The Times Union published an article this morning outlining Albany County’s potential plans to move some of their offices from their downtown building to the former campus of the College of St. Rose uptown. The downtown building would then be converted to housing.
I don’t have a deep understanding of what operations are actually housed in the building on State Street (downtown), so I won’t attempt to analyze the impact the move would have on either employees or county residents in need of services. But I did want to share one or two initial reactions to the news.
First, downtown Albany, like the rest of the region, state, and country, is in desperate need of additional housing. If this doesn’t turn into a way to allow a deep-pocketed developer to grab prime real estate on the cheap (at taxpayer expense), it could be a great way to increase the supply of housing downtown.
But I wasn’t thrilled with some of the comments Dan McCoy (the County Executive) made regarding parking. It’s clear he brings a very suburban mindset to the situation. While the St. Rose campus is on a bus line, the State Stree location is at the terminus of several bus lines. It’s also much more accessible by bike. The Hudson Mohawk hike-bike trail provides ready access from Cohoes, Watervliet, Menands, and eastern Colonie, while the Helderberg-Hudson rail trail (via the south-end connector) provides access from Bethlehem, Slingerlands, New Scotland, and Voorheesville. Getting to the St. Rose campus can be done on a few surface roads from the south, but there’s no dedicated bike route, except via downtown on the Madison Ave bike lane (a dicey proposition on a good day).
I would like to see the County take a more wholistic view of transportation, rather than operating on the assumption that the only people who matter will arrive by private car. That’s a particularly troubling assumption when mentioned in the same context of a senior center and senior services. Many seniors don’t drive. Indeed, seniors are one of the great beneficiaries of complete streets, so it’s disappointing to see McCoy being so focused on parking, rather than transportation more broadly.
I’ll be interested to see what comes of this. Seeing the County looking at ways to increase housing is a good sign. It’s interesting that the same article mentions the several now-vacant dorms on the St. Rose campus without connecting that to the need for housing, but you can’t cover everything in a single article.