Fairport Forward
Fairport Forward explores what the Village can become, how it can grow, and how the community can help shape its future. Each episode takes a deeper look at the ideas, values, and opportunities that can move Fairport forward while staying true to the spirit that defines it.
Fairport Forward
Room to Stay: Housing Options for a Thriving Fairport
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Today we’re talking about something that’s become impossible to ignore: housing in the Village and why it matters for everyone, even if you’re not looking to move.
A healthy village needs enough homes for the people who want to live here...at different ages, different incomes, and different stages of life.
In this conversation, we’re digging into what kinds of housing fit a village like ours. We’ll talk about what we heard from you, and what practical steps could help us create more homes so more people who love our Village have room to stay.
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Hi, I'm Jonna McCooy and I'm Amy Olds and we're back with Fairport Forward. We really didn't go anywhere. We didn't had a cost real image. Can you tell? Same day who diswells. Today, um today. This hour, not Fairport Forward, we are talking about housing. Housing. That was another popular topic from the survey, of course. That's what we're here to talk about. Housing is important to everybody. Everybody needs one. Yeah. A roof over your head would be good. Yes. Um, and so and there were multiple projects submitted that involved housing, and um, not to get too down in the DRI stuff, because this conversation is not only about that. However, it is a very important aspect to the DRI and downtown revitalization initiative grant. What a mouthful. They had to have a housing component, and rightfully so. It's a it's a big issue, not just in Fairport, but everywhere. Everywhere. Another part of the discussion that might be new from the economic development community is the focus on housing. Now you hear a lot that housing is economic development. So you might have in past years when you talk about economic development and business attraction and all those things, you're thinking mostly about commercial activities. You know, we talk a lot about Main Street and we talk a lot about how do we address businesses and how do we, you know, drive economic value for our community. Housing is now a big part of that conversation. Yeah, it's actually one of the focus areas for our organization, OCED, as well. Yes, we have an urban renewal agency built into our office. So it's part of our day-to-day. Yep. And so we're gonna bring it to the people with the the feedback we had for the survey. Yep. Let's get into it. Okay. Well, I got notes to surveys, say all now. I got notes. I got notes today. Um, at a very high level, these were the general sentiments. People support housing, they want it to fit in to the village aesthetic, the charm. When you say support housing, you mean they support new housing. Yes. They all want more housing. Okay. Yeah. We aren't even getting into the quantification yet. They all support housing, but they're worried about it not fitting in. They don't want housing if it means losing the charm of the village. They don't want housing if it puts an infrastructure strain on the village. Um, they don't want it if it's a high rise on Main Street. Right. But they do want housing options and there is support for certain types of appropriate, well-planned housing. Um, there is broad agreement that the character of the village is where it's at. That is number one, what we talked about last episode. If it doesn't fit into the village character or it detracts from the village character, you're out of here. Right. Let's talk about some of those components, what people want, what they're afraid of. Let's talk about that in kind of a real world, what's happening today in our village. Um, the good news is again, we're already uh working with those um parameters in mind. Yes. So if you think about some of the newest housing developments in the village, for example, one of our active developers in the village is uh Jeff Seidel through JB Sterling. And they've done a number of projects that fit right into the village, both on Main Street and in more residential areas. Yeah, should we say what those are? Um 29 Perrin Street, multifamily residential, six Perrin Street, multifamily residential, uh 91 South Main Street. You might know that as the Diane Prince Building, which is mixed use. The upper floors are apartments. And in the Main Street level is Diane Prince. Retail, cute retail shop. Good for the holidays, beauty duds. Already we have active housing development, new adaptive reuse of properties, some some new construction, some along the canal, some along the canal on West Avenue, and really at a way that is specifically intended to fit into the village to match the character of the street that they're on. If you drive down the street on Perrin Street, you won't look at those buildings and say they don't belong to the street. Yeah, you don't have to laugh. Yeah. For sure. Yeah, I think that's really great that there are some real life examples already happening and it's a good illustration that we are on a good a good path, and that some of the guardrails, to borrow a term from last episode, are in