HVCC expansion in Albany has echoes of Capital South Campus Center

But the $5.4 million center, and the institutions meant to provide a pathway to success, failed to live up to its loftiest expectations. A common complaint is that the campus, a modernist structure that stands in stark contrast to the worn brick towers it sits next to, isn’t accessible or usable by the community at large.

“The whole point of putting it there was for the community to be able to use it,” said Dannielle Hille, of the nonprofit A Block at a Time.

The center’s struggles and a long history of South End residents having projects foisted upon their neighborhood without their input blunted recent news that Hudson Valley Community College is seeking to expand into the South End where public housing high-rises currently sit.

Last week, the city Common Council voted 9-3 for Albany to apply for a $3 million state Restore NY grant to pay for half the demolition costs of the Albany Housing Authority’s Lincoln Square homes. The narrative supporting the grant laid out a proposal to replace the decrepit buildings with a $66 million 66,000 square foot HVCC campus.

Some of the language used at the Jan. 19 council meeting mirrors that used by local leaders to help create the Capital South Campus Center.
Capitalize Albany President Sarah Reginelli told the council the grant application and potential for an HVCC campus was fundamentally about providing opportunities for residents of the South End.

“It’s about creating opportunities for job training, for learning English, for earning certificates that directly increase wages,” she said. “It’s about providing a direct pipeline from the neighborhood — through no-cost and low-cost education — to a well-paying career.”

For many residents, it was the first time they had heard the idea that the now vacant 196-unit affordable housing complex would be torn down to make way for another educational campus.

But the project has been percolating in the background for several years and is partially seen as a way to fulfill the unreached goals of the Capital South Campus Center.

Support ebbs

As Times Union writer Paul Grondahl put it in 2014, the Capital South Campus Center had a “Field of Dreams” quality to it for residents. If you build it, will they come?

That question may have been directed at the wrong people.

Part of the reason the center, which is owned by the Albany Housing Authority and originally managed by Trinity Alliance, failed to live up to its goals was because the institutions that agreed to provide some of the key steps in the cradle-to-career pipeline dropped out.

The center started off strong after it opened in 2014.

In the last six months of 2015, 426 people completed a career advancement course and developed an individual education or employment plan. Of those, 161 completed a certificate, found a job, or enrolled in college. In addition, 81 people earned high school equivalency diplomas, 60 completed English as a second language courses and more than 50 children participated in an early childhood language development program, according to Times Union archives.

But soon after the center opened, much of the outside educational support evaporated. Part of the problem was multiple schools working with limited time and space. And those promises of support were largely verbal, rather than contractual, said Trinity Alliance’s CEO Harris Oberlander, who was instrumental in the center’s creation.

The center was also built during the peak of Alain Kaloyeros’ reign atop the state’s nanotech field. SUNY Polytechnic Institute promised a $475,000 grant to help create a clean room simulation to help local residents acquire the training they’d need to enter the nanotechnology field.

But when Kaloyeros’ downfall came in September 2016 on charges of felony bid rigging, that clean room training never came to be.

Not everyone left. Meals on Wheels continued to use the state-of-the-art kitchen that was meant to host culinary programs through Schenectady County Community College. Oberlander credited Empire State College in particular for sticking with its promises.

“They showed up, they were good,” he said. “They were helpful.”

Another problem was that many of the residents who came to the center weren’t ready for college courses. In 2016, Oberlander told the Times Union that many of the people the center served had barely reached a fifth-grade education level. The center’s high school equivalency and English as a second language courses took off.

Despite those hurdles, Oberlander said earlier this week he was proud of what the center had managed to achieve.

“I still believe in it,” he said. “I still believe we did the right thing.”

By 2018, the relationship between Trinity Alliance and the housing authority had become strained. The authority found a new managing partner for the center in 2019 in Capital Region BOCES.

That was around the time the center stopped hosting community meetings. The change, in part, was because BOCES’ agreement with the housing authority and the grant guidelines that funded the center said the center’s use had to be restricted to education and workforce training activities.

“(BOCES) are meeting definite needs that exist in the community,” said Mayor Kathy Sheehan “But I think not in a way that was initially envisioned.”

The campus has been far from dormant. BOCES, one of the original partners since the site opened, runs or hosts numerous programs, including ESL classes, workforce fairs, childcare, and Albany CanCode, a nonprofit that trains people for software career opportunities

In 2022, the building’s Literacy Zone served over 400 students and provided 33,000 hours of instruction, according to Alyssa Teribury, a BOCES assistant program manager.

