Growing Pains in Rural Villages
Infrastructure Groans Under Increasing Populations
New York’s Catskill Mountains have drawn visitors from the city for generations. And that’s always meant change. But the post-pandemic world has led to challenges no one was prepared for. So far, no one has a practical answer.
It used to be that tourists visited the Catskills, and then went home.
In the Victorian era, families of means spent every summer in the fresh mountain air at luxurious mountain houses and humbler boarding houses, escaping the heat and disease that blanketed urban areas. Those summer visitors were an important part of the local economy.
In the fifties, the Catskills became home to the Borscht Belt — with thriving resorts with pools, golf, tennis and even skiing, along with Vegas-style entertainment. The resorts brought jobs, though the thousands of visitors seldom spent money outside the resorts.
The Woodstock era saw the Catskills become a music mecca and the East Coast home of the counterculture. The seventies and beyond saw the growth of tourism-related shops, particularly tourism related to the hippie movement and the music that fueled the historic concert at Bethel. Those tourists got off the highway and drove right past Woodstock’s neighboring, then-struggling city, Kingston, without stopping. Tourism was hyper-local.
But one thing remained true: living in the Catskills full-time was unrealistic for most people who visited. Work demanded a location closer to the city. So the basic full-time populations remained fairly consistent.
That has changed, and it appears it has changed forever. The Internet made it possible. COVID made it happen.
The pandemic was accompanied by a surge of downstate buyers looking for a different lifestyle, for an escape from the boxes in the city in which they felt imprisoned during the lockdown. They are buying old farms, old village homes, building their version of sustainable housing, and settling in.
These are young couples and families who either started new businesses that mostly sell online, or who have traditional jobs that can be done anywhere so long as there’s high-speed Internet. Tourism continues to thrive, with Airbnb.com as its poster child and major economic driver, but full-time home sales are surging, too.
Kingston has now far outpaced Woodstock with a tsunami of new, young expat residents, and both communities have seen home values rocket as much as a hundred percent from pre-COVID levels. The once-affordable mid-Hudson Valley is now just as out of reach for many homebuyers as the New York City suburbs.
Villages like Franklin, where I live, in the northernmost part of Delaware County and the far north edge of the Catskills, used to be somewhat removed from all of this activity. It was just too far from the New York City metro area. Downstaters had summer homes here, and a lot of their children chose to stay. But moving here full-time from downstate just wasn’t possible for most people.
Now, because prices here are still relatively reasonable (though probably up forty percent from a few years ago) and the Internet is, in most places, fast and reliable, the western Catskills and Delaware County are targets for aspiring upstaters. And that’s good, bringing new families, new businesses, and new energy.
But it has highlighted an issue. It’s an issue that recently got a write-up in the Albany Times Union newspaper.
Delaware County is one of the largest and poorest counties in the state. There is very little industry. That lack of development has preserved the area’s rural charm. Locals and newcomers alike are anxious to preserve that charm. But it comes at a cost.
The village of Franklin, for example, is on the National Register of Historic Places. It has a handful of streets featuring hundred-year-old homes, a charming local school, a professional live theatre venue, and some surprisingly sophisticated shops. But it, like most other upstate towns and villages, also has historic infrastructure, with not enough funds to modernize.
The main street shops each have their own septics. Some of those septics are far too small for modern health regulations, so there are strict limits on what businesses can be there.
The local cafe opened without knowing about the problem in their building. So they serve food on waxed paper in plastic baskets — the building can’t handle a commercial dishwasher.
A nearby building recently bought and restored by interior designer Meg Lavalette, can’t have a restaurant in its available space. The septic can’t handle it.
A dilapidated pair of historic buildings which have been languishing for years, could not house even one apartment, much less a restaurant, if they were renovated. Again, the issue is septic. So they remain, gradually deteriorating when they could be the jewels of an historic village’s Main Street.
This isn’t a problem unique to Franklin. It’s probably an issue in almost every rural village across the country that suddenly finds itself popular with urban expats. These are towns and villages with a limited tax base. Sewer systems, wastewater treatment, new water mains — these are huge, costly projects. They are simply unattainable for villages with populations that don’t even reach a thousand.
Franklin has been looking for solutions, applying for grants, and considering alternatives to a village-wide sewer system.
A hundred years ago, when Franklin was a business hub and had trains to carry its goods all over the country, the individual septics were good enough. They were a modern innovation, in fact.
Since then, the roads have been updated. The electric service has been modernized. The Internet reaches all but the most remote locations. But water and waste systems lag behind. Communities do the best they can when they can.
The pressure is increasing. The businesses breathing life into these country villages need modern infrastructure. The question is how to pay for it.
The Catskills Literary Journal is managed by Susan Barnett, an author, realtor, and long-time Upstate New York resident.
