Housing, jobs among big concerns in new North Country survey

WATERTOWN, New York (WWNY) – Housing and job availability in the tri-county region need improvement. That’s just one finding from Jefferson Community College’s 25th Annual North Country Survey of the Community.

Nearly 2,000 North Country residents participated.

“To our knowledge, this is a rich and long-term database that is not common amongst communities the size of Watertown and our tri-county region,” said Joel LaLone, director of Community Studies at JCC.

Similar to previous years, attitudes toward available housing continue to trend downward in Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence counties.

“There’s this graph, a line graph that shows the 40% going down to 10%, and it hasn’t stabilized. The whole idea is it’s got a limit. You can’t have a negative percent that says that the availability for housing is excellent or good. When is it going to bottom out? It hasn’t yet,” said LaLone.

Lance Evans with the Jefferson-Lewis Board of Realtors says some reasons behind the rating could be the north country’s short building season and high interest rates.

“Housing availability has dropped not only here, but across the country. Some of it is because interest rates rose and therefore, people who have bought homes before didn’t want to sell the home they were in. So if they’re not selling the home they’re in, it’s not going on the market,” he said.

29 percent of those surveyed say the availability of good jobs is poor in the region. The WorkPlace Executive Director Cheryl Mayforth says this doesn’t come as a shock.

“Housing is extremely expensive. It’s not in line with wages. Childcare is not in line with wages. You can see how people here are very stressed when it comes to their finances. They need better paying jobs, which really are not that available,” she said.

The survey also polled people on the 2024 presidential election and LaLone says people in the north country showed strong loyalty to their candidates, many voting the same way in 2024 that they did in 2020.

“Amongst the people who said they voted for Donald Trump in 2020, 97% of them, when we asked them later, ‘Who are you going to vote for next week in Trump vs. Harris,’ 97 percent of them said, ‘I’m voting for Donald Trump,’” said LaLone.

The most positive responses were on the quality of the environment, K-12 education, access to higher education, and overall quality of life in the area. More than 40 percent of responders noted each of those as “excellent” or “good.”

LaLone thanked the sponsors of the annual surveys, including Car Freshner, the Northern New York Community Foundation, JCC, the Development Authority of the North Country, and the Lewis County Board of Legislators.

Copyright 2024 WWNY. All rights reserved.