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Essex County Land Bank: Removing Blight and Building Workforce Housing in the Adirondacks

One Community Update
February 24, 2026

Source: northcountrypublicradio.org

NY looking to expand land banks

There are 31 land banks currently in New York state. They demolish, rehabilitate, and even build homes, and have access to specific state funding.

Governor Kathy Hochul has called them a “valuable tool” in addressing the issue of affordable housing. The state says since land banks were created in 2o11, they have returned “thousands of properties back to productive use and created affordable housing opportunities in communities from Buffalo to Long Island.”

Hochul recently announced she wants to increase the number of allowed land banks in the state, from 35 to 45.

In Northern NY, there are just a few land banks. There’s one in the City of Ogdensburg, one in Franklin County, and one in Essex County.

The Essex County Land Bank was established in the summer of 2023, and has accomplished a lot in its short tenure. Here’s how that happened.

Persistent blight and where does the workforce live?

Essex County is the second largest in New York state geographically, behind St. Lawrence County. But it’s the second smallest, population-wise, behind Hamilton County.

That presents some serious challenges with housing enforcement, especially in making sure that homes don’t fall into disrepair.

“Code enforcement alone have been difficult jobs to fill,” said Michael Mascarenas, the Essex County Manager. “You know, the people we have do a really good job, but just finding them and being able to keep up with the enforcement efforts [is a challenge].”

Mascarenas has worked in Essex County government for decades (he’s a former Commissioner of Social Services) and he said it’s frustrating to watch homes become inhabitable and turn into what people call ‘blighted homes’ or ‘zombie properties.’

These are often homes that people don’t live in or pay taxes on, and end up at county tax auction regularly.

“You could see the continued deterioration. You could see the frequent flyers that came auction after auction that people would purchase sight unseen,” said Mascarenas. “You would see them again three years later, and it would just be in worse condition than it was previously.”

That’s even more maddening, said Mascarenas, knowing that housing in this area of the Adirondacks is scarce, especially for local workers. Mascarenas says that’s an economic issue, because a local workforce is critical to Essex County’s number one economic driver: tourism.

“In the park, you need a certain workforce to be able to accommodate those visitors, and those visitors demand service,” said Mascarenas. “Problem is, where do they [the workers] live?”

That question has haunted many Essex County officials. But they thought the county had no direct way to address it.

Harnessing the power of a land bank for Essex County

Back in the spring of 2021, Supervisor of the Town of Essex Ken Hughes heard about land banks for the first time.

“It just bowled me over. I couldn’t believe that something like this existed,” said Hughes.

Land banks have been around since 2011, when The New York State Land Bank Act was passed.

The idea was to help municipalities address vacant and deteriorated properties through nonprofit corporations, approved by the Empire State Development Authority, which have access to special powers and specific state funding.

“This is money just for land banks, that land banks can tap into,” said Hughes. “And for me, that was very attractive because I didn’t want to burden town or county taxpayers directly [long-term].”

Land banks also have the ability to ‘cut the line’ at county property tax auctions. “And so the land bank can take those properties, with county board approval, and then they can use the monies that they receive from New York State to rehab those buildings…and fix them up and get them back into a habitable state,” said Hughes.

So Hughes started doing research. In 2021, in Northern New York, there was just one land bank, in the City of Ogdensburg.

There was nothing in the Adirondacks.

“I wanted to be the first one,” said Hughes. “I wanted to see Essex County be that lighthouse county to show other people that we can do it up here.”

But to do that, Hughes needed to get his colleagues, which was the rest of Essex County’s Board of Supervisors, excited about establishing a landbank. He says that took time, but eventually everyone jumped on the bandwagon, no matter where they fell on the political spectrum.

“There’s no discussion about, you know, ‘I’m a Republican, I’m a Democrat,'” said Hughes of the Essex County Board of Supervisors. “And if there’s a common sense idea that any of us bring to the table, we really come together. We ask questions. We debate civilly…I’m so incredibly grateful that my colleagues on the board at the time were open to the conversation, were convinced that it was a worthwhile and worthy endeavor for their constituents and their towns.”

Building the vision for Essex County and getting start-up money

Hughes says that bipartisan support was critical, especially because it took money to get the land bank started.

The county ended up using a big chunk of their COVID-era funding for that purpose, about $300,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act.

“And that gave us our seed. Because we had great ideas, but we had no money,” said Jim Monty. Monty is the recently retired Supervisor for the Town of Lewis and another early supporter of the land bank idea.

Monty had served on a county workforce housing committee earlier in his career and has been dismayed to watch how rising prices have made starter homes unaffordable to local workers during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A lot of these homes were unaffordable for workforce housing, so a lot of these ended up being short-term rentals, again, depleting the stock,” he said.

