SARANAC LAKE — Harrietstown has received a grant to start work on a major and overdue plumbing upgrade to replace all the 50-year-old pipes in the nine-story Lake Flower Apartments building.
Currently, there are concerns of a “catastrophic” failure in the rusted, cracked and eroded plumbing at the Harrietstown Housing Authority-owned apartments.
HHA Executive Director Patrick Murphy said this grant came at just the right time to get the much-needed work started. He said this is “deferred maintenance now at emergency level.”
There are buckets and tarps to catch leaks in storage closets. Murphy said staff are chasing leaks all over. He said chronic moisture intrusion creates a risk of mold.
“It is terrible,” Murphy said.
The town is getting the grant, and Murphy thanked the town leadership for their help securing the $1,298,361 state Community Development Block Grant, which comes from the state Homes and Community Renewal agency.
“This building is one of the largest concentrations of affordable housing in the Adirondacks and a cornerstone of the regional safety net,” the grant application states.
The apartments serve very low- to low-income residents, offering affordable homes to people who earn 50% to 80% of the area median income. Saranac Lake’s AMI is $88,500.
At least 40% of new admissions are reserved for extremely low-income families earning 30% AMI. The rest are for people earning at or below 50% to 80% AMI.
Murphy said there’s a large need for the type of housing the Lake Flower Apartments offers.
“Countywide, 44% of residents qualify as low- to moderate-income, and a large share of renters — over 50% — are cost burdened, paying more than 30% of their income on housing,” the grant application states. “For low-income seniors and individuals with disabilities, these pressures are even more acute.”
The cast iron pipes installed when the building was first built are crumbling.
“The water chemistry is not bad for the people who drink it, but it is hard on the infrastructure,” Murphy said.
He’s worried about leaks they can’t see causing flooding or health issues. The ball valves are so corroded he’s worried they’ll snap, and they don’t always shut off the water completely when work needs to be done on the fixtures of apartments.
In 2024, his predecessor, Sarah Clarkin, hired engineers to investigate the quality of the infrastructure. He said they found the pipes are almost ready for a catastrophic failure.
When he took over as executive director for HHA in August 2024, this became his number-one priority.
They got an architect to design a new water distribution system and started raising money to do the work. The project is estimated at a total of $2.5 million.
Before this grant, they had received a $678,000 Emergency Capital Grant from HUD. Murphy said these emergency grants are not easy to come by. HHA is also putting in $380,000 of its own money.
Murphy said this state grant came just in time. The HUD emergency grant expires eventually. HHA got that grant just in time to use it on the state grant application.
Soon, HHA will send out bids for the job, and he hopes to have construction start by the fall. This sort of work can be done through the winter.
Planning the logistics of replacing the pipes for 78 apartments, while people are still living there, has been difficult. Murphy said they’re still planning out the specifics. But they’re planning a phased approach.
The entire project is estimated to take around 13 months to complete.
Murphy said they’ve left a handful of units vacant in the past few months in preparation, so building residents won’t have to leave the building while the work is done in their apartments. They’ll rotate through finished units and be able to stay at the apartments.
Murphy said they considered housing residents in the community during the work, but there’s not enough open apartments in town. If HHA rented hotel rooms for more than a year, he said it would add $2 million to the project cost.
Moving around in apartments is going to be difficult, by he said they’re trying to make it the least difficult. The high rise is their home, he said.
In addition to replacing all the plumbing and installing a water softener system, the grant also has money to upgrade the building’s undersized electrical capacity and old fire monitoring system.
This grant is one of two $1.2 million housing grants Murphy’s housing agencies got last week. This other grant expands a rental assistance program in Franklin County. An Enterprise article on how this program works will come later. Murphy said he’s feeling very lucky right now.