The village is taking title to this abandoned, foreclosed home on Canaras Avenue, with plans to sell it to the Franklin County Land Bank to be turned into affordable workforce housing. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

SARANAC LAKE — A long-vacant home on Canaras Avenue is set to get new life as the village is talking possession of the foreclosed property and selling it to the Franklin County Land Bank to be sold as an affordable home to someone in the local workforce.

A $1.25 million grant the Franklin County Land Bank got from the New York Land Bank Initiative last month includes new money for property acquisitions, which allows the land bank to purchase the house from the village. The land bank is ramping up its efforts in its second year of existence as it starts getting state money, prepares to renovate homes it already owns in Tupper Lake and Malone and purchases a third in Saranac Lake.

A land bank is an entity separate from the county, which works with the county to take properties that have years of delinquent taxes and are run-down or vacant, and transfers them to the land bank. The land bank renovates the property with state grants and private money and sells it to private people for housing or commercial use, putting the land back on the tax rolls. These properties could be safety hazards, eyesores or empty prime real estate that could be used for business or housing.

“There are abandoned properties everywhere,” land bank property management committee Chair John Gillis said, “and the land bank is positioned well to put them back in productive use.”

This is the first property the land bank has in Saranac Lake.

Village Mayor Jimmy Williams credits village Code Enforcement Officer Chris McClatchie with getting the process started. He has been looking into how to improve village properties and learned about the abandoned title acquisition process.

Village development board member Dan Reilly said it has been a while since the village has taken abandoned property like this, and he felt its use is “way past due.”

“There’s several properties you could take if you look at that one as practice,” Reilly said on Tuesday.

“Proof of concept,” Williams said.

Article 19-A of the state law allows the village to take title of an abandoned home. The house on Canaras Avenue — on the corner of Olive Street, where the entrance to the high school is — was declared abandoned in October. On Feb. 10, the village’s special council appeared in Franklin County Supreme Court and no one showed up to object the village taking the land, so the judge allowed it. Last week, the village board unanimously agreed to take the title and sell it to the land bank.

The village will sell it to land bank for $16,500 — $13,200 in taxes owed to the county and $3,300 to cover the village’s legal fees. The land bank has $200,000 from its grant to put toward property acquisitions.

“It’s great to be able to have the opportunity to be able to do a property in Saranac Lake,” Franklin County Land Bank Chair Harry Gordon said.

The house at 71 Canaras Ave. has been abandoned for years. It’s unclear how many years, exactly. Gordon said the two former occupants of the house died and their family had no interest in the home. Google Street View imagery from 2015 shows construction going on in the yard, but it is unclear exactly what was happening then. Visibly, the house has been empty for a long time, with paint peeling off the walls and ceiling, and wood rot on the exterior decks. A legal page on the front door, posted by the village code enforcement department, states the house is “unsafe,” “uninhabitable” and “unsound.”

It is a 992-square-foot, two-story home built in 1900 on 0.13 acres of land. It has three bedrooms, one bathroom and a 120-square-foot porch. The full property was assessed at $85,000 in 2025 with an estimated full market value of $121,065.

Gordon said the land bank was interested in it because it is “well-located” — close to downtown and right between the elementary, middle and high schools.

“If you were a teacher, you could walk to school,” he said.

He remembers hearing last year about a special education teacher turning down a job in the Saranac Lake district because she couldn’t find a place for her family to live here.

“One of our goals as a land bank is make housing that’s affordable for people who are teachers, health care workers, police officers and so forth,” Gordon said. “If they don’t live in our community, we don’t have a community.”

How long will it take to turn it into a new home? That’s unknown. Gordon said no one from the village or land bank has seen the inside yet. They’ll need to have professional evaluation and decide whether to rehab the house or tear it down and build new. The land bank’s other properties were acquired in “uninhabitable” states, Gordon said, so this one can’t be much worse, he imagines.

The county land bank is currently renovating two homes it acquired last year — one in Tupper Lake and one in Malone. To read more about the Tupper Lake home, go to tinyurl.com/yskmtvxu.

Gillis said they’re preparing to bid for work on these houses soon, for work to start in the summer. It feels like it’s slow going, but they’re making progress, he said. The land bank was established in the spring of 2023, acquired the first two properties in the summer of 2024 and weren’t eligible for land bank grant funding until late in the fall of 2024.

The key is longevity, chipping away at blighted properties over time.

Each land bank property will be sold with three deed restrictions — it must be a primary residence, it cannot be a short-term vacation rental, and if it is sold, there is a cap on the amount of profit that can be made. Gordon said the goal is to have these houses be workforce housing in perpetuity, so they want to avoid anyone flipping the homes for profit.

The land bank is meant to break the “foreclosure cycle” — when a property owner falls behind on their payments, gets foreclosed on and another buyer scoops the derelict property up on the cheap but doesn’t fix it up, falls behind on their payments and gets foreclosed on. The land bank is not required to pay property taxes while it holds and improves the property. But its eventual goal is to fix it up, sell it and get it back on the tax rolls.

Gordon said the not-for-profit organization’s mission of building stronger communities is achieved through increasing affordable workforce housing, removing blight and returning properties to tax rolls. Specifically, this is done by acquiring foreclosed properties which were out of shape and not up on their taxes to be sold as affordable workforce housing at below-market value.

Land banks can be flexible with the sale price. Members often say they can sell the house for the best outcome, not the best price.

Instead of getting the “best price” from the highest bidder, like governments are usually required to, they can negotiate and sell it at a lower price to someone who couldn’t afford it at the market rate, based on needs.

Gillis said they’re looking for more abandoned properties around the county — from the Canadian border to Coney Mountain. In the village of Malone alone, he has a list of 60 abandoned properties. He encouraged local leaders to make suggestions to the land bank about properties they could acquire. Gillis said they rely on local knowledge to learn about opportunities.

Williams said he’s enjoyed working with the land bank, saying they have a worthwhile, selfless goal.

The Franklin County Land Bank is one of 31 which have cropped up across the state since land banks became allowed in New York in 2011.

Gordon said he hopes the state legislature and governor will continue to fund land banks. The current proposed budgets from the legislature include a potential $50 million for land banks. While that money isn’t real until the budget gets passed later this spring, Gordon said it’s encouraging.

The North Country has been in an affordable housing crisis for years, and after two years of preparing, he said the Franklin County Land Bank is ready to be another tool to address it.