Shandaken has an empty-house problem. The tiny town in upstate New York, which includes hamlets Pine Hill and Phoenicia, has long been a vacation destination for people looking to visit the Catskills, but the balance of things has fallen off in the last half-decade.
Not too long ago, Izaak Schwaiger, a volunteer firefighter in Pine Hill, kicked down the door of a house with its fire-alarm going off only to find no fire and nobody home — just a malfunctioning security system. It happens more than you’d think. Schwaiger rattles off a list of the kinds of emergencies he sees that has followed the post-pandemic influx of weekenders: fires starting in improperly maintained Airbnbs, hikers getting lost, a teen who drove straight into a muddy field and got stuck. Shandaken is also aging. At 50 years old, Schwaiger is the second-youngest person in his department. The average age of his 15-person team and nearby departments is, he guesses, around 60.
Many of upstate’s vacation and commuter towns are facing their own version of this, but it can feel most acute in a small, rural place like Shandaken. The fact that so many of the houses in the area are second homes has been true for a decade at least, but the people buying them are getting wealthier, too. In the same time period, the proportion of people working from home in Shandaken has shot up from 10 to 24 percent. If they work at all while in Shandaken, it’s usually at a remote job, often high-paying, often based in the city.
So how do you run a town where no one is picking up the Richard Scarry–esque, essential jobs and most everyone else is getting priced out? Clio Chang reports on the crisis: https://t.co/kqMLU702nm
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