things that I always advocate for with communities is to really do the community planning and visioning. Come up with a vision for your downtown or for your strategic opportunity sites, and that’s your opportunity to engage your stakeholders, engage your community and when we talk with developers, one of the first things that they always want to look at is what does the community plan say? What does the community come out and said they support here? What are the things that we think that they’ll be resistant to happening here? Being proactive, doing that early, rather than waiting for a project to come up, have that community dialogue in the context of a controversial project. The last thing I would say is to think through the due diligence and making sure that the developer does there. So we talked about all of those fears about potential negative impacts, but there’s a lot of ways to address those and all of those types of potential adverse impacts are things that can be studied, can be mitigated.

Amanda Ellis: Thinking about housing inventory pricing, some of the things we’ve already talked about peripherally so far in this conversation, something we’ve seen happening more and a lot of headlines about since the pandemic related to housing inventory is it being snapped up by people from outside the market, especially in smaller or mid-sized cities where things tend to be more affordable, seeing remote workers swoop in and snap up these, turning those into maybe vacation homes, Airbnbs, et cetera. What suggestions do you have based on your expertise for communities who want to make sure that they do have affordable options for the people already in the community who have roots there?

Dan Stevens: A huge issue that we’re seeing in many communities, including the ones that you described, a lot of smaller cities, rural places, a lot of places with a high quality of life, a lot of touristy places that have a tourism based economy and service workers that need that housing. And one example, we’re working up in the north country of New York, Adirondack Park region, and we’re in some places that’s the proportion of seasonal housing is upwards of 60%, 70% of the overall housing stock. And as we’ve gone through the data, we can see those numbers creep up and a lot of the year round workers are being pushed out. And part of the story there is also the increases in short-term rentals and properties being used for those types of rentals, just dramatic growth in those short-term rentals as well. It’s a very challenging topic. There is no silver bullet solution, but there are things that have emerged and are proving to be successful and different ways to tackle it. There’s kind of two sides to it. We need to, in these places, build or rehabilitate additional housing. We are dealing with this fundamental housing shortage issue, which is built over the long-term and now just being made worse by some of these pandemic impacts and the outflow of people from urban areas and so on. But the other issue is how do we ensure that housing that’s built remains affordable for low income and workforce level folks and that it remains available to those that live and work in a community and isn’t still just gobbled up by these new people entering a region. And so I would say the latter part is the tricky one. There are approaches that have been taken that work. One of the most effective ones and a model that’s been around for a while is the community land trust model, essentially a nonprofit organization that allows households to purchase a home but without the land, which keeps the home affordable. The model includes restrictions so that the property remains affordable in perpetuity. And so these land trust models can take a little different form. They might acquire existing homes or develop them, but some have been very successful really just in terms of the number of affordable homes that they’re able to produce and maintain as affordable in perpetuity. There have been some more interesting innovative things recently that we’ve seen. Out west, Vail, our ski town out west, has pioneered a pretty interesting program called Vail InDEED, and that one involves purchasing deed restrictions. So the town itself purchases these deed restrictions from homeowners and developers, and it permanently limits the occupancy of that housing unit to individuals that are employed within the county. So regardless of income level, those homes are permanently available for the workforce and it’s been successful to date. It’s being piloted in other places, including upstate New York. There’s housing co-op model or cooperative provides an ownership opportunity, but instead of owning an individual unit, you’re basically buying into a building as a whole or development as a whole, and it’s a more affordable route to ownership and typically have mechanisms to ensure that that housing goes to workforce or those of a particular income as well. And then, of course, there’s a whole host of things that we can talk about with short-term rentals and limiting those. With the short-term rentals, a lot of communities have been making that distinction between a primary residency requirement or hosted versus unhosted, where a hosted short-term rental, you’re essentially having to be on the property while the short-term renters are there. And so it’s a way that communities have tried to limit outside investors from purchasing multiple properties and operating them as businesses and removing that stock from available housing. And certainly we’re seeing in a lot of communities, particularly impacting the availability of year-round rental units, right? Landlords, if you’ve got a unit that can be rented out, it’s much more financially attractive to do the short-term rental approach than to be a long-term rental landlord. And it’s what’s happening. And we’ve really seen a decline in a lot of communities, particularly these tourism based communities, seasonal communities in the availability of long-term rentals.

Amanda Ellis: Looking ahead, Dan, in the next several years, what new challenges in this area do you think that economic developers should be prepping for?

Dan Stevens: Yeah. Well, we’ve talked a lot about housing. That’s a problem that’s certainly not going to go away. I think we’re going to hear a lot about that in the economic development world. If you go back 10, 20 years, housing is not one of the top economic development issues when you talk with economic developers around the country. But fast forward today, it’s one of, if not, the most pressing economic issues that folks are dealing with because this is what we hear from businesses that they can’t grow, can’t expand because of this limitation on the availability of housing. And I think looking ahead, we’re going to need to be really focused on things like adaptive reuse and how do we make this adjustment as we don’t need certain spaces and we need other spaces more. So one example, of course, being office space and the remote worker percentage and approach is going to land, but all indications are that’s going to stick around in some shape or form. And expectations are we’re going to have a pretty substantial glut of office space. We’re going to need to be thinking creatively about how do we repurpose this office space. There have been office conversions, but not many and a lot of financial reasons factoring into that. But I think we’ll see people taking a close look at that and particularly the conversion to residential, which we know that we need almost everywhere, but we’re also seeing a lot of communities are going to be over retailed, in that they have too much retail space relative to really what they need and for brick and mortar businesses on Main Street. So I think right sizing, the retail footprint of communities is another important aspect that we’re going to be dealing with over the next couple of years and trends towards E-commerce and all of that driven by the pandemic and even prior to then. And then I think generally we’re just entering this new high interest rate era and we’re headed for a slowdown, and everybody’s looking into their crystal ball on that one. And it remains to be seen, the extent of that slowdown, but it’s going to cause some economic pain for a lot of places. And so in the near term, there’s going to be a need for monitoring business communities, so having things like business visitation programs to catch those early warning signs of businesses that are struggling, all of those types of things, going back to basics, to weather the storm that’s upcoming.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. So Dan, it seems like you’ve spent your whole career in this little exactly this, real estate development, in this realm of economic development. It’s very specific. How did you end up doing this?

Dan Stevens: Yeah, great question. I had my start as a community planner and so tie between placemaking, building attractive and vibrant communities and the tie in with how that impacts economic growth and quality of life has really been appealing to me, and I do find it very rewarding.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, I mean, it sounds really interesting and you clearly have so much knowledge that I’m glad we got to hear about today. So I always wrap up our interviews, Dan, with a fun question. So where are you based?

Dan Stevens: I am based in upstate New York in Saratoga Springs, working out of our home office at the moment, but yep, I was born and raised in upstate New York and happy to call upstate New York home.

Amanda Ellis: So what are your favorite bucket list items that visitors to the area should make sure that they do?

Dan Stevens: Oh, well, in Saratoga, we’ve got plenty. So most people know us for the horse track and of course, that’s always a fun outing to go there, but we’ve got a lot to do. Our Main Street Broadway has just about every type of restaurant you can imagine. So taking a stroll down Broadway, always a good time as well. And we’re a stone’s throw away from the Adirondack, so if outdoor recreation is your thing, it’s a good place to call base camp.

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dan, for your time. That was so much great info, and it was great having you on.

Dan Stevens: Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Amanda Ellis: Thanks for listening to the Livability Podcast, where we take you Inside America’s Best Cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-sized cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. Have an idea for an upcoming episode? Email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis, sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.