Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces Start of Construction on 78-Unit Affordable Housing Development in Chautauqua County

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced construction on Homesteads at Dunkirk Landing has started, a 78-unit affordable and supportive housing development that will create new homes in the city of Dunkirk, Chautauqua County. The $37 million development will include 16 apartments with supportive services for veterans who have experienced homelessness and approximately 5,900 square feet of commercial space planned for a childcare center. Under Governor Hochul's leadership, New York State Homes and Community Renewal (HCR) has created or preserved more than 600 affordable homes in Chautauqua County. Homesteads at Dunkirk Landing continues this progress and is part of Governor Hochul's $25 billion five-year Housing Plan, which is on track to create or preserve 100,000 affordable homes statewide.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much. I want to thank you and all your partners, and your family for doing extraordinary work. I get invited to projects all over the state. We're doing a lot. But yours are among the finest quality, and I'm proud to be associated with you and everyone at Regan Development. Let's give a round of applause to our developer.

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I want to give a special shout-out, in her absence, to the Mayor, but also, we have our Director of Planning here, Vince DeJoy. Thank you, Vince, for making this happen. Our County Executive, PJ Wendel, has joined us. Once again, thank you, PJ. I see Mayor Ferguson from Dunkirk, or from Fredonia, right? Fredonia. See, I just saw it. It's a beautiful area. Our county officials, and everyone else who's joined us here.

And I also want to make an observation. I want to thank the elected officials from Dunkirk for working to make Dunkirk a pro-housing community. That is why we're here.

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Because I've been trying for years to get communities to step up and build more housing. Some are very open. Some say, "Sure, bring it on." Some say, "No, not in my neighborhood." And yet the demand is so great that young people grow up, want to raise their kids near Grandma and Grandpa. Like I brought my kids back home to my parents in Hamburg because the babysitting was a lot cheaper than it was in Washington, okay? Let's just put that out there.

But families want to stay connected, but when you price a family out of an area because you didn't build enough housing and the limited supply means the rents go up because they can get that something has to change. Or seniors who want to downsize from their home and have something else to live in and stay in the same community that they are part of for so many years.

We had a real housing crisis, and I devised a program that would say, the state of New York gives a lot of money out to communities. Our Main Street grants, our downtown revitalization projects and many others. I have amassed all that into a $750 million fund that is only unlocked for communities where the local government, the town board, the village trustees, the county, they step up and say, "We will agree. We will certify that we're pro-housing, we want more housing and we'll meet certain growth metrics."

Those are the counties, those are the communities, those are the towns and the villages that are thriving in New York and the others are missing a great resurgence. So thank you again, Dunkirk, and all the communities that have supported this.

I did just more from Fredonia, Mayor. We signed the beam for a new hospital here in Northern Chautauqua. I want to say this as well, what that means for this community is that not just the local residents can be guaranteed the highest quality healthcare, but for our local businesses - and we're trying to help even more come and grow and expand - they look at questions like, "Is there a well-served, state-of-the-art healthcare facility for our employees?"

And if the answer is no, the community's not going to be the beneficiary of their investments either. So it all ties together. But now, leaving that great project to build this project, to break ground on 78 new affordable homes is extraordinary. Two very different projects, but both reflecting something's going on here.

There's a momentum here, and there's people, whether they're locals or outside developers, who see the potential of this area, and that is to be celebrated here today. And as a born and bred Buffalonian, go Bills. Go Sabres. What a great run. Yeah. Sabres. Go Sabres. Let's not forget the Sabres. If you want to say, "Go Knicks," you're welcome to.

It's not like we have the Buffalo Braves anymore, okay? Yeah, I used to watch the Buffalo Braves. I'm that old. We used to have a professional team. I digress, but I will say this, we've been knocked down a lot in my lifetime.

I wished all my siblings lived here. They all had to leave because when the jobs shut down at Bethlehem Steel and the Ford plant shrank, there were no jobs. So I'm the only one out of a big Irish Catholic family still left in this area. So we have been knocked down a lot. But you know what? There's this, this belief in ourselves, this resilience, this strength that comes from maybe some tough winters that toughen you up.

But whatever it is, we never get knocked down and don't come right back up, and that comeback is going on right now. I believe in this with every fiber of my being, and that's why I come here as often as I can to celebrate what's going on all over, especially in places like Chautauqua, that probably thought they weren't getting a lot of attention out of Albany for a long time, right?