place to ensure that we are already we're gonna stay on this path. Another thing that you talked about people worried about making sure that the density fit our village. Yeah. I think an important uh piece of the conversation is do we have room for more housing? Yeah, and that's it that's a tricky one because we don't have room for all types of housing. We have room for specific types of housing. When we talk about rental units, you know, there's obviously oh in the village, there is a strong desire for owner-occupied houses because there is truth to the saying that they can, you know, they are embedded in the village. But at the end of the day, rentals play a really important part of our economic uh villa uh charm of our village as well, because they allow an entry point that isn't always attainable, like at a purchase your house level. Like sometimes you need that starter home that's really a rental. And then once you built up a little, I got a better job now, and now I now I have enough to put a down payment down on a home. So it's really important that we offer both rentals and home ownership opportunities. I think it's important to say that. So when we talk about uh capacity and city, do we have room for more housing? We do. Um, we have a small little village, as as we've mentioned a number of times. I believe we have somewhere around 2,100 residential parcels, but we have only 780 multifamily units on those parcels. And so that's a low number from a percentage perspective. Um, of all of the available places we can have housing, not that many have multifamily housing. And that tells us we have some room to add. Well, to that point, it will be interesting to kind of reclarify in your mind what a multifamily means. It doesn't necessarily mean what might come up to a lot of people when you think, oh, that's like an apartment building. That's that's what that means, a multifamily apartment building. Right. Uh in the village, a lot of those units that we call multifamily are actually like your neighbor who has a duplex because the house was split in half, what because it's a big mansion type house. Um, and it that isn't the type of lifestyle we live anymore. So now it's a duplex and there's two different doors, and you might not even notice because it just looks like a house. Right. So a lot of those units that you're saying, the 700, whatever, a lot of them are your neighbors. Like they're right next to you, and you may or may not know, uh, but that term multifamily doesn't necessarily mean an apartment building exclusively. So I think that's an important distinction to make. Exactly. We but we do need those to the point you made because when we talk about housing, we need to be talking about housing for everyone in our community. Everyone. We know that our community is made up of people at all phases in life. We have um young families, we have seniors who want to age in place, we have people like me who have kids who have gone to college and left left town and then want to come back and move back around mom and dad. We want we want those kids to be able to want our seniors to be able to stay in place, or maybe they want to downsize. We want places for all of them to go. We heard a lot of that in the survey. There would be uh folks that said, I can't believe that my son won't be able to come back here, you know, after college because where's he gonna go? He doesn't want to move in with me. Um, but there's nowhere for him to rent. Actually, today I did a search of how many apartments there were in the village limits, just today, which is December 10th, 11th. And there were, I think, seven or eight, but they were all way more than you might remember from back in the day. I think the cheapest ones, like 1,500, $1,500, up to over $3,000 a month. Those don't even include, you know, your basic utility stuff, your, you know, you have a cat, you know, that kind of thing. So, I mean, there are a lot of people getting very much priced out of even the the rental market. And that lack of stock available is also a clear indicator that there's room for more. So I think the research shows that at a balanced market for rentals is like five to seven, five to eight percent vacancy. So at any given time, you should have that much vacant to show you have enough, but not too much. We're at two and a half percent for like the last five years or so, which is lower than even the Greater Rochester area as a whole. So we definitely have a demand for rental units. So if we can deliver them, there will be even more people here to help simulate our village. About that part. So, yes, we we just talked about the why do we really need more housing? Well, we need it for um continued growth in our community from a community perspective, but we also need it from a continued growth from an economic perspective. Yeah. We have a number of small businesses, as we've talked about in other episodes, that can't survive just on the weekend traffic, the festival traffic. They need every everyday traffic. Adding 50, 100 units could seriously change the economic picture for a small business over such up a couple of customers. That's yeah, those a handful of new customers that are regulars. They could be the difference between making it just a year or making it for the long haul as a small business. I mean, they operate, especially