There are currently about 2200 registered short term rentals in Essex County, which only has a population of about 37,000.

Monty saw establishing a land bank as a way to make a difference, even if it was small.

And he appreciated that they could write their own rules; land banks get to decide what kind of projects they take on with state funding, and who they are willing to sell to.

In Essex County, they focus on people making between 80 percent and 120 percent of Area Median Income. Think a single person making around $55,000 dollars a year.

“We contacted a lot of the other land banks and tried to figure out what works from everybody. And then we pieced it all together for us, in Essex County,” said Monty.

Finding a leader at an existing organization

So they had the vision, they even had start-up money. But they still needed someone to lead the actual work.

Ken Hughes remembers getting to a point where he started to think, “…maybe we have to create our own nonprofit organization, and we have to form our own board of directors and all this kind of stuff.”

Then, one day at a Essex County Board of Supervisors meeting in Elizabethtown, Hughes remembers Jim Monty pulling him aside to say he wanted him to meet somebody after the meeting.

Monty had gotten in touch with Pride of Ticonderoga, a community development program founded back in the 1980s. It had just one fulltime employee: the new director, Nicole Justice Green.

She was in the county building to talk about the land bank idea. Hughes says they pretty much instantly knew that Green was their person. “We struck gold with what she knows and what she does in that organization and her enthusiasm,” said Hughes.

Pride of Ticonderoga already worked with NYS housing programs, and that was a big leg up from creating a land bank from scratch.

“So that experience on the other side of the work…meant that we didn’t really need a lot of training to enter into this world,” said Executive Director Nicole Justice Green.

For Green, the land bank idea was a chance to make a difference in an area she knew there was a need.

“We would have people call us looking for housing. We would have people call us because they were unhoused,” she remembered of her early days leading up Pride of Ticonderoga. “And at the time, Pride didn’t have that funding…to be creating housing. That wasn’t really something we did or ever had done. And so I would remember going home feeling very, very weighted down.”

This was a chance to change that.

The Essex County Land Bank was officially formed in May of 2023, housed within Pride of Ticonderoga, with Nicole Justice Green as Executive Director.

Lucky timing and the first project

In a stroke of good luck, not long before the Essex County Land Bank was officially formed, the New York State Homes and Community Renewal office had just released a new pot of money, called Land Bank Initiative Funding, which was for land bank administration and projects.

That was a really big deal, said Green, because “creating a new funding source at the state level is like almost an act of God!”

The funding was also particularly easy to access and had fewer rules on how it could be spent. “So it was very fortuitous that all happened at the same time,” said Green, “because it meant that for small rural communities, the cost burden of creating and operating a land bank was made almost negligible for them.”

The Essex County Land Bank started small, and it started slow.

In its first year, it rehabilitated one house in the Town of Jay, plucked from the tax foreclosure auction.

Pride of Ticonderoga, which is now called the North Country Rural Development Coalition, had never done a full gut and rehab job on a standing home. Green says there were lots of challenges, from finding contractors to unique sewer issues to simple waste removal.

“Even if there’s not hazardous material, we have to ship it out of the county,” said Green, because there’s no landfill in Essex County. “So it means that the cost of our demolitions are the highest in New York State.”

But they got through it, and sold the home to a young, locally working couple with an infant.

Former Supervisor of Lewis Jim Monty said that was a big moment. “The look on their faces, this young family with a young child that potentially can get in a home that they might not have been able to afford. It warms your heart. It gives you a good feeling.”

Picking up steam and building new homes

In 2025, the land bank demolished four blighted properties, making room for new homes to be built, and rehabbed three homes.

It also partnered with the state to build a modular starter home in Newcomb, something they plan to replicate going forward. The land bank is doing predevelopment work for more of those homes, potentially dozens, in Westport, Chesterfield, and North Hudson.

The Essex County Land Bank is also the partner on a 60-unit workforce housing apartment building that was recently awarded just under $10 million dollars in state funding.

Green says as she and her team gain experience, it’s getting easier, and that makes all the difference when building affordable workforce housing. “It’s going to be just continuing this momentum. The state’s given us the resources to do it and so it’s our job to deliver,” said Green.

Regional studies have shown that thousands of units of workforce housing are needed in the Adirondacks. The Essex County Land Bank can’t provide all of those.

But they’re moving the needle, said Green, and it gives the county the power to take action. “The Land Bank is not the be-all and end-all for this crisis, but we do have a really unique toolbox.”

There are plenty of challenges ahead. A recent court ruling changed the way counties can acquire blighted properties. The Adirondack Park continues to be a hard place in which to develop and build.

Still, the Essex County Land Bank exists, and it’s saving and building housing. That’s a win, says County Manager Michael Mascarenas. “They’ve done an amazing job, much better than I ever hoped.”