A manufactured home in Newcomb could be the start of affordable workforce housing for the region
Home prices have soared in the last five years, and so have second-home buyers and short-term rental properties.
That’s made finding a “starter” home for less than $200,000 a rarity in much of the North Country, especially in the Adirondacks.
A new state pilot project is exploring how manufactured homes could help address the affordable housing shortage. One of the pilot homes was built in Newcomb, and it’s proving to be a model on the local and state level.
10 Colden Place — a rare, affordable starter home
10 Colden Place isn’t really what you’d picture when you hear the term “manufactured home.”
The 1,400-square-foot home is on its own lot, with lots of pine trees nearby. It has an attached garage, blue clapboard siding with white trim, and even a covered front porch.
Inside, the home has three bedrooms, an open-concept kitchen, and a living room. It’s essentially a model starter home. It’s priced that way, too: 10 Colden Place is listed for $170,000.
“I work in 18 towns in Essex County, and I also travel to Franklin, Hamilton, and even into Washington. You really don’t see a lot of homes like this,” said Nicole Justice Green. She’s the director of the Essex County Land Bank, which built this house.
Because there are so few homes like this, Green said the “people in the open housing market [in the North Country] are dealing with homes that are older, that need a lot of work, and that are very expensive and hard to maintain.”
She said that makes it difficult for young families to buy a home, and it also makes it harder for people to age in place, because older couples with larger homes can’t find “a smaller home in their community.”
A big part of that difficulty is that when smaller starter homes do come up for sale, first-time homebuyers are often competing against second homeowners, and even corporations that buy homes for use as short-term rentals, or STRs, Green said.
“In this community [Newcomb], their rate of second homes and STRs is one of the highest in Essex County,” said Green, “to the point where they have multiple positions in their school district that they have had final applicants accept jobs and then ultimately have to decline because they cannot find housing.”
The pilot program
Building this house was a stab at trying to address the shortage of affordable, starter homes in Newcomb, and beyond. That’s because it was part of a New York State pilot program called MOVE-IN.
The state partnered with three different land banks to build three of these “cross-mod” houses, which were mostly built in a factory and then sited on foundations. Essex County Land Bank was selected for the pilot alongside the City of Schenectady and City of Syracuse land banks.
Green said they were delighted to be selected, and honestly, a little surprised.
“It goes to show that the state was really listening to some of that feedback and advocacy that the Rural Housing Coalition has been putting forth in the past few years, which is that rural communities and communities in the Catskills and Adirondack Park shouldn’t be excluded from these [state housing] programs,” she said.
The idea was to see if manufactured homes sited on real foundations, and built to HUD and local codes, could be a feasible solution to the state’s current housing crisis.
It has particular relevance in the North Country, “where we have a massive contractor shortage,” Green said.
Limiting who can access starter homes
After a ribbon cutting to celebrate the completion of 10 Colden Place, Sarah Gallipo-Samis put out the house’s “for sale” sign.
She’s a real estate agent with Century 21 Adirondacks, based out of Ticonderoga. She’s listed several Essex County land bank properties.
“It’s a good feeling, I think, is the genuine truth,” said Gallipo-Samis, getting to play a part in “helping to bring affordable, sustainable housing to people who are in the workforce, but otherwise would not be able to afford some of the prices that we’re seeing nowadays.”
Gallipo-Samis is referring to the deed restrictions placed on this house by the Essex County Land Bank.
To buy it, you have to make less than 200% area median income, and it has to be your primary, year-round residence. Homeowners have to stay current on their school taxes, property taxes, mortgage, and insurance. Annually, the land bank staff will do an inspection to make sure the home is up to code, and to fix things covered by the home’s warranty.
Crucially, the home cannot be rented or used for a short-term rental.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said Gallipo-Samis, “but there has to also be houses for people who just want to live and work in a community, and be a part of their community.”
If the owners choose to sell, the deed restrictions remain. “It will remain an accessible property for people in the low-to-middle-income price point,” she said.
A new chapter at the Essex County Land Bank
The price and the deed restrictions essentially make this house permanent, affordable housing for the local workforce.
That’s at the core of the Essex County Land Bank’s mission, which was conceived in 2021 and formally established in 2023. It fixes rundown housing and rehabs zombie properties. 10 Colden Place was its first new-build project.
That was only financially possible because the home was manufactured, Green said.
“A traditional, stick built home of this size would cost around $450,000,” she said. “This home cost us around $260,000.”
John Erb, director of operations for Champion Construction Services, which built and sited the home, said a lot of the cost savings come down to time.
“We build in a concurrent schedule. What I mean by that is while the homes are being manufactured in the factory, the construction teams are on site prepping the site and getting ready for it,” said Erb. “So that work is overlapping. Where in conventional building, you’re excavating, you’re putting the foundation in before you can even start framing.”
Building in a factory also takes out the variables of weather and the need to buy and transport the building materials. He said that allows the whole process to shorten to around six months, from when they get an order to when the home is move-in ready.
“When the home delivers out, and when it’s set into place, I mean, the home’s about 80 to 85% complete at that point,” said Erb. “Then we just have the finishing touches that usually happen over the next 30 to 60 days.”
With the shortage of home builders in the North Country, this is a real, viable pathway towards building affordable housing en masse, Green said.
The importance of local partnership and local will
The other critical piece to getting this home built was the Town of Newcomb.
It donated the land the house was built on to the Essex County land bank for this express purpose.
Town Supervisor Robin DeLoria is retiring at the end of 2025. He became aware of this six-acre parcel back in 2017, when he was asked, as then-deputy superintendent SUPERVISOR?, to survey all the land that the town owned.
“When we did the survey, we realized that it had municipal water, municipal sewer. It already had power, electric, fiber optic, and telephone,” said DeLoria.
He said that obviously made it valuable, and that the land probably could have fetched a high price from a private developer or single second-home owner.
But he said he and other town officials were thinking a lot about workforce housing at the time, and he asked himself, “What’s the best use for this? And the best use wasn’t just chopping it up and selling the lots.”
Instead, he waited, and eventually the Essex County Land Bank was formed.
Mary Lamphear, the town’s deputy supervisor, said that was the perfect partnership they’d been looking for, because the land bank deed restrictions prioritize full-time residents.
“Families want to live here. They just can’t,” said Lamphear. “We wanted this land to be for workforce housing.”
Much more than just one home
10 Colden Place is just the first manufactured home to be sited on the six-acre parcel the Town of Newcomb donated.
There’s room for 4 or 5 more, which is what the town and Essex County Land Bank are planning on.
Lamphear said this will make a big difference in a small community like Newcomb.
“Families moving in here, increasing our school population, increasing our volunteer base for our fire departments, getting workforce year-round people,” she said.
This wasn’t just a local experiment; it was also a pilot for the state. Because it went well, New York announced a new $50 million initiative in September that will help pay for 200 more starter homes like this one.
The Essex County Land Bank will be applying for those funds, Green said. “We have a number of other sites throughout Essex County, and we are going to be applying to expand this program in Essex County for up to 32 additional homes.”
While the Essex County Land Bank will continue rehabilitating homes, Green said the manufactured model can help them get more residents into homes, and fast, especially considering the region’s shortage of home builders.
“Being able to order 30 homes and have them built within four months and have them dropped off and delivered…it’s almost like a shot of adrenaline towards the housing crisis,” said Green.
The new homes will be concentrated in Newcomb, Westport, Ticonderoga, and Chesterfield, with a few scattered sites in Lake Placid and Jay.