Expansion planned

The news that the Lincoln Square homes might make way for an educational campus has echoes stretching back more than 20 years. The towers, built as part of the urban renewal movement of the 1960s that swept the city, were substantially rehabilitated in the 1980s. By the turn of this century, the federal government told the housing authority it would not pay to rehabilitate them again, which began a fruitless effort to find the money to take them down.

Included in a 2007 plan for the South End was an idea that the towers would be replaced with an educational center or mixed-use housing. But first the high-rises needed to fall.

Aside from the prevalent thinking that public housing should evolve beyond the high-rise model as the optimal housing solution for those in need of assistance, the buildings themselves have extensive problems. The complex’s boilers and other mechanics are hosted in a single building, which means when a problem arises, it affects the whole complex. Parts for its elevators, which have consistently malfunctioned and skipped floors, are no longer manufactured. On multiple occasions, city police and fire have been called to help move residents with mobility issues in and out of the buildings.

The housing authority notified residents in April 2020 it would begin the process of vacating the towers, placing residents who lived in the towers in other housing units it had rehabbed or built throughout the city. Earlier this month, the last resident left the towers and they were fenced off.

Meanwhile, HVCC had been looking westward for an expansion from its Troy campus for several years.

The idea of a single higher education partner would solve several of the issues that undercut the Capital South Campus Center — including concrete streams of funding, staffing and curriculum based on community needs.

The discussion with the city and Capitalize Albany, its economic development arm, began in earnest last summer as college officials toured several sites in the city.

But HVCC President Roger Ramsammy kept telling city officials he wanted to be in the South End and the city expressed interest in the Capital District Educational Opportunity Center relocating from Troy to the neighborhood, Sheehan said.

Earlier this year, the city applied for a $10 million Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) grant for the South Pearl Street area. Included in those public meetings and discussions was the idea of an HVCC expansion in the South End and it was identified as a priority project for the grant. Additionally, when the city applied for a $10 million grant to help the Central Warehouse project earlier this year, Capitalize Albany told the Common Council its backup plan was to apply for the same grant for an HVCC expansion on Morton Avenue.

Sheehan said that while the South Pearl Street DRI map is awkwardly drawn to include Morton Avenue up to the Lincoln Towers site, the city sees them as connected.

“The idea was, when we tear down these towers if we can create a development there that includes bringing people into the district, then you’re creating this opportunity to then have the type of daytime foot traffic and people traffic to help see a successful commercial corridor,” she said.

Those conversations never reached the larger public until Capitalize Albany approached the Common Council earlier this month and asked it to quickly pass support for the Restore NY grant.

The result was a number of South End residents appeared at the Jan. 19 Common Council meeting questioning where the proposal had come from and why the neighborhood had not been involved in a discussion on what was needed on the site.

Hille, the A Block at Time founder, was among those at the meeting who questioned why the project’s organizers hadn’t taken more time to talk with South End residents. She compared the inclusion of the HVCC expansion in the South Pearl Street grant proposal to a Congressional bill where multiple projects are slipped into larger pieces of legislation. She believes it should have been broken out into separate public discussions.

“That says, ‘We don’t really care, we know what’s best for you’,” she said in a recent interview.

Officials from the city and college have all stressed that the proposal for an expansion site is still in the earliest stages and there will be multiple community conversations on the site’s future.

In an interview this week, HVCC President Ramsammy said there was no guarantee the housing authority would turn the site over to the college or that the community would support the expansion.

Beyond regulatory and administrative approvals, HVCC would need to raise more than $60 million to fund the site. In the end, what the community wants would drive the college’s decision-making, he said.

“It’s going to be there to serve what the community needs,” he said. “It’s going to be a community center, serving every aspect of their needs.”

But the college is moving ahead with trying to sway hearts and minds in the South End. HVCC is organizing a bus tour to bring community members over to Troy to tour the Educational Opportunity Center and a college spokesman said they would look at town hall discussions in the future if the project moves forward.

Councilman Derek Johnson, who represents the South End and has opposed the idea of the HVCC expansion at the Lincoln Square site, said the promises by the city and HVCC for community outreach are like those South End residents have heard before.

Johnson added he wanted to see data and studies to support the idea that an HVCC expansion would find the student population it needed for a new campus.

“It could be beneficial, but does it have to be that location?” he asked.