some of these little cafes, they're this their margins are slim. And it's a it's a they do it because they love it, not because it's gonna make them millionaires. And but there's also a line where you're not making enough to even do it. So we don't want that for our small business community. We want to provide the patrons that can stimulate and and foster and grow that so that there can be even more successful small businesses here. So it's not just for to sum it up, it's not just so the people that want to be here can be here, but it's also so that they want to be here because it's like this cycle. Right. And the businesses that want to be here can have and survive, right? Have customers that they can rely on and it all goes together. We had a big brid big a big bridge project in the airport today that or today, um, this summer that did cut off a lot of traffic to our main street. Yeah. And the way that we got through it for our businesses is through the support of the community. So the more community we can create for those businesses, the better it's going to be when those times get tough for them. Yeah, for sure. Um the demand here is really large. I think just bringing it back to apartment availability, you had shared with me a story about a local business owner who couldn't find a place to live. Right. Um there is a local diner in Fairport, very popular on Main Street. You might uh know what that is, um, that recently changed hands from a local owner to a gentleman who bought it who was moving from out of town, and he struggled for months to find a way or a place to move into our community. So it's not just when people say, Well, why do we have to have room? Don't don't we, you know, we're full of Yeah, we don't need anyone else. Well, you do, right? Of course, you're gonna have someone new move to the community who bought this iconic business. Don't we want to have a place for you to go? We want people to be able to live near where they were. Yes. So then but just the pipeline of uh employment, yeah, you know, you need people to serve you your coffee and swirl your job. Yeah. It's the workers. And so that's another thing I want to talk to you about um when doing research for this episode. The hot hot um or the buzzword housing is workforce housing. Yeah. And we hear a lot about it. People might not know what it is. I think it's important for us to talk about what is workforce housing so they can understand how it fits into our community. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are lots of different definitions out there. In my eyes, it's what it's housing for the the everyman, the per the people, the middle class, if you will. It's the the workforce. So I'm in the workforce. I'm in the workforce. Your teachers at Fairport High are in the workforce. Your people who serve you coffee and pickies are in the workforce. Your DPW workers are workforce, your shop owners are workforce, so police department workforce. Yeah, service workers. Um anybody with a job that's just, you know, making it work. Probably not low income, not too high. Right. Everybody looking in this podcast is workforce, or maybe former workforce. Yeah. Um, maybe you're independently wealthy and never were part of the workforce. Lucky you, and thank you for listening. But um, I think that's the point. Workforce is all of us, workforce is everyone. Workforce is your kid coming home from from college. Workforce even is that senior who retired and worked all their life and wants to retire in the same community, but doesn't want to keep up uh a four-bedroom house. Yeah. Um, or maybe they do want to do that and they want to be able to do both. Maybe they want their their kid to move into that house. Are all those options available? Yeah. And right now it's tight. It's a tight market, not just here, but everywhere. But but particularly we have some opportunities here. We do have some opportunities, and I think that could be a good segue to the idea that there's a couple of logical paths that can be taken to address some of our shortage and our needs for more. One of which is what has already been successful in some places, units above, units above a shop. Mixed use. Mixed use, if you will. Yeah. So, you know, you go to you go to get your slice of pizza and somebody lives above it. We have um a lot of mixed use. When I came to the village, I it's not obvious. Yeah. Like you said earlier, a lot of our multifamily mixed use isn't obvious. And that's why when we talk about adding more housing, people might get nervous about that to say, well, does that fit in our community? What does it look like? It's already in our community. Um, so when I first came to the village and got familiar with Millstone Block, uh, which is on Main Street. Well, Escalada is in our new store sunrising. Um I perceived it as a retail row of strop shops, just a a strip of shops. That has a number of residential users. Yeah, quite a few, actually. It does. Yeah, with the desire for more. So absolutely. And but you wouldn't say, oh, that building doesn't fit in our village. Of course it doesn't be part of the fabric of our village. Yeah, it's been here. Um and so that's an important thing to realize that we're not always talking about some big, huge new thing. Oh no, we sometimes are. There's also there's another project that is conceptual