Where is Albany's Developable Residential Land?

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Understanding the undeveloped landscape in Albany provides us with insight on what growth may or may not be possible, and what policies may or may not incent development of additional housing.  If Albany were a suburban town we would focus our analysis on zoning, utility buildout and NIMBY questions.  Albany is not a suburb, obviously, instead we have several centuries of development that influences where development may or may not happen.  

There aren’t too many people who can claim they have visited all neighborhoods of Albany.  Albany Police and Fire, Albany General Services, UPS and Prime drivers, and people who have lived in Albany a really long time might make that claim.   Most people don’t have a significant experience understanding the breadth of Albany’s neighborhoods.  Given that, when we ask a question like “Does Albany have room for additional residential development?” it’s worth spending some time exploring and analyzing Albany’s property landscape to answer the question.  

In this article we will talk exclusively about Albany’s opportunity for residential development - single family homes, duplexes, apartment buildings and more.  We may write a separate article about commercial development opportunities in the future.

 At a neighborhood level where are most of the undeveloped properties?  Wards 1-5 have over 60% (1800 out of 2900) of all undeveloped properties and we can see that in the Clinton Ave map above.  

Of note is the ownership of the 2908 properties.  There are 1576 unique owner names that own these properties.  Not all of these are real differences (e.g. “Albany Housing Coalition, Inc” and “Albany Housing Coalition, Inc.” - there’s a barely noticeable period on the end of the latter) and there some owners will use multiple LLCs for different properties.  However the takeaway is that there aren’t a small set of owners that collectively control the majority of undeveloped property.

We don’t have comprehensive insight on the past or barriers that may prevent affordable development, however we can look at undeveloped land, identify if there are patterns and connect types or patterns to potential development strategies.

This was our initial plan to study Albany’s undeveloped land:

1. Identify the number of multi-tract areas of undeveloped land (>20 parcels in a cluster) 
2. Explore recent patterns of single family tear down to construct new multi-family housing
3. Identify themes, classes or categories of undeveloped property.  We don’t have time to look through nearly 3000 properties and figure out the character and potential of each property.  However, we can look at a significant sample 100 parcels of undeveloped land) and use that to identify themes

Analyzing all 2900 properties to identify themes or categories of undeveloped land is time prohibitive so we took a random sample of 100 properties, examined each and created the themes through a classification process.   

There are many ways to classify vacant land - we found 6 main classifications or themes.  What we will describe is a reasonable first pass at identifying themes and the magnitude of the properties associated with each theme.

6% of sample - 6 properties

Lastly, there is a set of properties that realistically can have no viable or practical development because of their location or size, for example a sliver parcel that is along a limited access highway.

 With this study of the City of Albany’s vacant land we have uncovered some important themes and statistics.  We can provide three examples that challenged our opinions prior to research -  1) the count of undeveloped properties is higher than we initially guessed, 2) the prevalence of vacant land in row house areas is higher than we would have guessed, and 3) the number of unique owners that participate in ownership of undeveloped properties is greater than we initially guessed.

What are potential policy and research implications?  We can envision a few:

1. We need to analyze our undeveloped property on a yearly basis.  The City publishes a Vacant Land Inventory but this is limited to a list of properties.  As a healthy, data-driven city we need to dig deeper to understand the trends of a finite commodity - undeveloped land.
2. We need zoning that allows for creative development in row house areas.  While the concept of “Accessory Dwelling Units” (ADU) is typically perceived as a second building constructed on an already-developed parcel, zoning could incent ADUs on adjacent parcels.  Another example is CrossMod manufactured housing.  CrossMod homes are upscale manufactured housing that could be used for lower cost (but still high quality) urban infill. 

There are a number of additional studies that are natural next steps:

1. Further research on “Theme 5 - Large potentially developable parcels” - counting them, identifying the physical viability of development, identifying potential usage categories (multi family, subdivide, mixed commercial/residential, etc), ownership and any historical or current development discussion
2. Talk to 5-20 owners of Themes 1 and 2 (small properties in row house areas and medium-sized parcels) and get their perspective on development of their land.  It’s their property, no one can or should force them to do anything - what are their thoughts on development or lack thereof?
3. Review any academic research on urban expansion in urban and dense urban areas.  For example, does this article inform any research that we want to do? 

Questions or comments?  email us at AlbanyDataStories@gmail.com