Guest Editorial by Adrian Kuzminski
Housing: Time to Take Control
Ahealthy community depends upon the year-round residents who live and work in it. The more tourists flock to an area, the more the streets, shops, restaurants and public spaces are filled with perhaps friendly but still anonymous visitors crowding out the locals. Cooperstown sees this every summer. In extreme cases (Venice, Barcelona, the Hamptons, etc.) property values rapidly escalate and local residents are almost entirely driven out, wholly replaced by mass tourism and the businesses and services which cater to it. In the end, a bloated tourist community turns into something like a theme park. Cooperstown hasn’t reached that point, obviously, but it’s getting closer. Tourist overdevelopment of the type we sadly see elsewhere has been increasingly evident in our area for some years. The time to take action is now, before it gets too bad and we lose control.
The root of the problem lies in the imbalance between short- and long-term rental housing. When the income of a home or apartment from short-term rentals to tourists exceeds its income from year-round rentals to local residents, a housing shortage quickly develops, affecting mainly working people. Most of them must move away and commute, if they can. This has already happened here. Many employers (including our largest, Bassett Healthcare) now have trouble recruiting employees. What’s left are the more affluent homeowners, mostly professionals, business owners, and the independently wealthy. But the non-tourist economy and quality of life suffers. What was once a relatively balanced community of poorer and richer living together begins to resemble a gated community with invisible, but real, gates.
Getting control of the housing situation is the key to limiting the future impacts of tourism. Communities have the authority and power to protect their identities. The Village of Cooperstown did exactly that in 2023 when it passed a law requiring that short-term rentals in the village be offered only on properties with resident landlords. Absentee landlords in the village could no longer offer short-term rentals. It’s time to consider extending such a law to the entire Town of Otsego, as well as to the towns of Middlefield and Springfield, and perhaps Hartwick and others as well.
Banning short-term rentals by absentee landlords throughout the area would help ease the overall Otsego County housing crisis. It would make absentee-owned homes and apartments available to people seeking affordable long-term rentals without competition from tourists driving up prices. At the same time, resident landlords would continue to offer short-term rentals. With the competition from absentee landlords for short-term rentals removed, resident landlords would have more incentive to enter the market. Such rentals, however, would remain secondary to a primary, owner-occupied residence on the same property. This would do much to ensure stability and value in local housing, better maintain properties, encourage cohesion instead of sprawl, keep the money earned in the community, avoid often vacant, isolated rental units, and ensure the kind of personal contact which diminishes the anonymity of tourism.
Banning short-term absentee owned rentals would also do much to mitigate the effects of possible future development, such as the currently proposed Manocherian subdivision in Otsego and Springfield, which envisions 111 lots on over 1,500 acres. Rural plots in scenic areas are a magnet for second home buyers, many of whom are likely to be absentee owners looking to finance their investments by short-term rentals. Banning such rentals would do much toward lowering the impact of subdivisions. It would encourage long-term residents to occupy the new plots. Such residents are far more likely to be integrated into the community and be protective of its assets than an endless flow of anonymous tourists and their providers, who seek to consume those assets to the point of destroying them.