that could further develop what's um just kind of leftover warehouse space behind the cannery, I think. Right. Um that was a more significant idea. That could have new life. A new life. Have new life and and check a couple boxes. It could uh give us some more patrons for our shops, it could uh let your daughter find a place to live when she graduates and wants to be close to home to start a family someday. So, you know, these are real life examples of projects that could potentially move the needle. And it doesn't have to happen all at once. I think that's another thing is we are a size that even the even adding a handful of units every couple of years can can get us where we need to be. Right. It doesn't have to be this big bad project coming in. Yeah. It's more organic than that. It can be, but led with intention. Absolutely. To that um point from an intention perspective, bring it back to the DRI, the thing I love about both of those examples is they're both DRI projects. Yeah, they're very different. They're very different. They but they both help contribute to the same thing, and that's exactly what the DRI award is intended to do. How can you use these dollars for transformative projects in your community? And they're both transformative, but in a very different way. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I think that that is uh a cool, um, like you said, organic example of how using these tools, as we've talked about, can address the problems that that or challenges that we see in front of us as a community. Yeah, for sure. So we have those potential DRI projects, but beyond that, we've got other ways that we can drive uh housing forward with intention. One of those is through OCED, as we talked about before. We have our urban renewal agency, but we also have an IDA, an industrial development agency. Yeah. And that with that allows us to offer incentives to developers in different ways to help them through the process and guide them to the ultimate housing outcomes that fit for our community. Yeah, and and reasons that to we need to stay competitive. You know, there's other towns and villages that need housing too. And we, of course, want to attract the right developer for Fairport, but we don't want to lose the right developer to someone else that maybe offered them more. Right. So I mean, there are these types of things, and like it or not, it's a tool. It's a tool. Another tool, of course, we talk about it a lot, is our code, our character-based code. And it's a tool, um, right, at the village level, in another way that gives us control around what does get filter. So back to some of those fears. Oh my gosh, they're gonna put a giant high-rise on Main Street. No, we're not gonna do that because our code wouldn't allow that, yeah, allow us to do that. Whether it's the existing code or the draft code, you're not gonna get a building over three stories right now on Main Street. Um, so I think it's important for people to remember that all of these decisions are made with intention, whether it's approving a project, approving a policy through code, they are always made with the intention to maintain what is important to Faircourt. And those decisions are made by the community and their voice and the people that um they we have representing that community at at the municipal level. When you say all that, it reminds me when you say those things about the municipality and the village, you know, having guidelines in place. It brings me back to our favorite concept for all of these themes, which is balance. And the village has guidelines in place so that intentional decisions are made from a housing, you know, new housing and what we can and can't do. But on the flip side of that, some of the new way of thinking is to try to make things as smooth too and remove roadblocks. And we don't want to be a community that's just impossible to work with. So I feel like there is a balance there. And I think Fairport is trying to lead the way in that. Like rem we have our guardrails, but we also are flexible. We want to maintain our charm, but we're gonna listen to you. Right. So it's that's just smart planned development for the future that takes our character and our charm and the voice of our our residents in mind every step of the way. And that kind of makes me think um brings it right back to the survey. You know, people want Fairport to still feel like Fairport, no matter what you think it's built, no matter if you add another unit, you split a house in half, you build a couple more apartments back here. It has to be Fairport, Fairport, Fairport. It cannot look like it belongs somewhere else. It needs to look like it belongs here, fit the streetscape, have the charm, and serve our people, our community, the people, what the people need here, which is starter homes, downsizing options, family homes. That's what they name. That's what they want. So um that's a great segue that another um thing that is a part of our community, we haven't talked about it much yet, but um is our arts community. Another important population in Fairport are is the arts population. We have a number of art studios, we have an active public arts committee, and in our next episode, we're going to get into um public art and all the things that it that it means. So until then. Until then. See you next time.
