EDC is doubling incentives, considering alternatives
By Lauren Dorsey, Staff Writer
At Monday’s Woodstock Economic Development Commission (EDC) meeting, the EDC voted to double the incentives for its “Lease to Locals” program. The program, which the EDC launched in May, is designed to convert short-term rentals (STR) or unused rentals to long-term housing for local workers.
So far, Lease to Locals has failed to attract any qualified participants. “We’re still in the same situation,” said Jill Davies, a member of the EDC Housing Working Group during last week’s Woodstock selectboard meeting. “There are no properties to rent that people can afford.”
Lease to Locals is open to all Woodstock residents. It aims to create new, affordable rental properties by offering financial incentives to those who begin renting to locals for less than the EDC’s specified maximum rates. For example, to qualify for the incentive, the rent for a private room cannot exceed $800 a month.
Under the program’s now doubled incentives, participants would receive up to $3,000 for a qualifying seasonal lease, which the EDC defines as at least five months, and up to $6,000 for a qualifying year-long lease. Property owners can only participate in the program once.
Davies hopes that by increasing the program’s incentives, the EDC may learn more about why Lease to Locals has not been working.
She explained during the EDC meeting that the program could be failing to attract property owners because the incentives aren’t high enough, or perhaps local homeowners can’t commit to renting their units for several months in a row because their families or relatives use the spaces regularly. “Or maybe we have too many second homeowners who live in Boston or New York and come up and use their places frequently,” said Davies. “We don’t know the answer, but the one lever that we can pull today is to double the incentives.”
The EDC did not need any additional funding to double the rates, since $66,000 of the funds originally allocated to the program remain unspent. “This is already money that’s sitting there, not being used,” said Davies to the selectboard.
The group has spent $33,000 of the original funds to hire Placemate to develop the program’s particulars. “We hired Placemate because they’re doing more work than we could do ourselves [to] administer it,” said Davies during the selectboard meeting. “We’d like to use the [remaining] money to go for broke because we’ve spent money to get Placemate to set this up.”
The contract with Placemate expires in February, at which point the EDC will have to either sign on for another year with the company or discontinue the Lease to Locals incentive. “So obviously, if we weren’t able to get anybody interested [by February], we would not recommend going forward with this program,” said Davies.
Lease to Locals is one of four housing programs the EDC is currently operating. The others include the ADU Workforce Rental Program, which is aimed at incentivizing property owners to build accessory dwelling units; the Multi Unit Housing Rental Program, which encourages owners to create and rent duplexes and triplexes; and the HomeShare program, which incentives homeowners to rent a bedroom to local workers.
Davies emphasized during both the EDC and selectboard meetings that at present, none of the EDC’s housing programs are encouraging the development of affordable housing that the group would like to see. “We’re coming to you on a backdrop where none of the other programs are working right now. The cost of building is too high,” said Davies. “This is our chance at helping to increase and improve housing.”
This discussion follows the selectboard’s September decision to pause any additional EDC funding requests until the selectboard finishes its joint priority discussions with the Village trustees.
As a result, during the EDC meeting, the EDC discussed reevaluating their proposed funding priorities and projects, including housing, over the next few months.
Davies suggested several new directions the EDC could direct funding to help increase housing development. “We have come to a point where our housing programs are not working. So to say, ‘Let’s do more of the same thing,’ isn’t going to work,” said Davies. “The situation has changed, and so what we’ve done is come up with eight different ideas for how more money could be spent on housing, because we believe that all the EDC money could be spent on housing, and we promote that tonight.”
The Housing Working Group’s eight ideas would all begin by reshaping and increasing the size of the housing committee. The group’s proposals included ideas like purchasing buildings downtown to convert them into small residential units. “There’s two for sale right now,” said Davies. “It’s pretty rare that they come up. Why don’t we buy them, keep the retail operations, to fund things and then build apartments upstairs? That’s a big project.”
Davies also suggested funding large developer projects. “There’s a huge gap right now between the cost of building a unit and then selling it or renting it. The numbers don’t work out for anybody,” said Davies. “We think the gap, just some preliminary numbers, might be $50,000-150,000 per unit. That means if we want to get developers here to build, we need to be looking at giving them $100,000 per unit, so that could use all the EDC budget.”
They also proposed redirecting marketing efforts from tourists to developers. “We have enough tourists here. We all saw that for the last three weeks,” said Davies. “Why don’t we promote Woodstock to developers and promote the programs we have [so] that we’re still using the money technically for marketing, but we’re speaking to some different people who need to be spoken to?”
The EDC closed the meeting by committing to investigating how their money, which is generated from the 1% local options tax, can be spent and what the EDC wants to emphasize. “The world has changed. There are competing priorities. We can’t do it all,” said EDC chair Jon Spector at the close of the meeting. “Let’s pause our spending and let the economic development reserve funds start to fill up again while we develop a set of options.”