County land bank demolishes abandoned house at 92 Wawbeek Ave. in its first residential improvement project here

by Dan McClelland

A demolition company hired by the Franklin County Land Bank to raze a property it acquired here at 92 Wawbeek Ave. from the county in recent months was making short work of former residence here on Monday morning.

Robert Laubacker’s excavator attacked the front porch of the abandoned building shortly after 7a.m., and less than two hours later the entire building was levelled.

Mr. Laubacker, whose company is based in Niagara, N.Y., is related to the Morrow family of Tupper Lake, and has been combining business with pleasure in recent days with his local family members.

The Tupper Lake project was the first demolition tackled by the county land bank, and the first time Mr. Laubacker’s firm was hired.

“Mr. Laubacker gave us a very good price to demolish the house,” Sheila Connors, the new land bank’s executive secretary said Monday morning. She and Land Bank Board Member John Gillis were there to observe the contractor and his work.

“He also came up to visit his family members, the Morrows here,” she added.

The land bank also engaged Tupper Lake’s Cruz Carriere, a local videotographer, to employ his drone to video the work. Cruz’s video will be available for public viewing on the land bank’s web site.

Town Councilman John Gillis, who has been working closely with the land bank’s director, Harry Gordon since it was created by the Franklin County Legislature about two years ago, said the new single-family residence at the site will be narrower and set back ten feet from where the current building is situated, in keeping with local zoning set back requirements.

He said Monday morning the village was cooperating with them on this first land bank project here, providing the water to keep the dust down from a nearby hydrant that morning, and cutting off the various services to the property in advance of the demolition.

The land bank hired a company with two semis, each pulling 100-yard trailers to truck the debris to the county landfill in Westville that day.

The county’s new land bank program is one of the local agencies in the county trying to improve the housing stock here, in Saranac Lake and in Malone, as well as in surrounding areas.

As part of its work to date is the purchase and preparation for the demolition of a long-abandoned house at 92 Wawbeek Ave.

When the debris is trucked away and the lot tidied up, a new foundation will be dug and a modular-built three bedroom, one and one half bath brand new house will placed there.

The second house in the county Mr. Gordon, Mr. Gillis and others on the board are working on is a complete redo of a second abandoned property- this one in Malone at 13 Williamson Street.

On that project it was determined there is asbestos and lead-based paint there. A contract was let to have the asbestos abated in early September. “We have a request for proposals on the street to re-roof the house and its garage.”

Mr. Gordon said in a recent interview that interior renovations will begin, “once the roofing work is done and the asbestos abated.”

“That house, in particular, is in pretty good shape” structurally, so warrants a rehabilitation.

He said the two houses on the land bank’s immediate agenda “were uninhabitable” in their present form.

“They’ve been abandoned for years. They didn’t have working electricity, water, plumbing or heating systems.”

“So we’re taking a shell of a building that has been vacant a long time and doing the rehabilitation we need to do to make it suitable for workforce housing” in the case of the Malone property. Mr. Gordon noted workforce housing is in very short supply in this county.

He said they have recently secured a third property- this one in Saranac Lake at 72 Canaras Ave.

The first two houses went to the Land Bank from the county after they were foreclosed upon for non-payment of taxes, he noted.

“It’s a logical assumption if a person can’t pay their taxes, they also probably can’t afford to keep up their property”- and hence the deterioration of it.

Earlier this year Councilman Gillis brought Mr. Gordon to a town board meeting to explain the new land bank program to the town board. Mr. Gordon is a retired architect and the land bank chairman.

Work has been underway for almost two years to get the new land bank formed, Mr. Gordon began that evening. Franklin County’s is apparently the 27th created in New York State.

“For the Franklin County Land Bank our mission is growing stronger communities and to do that we have three goals. The first goal is increasing affordable work force housing. We know we don’t have enough housing in the county; we need more!

“The second goal is revitalizing neighborhoods by removing blight” where some houses are run down and they bring down the values of neighbors’ houses.

He said the third goal of his new agency is “returning properties to the tax base.” The properties the land bank has obtained so far were acquired because they were foreclosed upon because the owners did not pay their taxes.

He said the agency’s current aim is to achieve these three goals- housing, removing blight and returning properties to the tax rolls.

“Let me tell you what’s happened in the last ten years. Land banks have made some tremendous progress. Over 5,000 problem properties have been acquired.

“In total $180 million in funding has been secured and that has leveraged over $300 million in private investment. So this is a public-private partnership!

“That has returned $135 million in assessed value to our tax rolls and about $56 million in sales of these properties has been rolled back into other land bank investments. We think about it as a revolving thing.” Our goal with the properties we have is to fix them up and make them marketable and invest that money into other blighted properties.

“Land banks are special. Under the legislation in New York, there are some key powers that land banks have that other organizations don’t!

“One is we can acquire properties through tax foreclosures. As you probably know the county supreme court two years ago changed all that for every one in the country. But this is still a viable way for us to acquire property!

“We can hold properties tax free during the time (of renovation) and the land bank doesn’t incur additional tax liability.