Where is Albany's Developable Residential Land?
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.
uNDEVELOPED LAND BY THE NUMBERS
Where do we start? As with other articles we’re going to use 2023 Assessment and parcel boundary data to perform tabular and spatial analysis. The first question that we want to answer is how many undeveloped parcels are there? Let’s limit the study to privately-owned, residential property, with a NY State standardized property class of “311”. We’ll miss a few properties with this filtering however it’s accurate enough for the analysis that we want to do.
There are 2909 properties that meet this definition of “undeveloped parcels”, with an aggregate Total Assessed Value of $29.3 million, covering over 500 acres of land.
Above and below we have included a number of views into the locations of the undeveloped parcels - in these images all parcels are shown in Orange and undeveloped parcels are in yellow.
Are there any large multi-tract areas of undeveloped land?
Yes - one (1). This turned out to be the easiest part of the analysis and surprising / not surprising.
There is only a single area in the City of Albany (above) that has land organized for construction of a single family housing community. This area - west of Route 85 and Ohav Shalom Apartments contains approximately 220 parcels, with ownership divided among 8-10 different land owners depending upon how you count them. Most owners are private with the exception of several properties owned by “Albany County Land Bank Corp.”
There is undoubtedly a history defining the current state of this area, and this study does not get into the practicalities of developing the land (topography, environmental review, the desires of the land owners, etc).
What are the patterns of tear-down to construct multi-family
We started to identify projects - typically funded through an IDA or similar development vehicles - where one or more parcels with existing development are acquired, buildings are torn down and multi-family housing is constructed. 363 Ontario Street is a good example. After some examination we realized that this is a separate research project on its own and set it aside for now.
Theme 1 - Small, dense urban parcels in rowhouse areas
49% of sample (49 properties)
Easily the largest (by count) of undeveloped land are properties that are in Albany’s row house areas. These properties are typically 20-40 feet of frontage, 1000-2000 square foot lots. These lots can be on a major arterial such as Clinton Ave, in both upscale and lower income neighborhoods, however the majority of properties are in Wards 1 to 5.
Anecdotally, if we review how these properties are utilized (through Google Streetview and aerial imagery) we see usages such as off street parking, dumping, limited commercial usage, storage, gardens and no usage at all.
Theme 2 - Medium-sized parcels open for development
28% of sample (28 properties)
The second biggest (by count) theme that we identified is medium-sized lots that are developable. These lots are not associated with rowhouse areas, they are in neighborhoods that typically have single family homes and stand-alone two family flats, they are on average 4000-8000 sq ft lots.
While a further study would be required to get exact numbers, these lots seem split roughly evenly between ownership by a neighboring property holder and non-local property holders. In the former case these properties are typically integrated into a neighboring built-out property.
Theme 3 - Adjacent parcel clusters with single owner
4% of sample (4 properties)
We identified a special theme that is a variant of the first two themes - any set of adjacent, vacant parcels that are owned by a single owner, regardless of size (row house or single family home areas). This seems like an interesting enough class to be its own theme. Presumably an owner could more readily aggregate a set of properties and build a single development (single family home, duplex, triplex, or larger multi-dwelling unit) on the composite property.
Theme 4 - Committed Parcels
8% of sample (8 properties)
There are a number of vacant parcels that have usage associated with the property owner’s mission. Capital Roots (a community garden organization), Albany Police Athletic League (serving after school activities for kids) and similar property owners make up this tranche. We created the term “Committed Parcels” to mean that even though the land is undeveloped the land is committed towards a specific purpose or mission.
Theme 5 - Large potentially developable parcels
2% of sample (2 properties)
We identified large 1.5+ acre parcels that are potentially available for multi-family construction or subdividing into smaller, single family or duplex/triplex construction.