The Albany Common Council continues to examine a proposed change to existing law that would eliminate single-family home zoning throughout the city.
Opting to not "wait for federal and state action," 10th ward councilor Owusu Anane is lead sponsor of a measure green-lighting construction of Accessory Dwelling Units. Anane says allowing higher-density housing would offset the shortage of housing opportunities citywide.
"I believe that is fiscally responsible and I think it's the right thing to do to create more housing for the residents of our city, particularly in the housing crisis that we're facing as a nation," said Anane.
A recent meeting of the council’s Planning, Economic Development and Land Use Committee involved experts from codes, assessment, and fire services.
Albany Fire Chief Joe Gregory says public safety concerns include access difficulties should fire break out in an ADU.
"One of the key issue topics that we looked at too is occupancy. Occupancy confusion with our firefighters and responders," said Gregory. "Police officers, firefighters may struggle to quickly identify the location of the occupants within the ADUs. A fire could spread, could quickly spread between those two units, and identifying those areas would be, would be a detriment to our members. The increased occupancy load: adding an ADU to a property means more people living in smaller areas, which can complicate evacuation procedures and increase the potential number of people at risk at a fire. And limited egress paths. Proper fire escape routes can be difficult to design in smaller ADUs, particularly when attached to existing structures.”
15th ward councilor Tom Hoey says other items in need of consideration include setting limits on exterior measurements and square footage for ADU’s, accounting for installation of water and sewer lines and possible issues as to where dwellers would park their vehicles.
"There's a lot of rules and regulations in this legislation, but nobody said that they're responsible for enforcing it. So that's going to be one of the big problems, that if we do pass this type of legislation, where you have to be owner occupied, one of the units, either the main unit or the accessory dwelling, who's going to enforce that? Who's going to verify that that you still live there, and that you're the owner. Then one of the other problems is, if it sells, if that place sells, who keeps track of that? There was another problem the assessor brought up about that, if there's a few of these accessory dwelling units, like on a block, the whole block assessment is going to go up, not just for the accessory units, but the value of the houses go up. So that means when they do assessments, it's done by areas. So the whole area would actually have a tax increase, or assessment increase, which usually leads to a tax increase,” Hoey said.
City Assessment Commissioner Trey Kingston says Albany already has more than a dozen ADU's scattered across the city that essentially are two individual single-family homes on the same property.
"The most common thing that we see, but I think would cross over to the accessory dwelling units, would be a property owner who vacates the premises when it comes to occupancy, but retains ownership. So somebody that moves from Albany to Colonie or to Guilderland or Schenectady even, there's no database that crosses different municipalities in order to notify us that this isn't a primary residence or that it's not owner occupied. It's a complete nightmare," said Kingston.
Hoey says a hearing on the legislation with the Albany Planning Board is scheduled for April 8th.
Meanwhile, a new local law is to be introduced before the Albany County Legislature this month to provide a partial real property tax exemption for residents who construct ADUs on existing residential properties.
