In New York City, officials estimate the State Environmental Quality Review Act adds an average of two years to construction timelines and an average of $82,000 in costs per home. In the Adirondacks, where comparatively small housing and sewer projects can be snowed under by mountains of paperwork, it can kill projects before they begin.
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For three hours each morning, before the day can really start, the director of the North Country Rural Development Coalition — an affordable-housing advocate based in Ticonderoga — pushes paper.
“Out of a 60-hour workweek, 20% of that is spent on paperwork,” said Executive Director Nicole Justice Green. So it was a relief to her when Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration announced plans to cut through some of this red tape by scaling back the State Environmental Quality Review Act, or SEQRA, a catch-all regulatory instrument enacted in 1975 on the wave of the nascent environmental movement.
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But just as fast, the relief turned to chagrin when a downstate lawmaker cut rural locations out of the proposal, which goes by the name of Let Them Build.
That news sent Justice Green racing to Albany to explain that the state is once again out of touch with the Adirondacks, where comparatively small housing and sewer projects can be snowed under by mountains of paper. Nor is there an understanding in Albany that small agencies such as NCRDC or the Essex County Department of Community Development lack the large staffs and teams of attorneys that larger jurisdictions employ to churn through the workload.
In New York City, officials estimate SEQRA adds an average of two years to construction timelines and an average of $82,000 in costs per home. In the Adirondacks, it can kill projects before they even start.
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Even some environmentalists — while wary of unspooling any protections — question whether SEQRA is entirely necessary in the park, which unlike the rest of rural New York, already falls under the watchful eye of the Adirondack Park Agency and Department of Environmental Conservation, not to mention local review boards and studies that include everything from wetland delineations to historic assessments.
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In the eyes of housing advocates, SEQR is squarely at odds with state priorities, such as sewer, day care and affordable housing. Justice Green said the state currently provides funding for housing initiatives, then blunts the effect by requiring expensive and time-consuming reviews that state money is, in effect, paying for.
“I’m paying the state with the state’s money multiple times for the duplicative reviews, which is not the best use of the state’s funding,” she said.
It is creating red tape so nettlesome that private housing developers won’t give the Adirondacks a second glance. And in one case, a state agency denied funding to a sewer project that was being held up in the review process by that very same state agency.
“For too long, unnecessary red tape has stood in the way of new housing and critical infrastructure,” said Hochul, in announcing a “Let Them Build” initiative that’s part of her executive budget. “If local leaders want to deliver new investments for their communities, I say ‘Let Them Build.’”
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Justice Green hopes the initiative can be reapplied to the Adirondacks.
“Any private individual looking to invest within the park has a pretty low return on investment to begin with — so the cost and the red tape and the hold-ups and delays for the projects to go through an unnecessary (review) can kill these projects. Developers just walk away,” she said.
Justice Green said Let Them Build would not have stripped away all environmental protections, or even most of them. But it would have had a meaningful effect for small nonprofit and government agencies.
“We’re not advocating for the APA or the DEC to go away, or to not have jurisdiction,” she said. “We’re just asking that they be allowed to make those decisions and not have another review added on top of it.”
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Specifically, housing advocates say almost all of their construction is limited to hamlets, because that’s where both the APA and conservationists believe it should happen. Lots in these hamlets have generally been built on, bulldozed or otherwise “disturbed” for generations — so, by this time, environmental reviews are moot.
By relaxing rules covering disturbed ground, the Hochul administration believes communities “will be able to build homes, child care centers, clean energy, and other critical projects faster and more affordably.”
Redundant paperwork and regulations have become a focus of what’s called the Abundance Movement, which maintains that while there might be a reason for each individual condition, together they create a quagmire that prevents good projects from being built.
NIMBY groups, the movement charges, have also weaponized these rules to shoot down projects, regardless of their merits.
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Environmental groups react to the Abundance Movement
Environmental groups, for the moment, are generally taking a measured view of Let Them Build. The Sierra Club is opposed, but acknowledged the problems the Abundance Movement is designed to address.
“The Sierra Club agrees we have an obligation to protect properly sited affordable housing projects from frivolous lawsuits and excessive red tape,” it wrote in a statement. “But as an environmental organization, it is difficult to place the primary blame for the housing crisis on SEQRA when there are other culprits like supply chain issues, rampant real estate speculation and out of control rents making houses and apartments more unaffordable.”
But the Adirondack Council and Protect the Adirondacks were less vocal, both voicing support for affordable-housing projects, and noting that in the Adirondack Park the APA acts as a backstop for regulatory protections. “This is a situation where our concerns over SEQRA are perhaps not as grave as folks outside the park, because of the Park Agency Act,” said John Sheehan, communications director for the Adirondack Council.
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But, he cautioned, “The safeguards in place are sometimes time-consuming, but they also do a lot to protect the rights of neighbors and the surrounding community when developments have an impact beyond the border of the site being developed.”
Environmental groups are also concerned with the Hochul administration’s process, which revises policy as part of the governor’s budget, instead of through the traditional legislative process, where the bill would receive more scrutiny and refinement.
Claudia Braymer, executive director of Protect, which has not taken a position on Let Them Build, but is cautious about creating unintended loopholes. “Some of the concern that I have is that the definition of previously disturbed sites is a little too broad, which could cause some mischief, with developers being able to say, hey, we’re totally exempt from SEQRA.”
A slowdown between state agencies
Anna Reynolds, director of the Essex County Planning Department, said that more than the paperwork, a ticking clock is a central issue when dealing with state regulations.
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“There are things that the funding agency requires and then there are other things that the permitting agencies require. And they all happen simultaneously,” she said. “It’s a checklist, have you done this and have you done that?” And then if the state requires a design change, the process starts all over again.
“It’s not that the clock on the project runs out, but the opportunities for funding run out. So for example, for a sewer project in the town of Schroon, we were denied a DEC grant because we didn’t have design approval. But that’s because the DEC itself hadn’t given us the sign-off yet,” Reynolds said. “So the same agency that denied our grant is the same agency that won’t give us the permit so that we can get funding to move forward.”
While the state is fronting significant housing money, advocates would like private developers to gain a toehold in the market as well. Strong developers with deep pockets and deep wells of patience may have a shot, but most small-scale developers do not, because they can’t outlast the red tape.
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“This is duplicative, it’s burdensome, it’s costly, and for tiny development in rural areas it delays projects, which is then killing them indirectly,” Justice Green said.
This story originally appeared in the Adirondack Explorer, a nonprofit news organization covering people and policy inside the forest preserve.