And I've changed that, because this is the town I used to come to for my vacations. Literally. Down to Chautauqua Institution or go to Aunt Millie's for really good cinnamon rolls. I have to stop on my way back. Tell her I'm coming. If I can get through the - If I stop talking, I can get down to Aunt Millie's.

So it's a great - your waterfront's incredible here, and the historic downtown and the gateway to the most beautiful, one of the most beautiful wine regions in the world. The largest contiguous concord grape area in the world, right? I remember that from a long - 20 years ago I heard that. Is it still true? Okay, just make sure nobody else caught up and make me a liar.

But, we came here to announce in 2023, the city of Dunkirk had won $10 million for downtown revitalization. And I said I could feel it starting then. And now that comeback that I forecasted back then is starting to take shape with projects like this.

This is a manifestation. This is part of that investment. And to the leaders here - I didn't come up with the plan. I had nothing to do with the plan. I look at a plan and say that's a winning plan. Yeah. I will fund that. Yeah. But I want the local communities to decide their own destiny, their own future. What do you want to see? Because I didn't have that 14 years down the road in Hamburg as a local official. Nobody in Albany said, "What would you like for your community?" And that's how we changed that whole dynamic.

So that, your vision, is becoming a reality with projects like this here at Homesteads at Dunkirk Landing. Taking two brownfield sites that were just abandoned, ignored, forgotten for so long. No one saw the great potential, and soon dozens of affordable homes will rise right here. And again, it's not just housing, it's who we're giving housing to. And I love the fact that these will be supportive homes for veterans with disabilities who experience homelessness.

And I'll say, this is why this has touched my heart. When I was privileged to serve as a member of Congress, I was on the Armed Services Committee. That work took me to pretty far reaches of Afghanistan. All over. Name the worst place you've heard of and I was there. And I would sit down with members of our military, all New Yorkers, sit down and break some bread in a very frightening war zone, and I would ask them, "What are you most worried about?" And I figured it was going to be, "Well, the Taliban's right over there, and we're sitting ducks here." They never told me they were worried about that. They were worried about coming home and not having a job or a place to live.

Now, this is years ago, but it broke my heart to think this is a stress point for people in our military who are in harm's way to defend our freedoms, to defend our flag, and they're worried about whether they're going to be homeless because the homeless rate among veterans was 20 percent in our country during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It was 20 percent. Our government stepped up. We had all kinds of tax credits to encourage people to employ them, but those who've come back with disabilities - and many are women, many more women in the military now - there was never facilities to take care of women, or women who had been abused in the military, and it was not a rare occurrence, I'm sorry to say.

How do we help them heal? Whether it's PTSD because of what they saw and the fear they have going under a bridge because they're still convinced that they're going to be under assault. There's psychological effects. I saw this with my own family members who've been in and out before. It's real. But also the physical changes that can happen when you're caught in a horrific situation. So the least we can do is give them a home. That says who we are as Americans, as New Yorkers. We thank you, but we're not just going to give you that "Thank you for your service," and wave goodbye at the airport. You're part of the family. You're someone we have to take care of, and we'll do that. That is our commitment to you because you made a commitment to us. So I believe in that.

So a partnership with Soldier On - have services and support to help them build independent, healthy lives - and despite all the concern about federal support for our veteran programs, healthcare programs, all those, don't worry about that. New York will always have your back because you had ours.

And there's another part of this project I really love. I said this a couple times, but I'm New York's first mom Governor. So I know a little bit about childcare. I know a little bit about childcare, or not having it. What it's like when you don't have childcare, and you have to leave a job you love, like I did, because we couldn't find childcare we could afford. Now, those babies are trying to take care of childcare for their own kids. So, no one solved the problem. And that is why I'm committed to universal childcare.

Now, when I was growing up and having kids, it was always your family's problem. You wanted to have kids, okay, you figure out your childcare. Now we realize it's society's challenge because the employers are not getting the workforce that they want to have when women can't go to work because there's no childcare. So now we understand it's, it has larger ramifications. So we're investing in making sure that every school district has universal 4K. Then it'll be 3K. We'll get down to 2K, and we're going to take care of all those babies. And a big relief for parents.

In New York State, the average cost of childcare for one child is anywhere from $20-40,000 per child. Imagine having two kids, working a minimum wage job, it doesn't work out. So the genius of a project like this that is going to operate a childcare center right here serving these families, responds to an incredible need that is unserved right now. So this is going to help the families at Dunkirk Landing and the surrounding communities.

So I am very excited about this, and I'm going to keep building. Larry, I'm going to keep building. Developers, I'm going to keep building. We launched in my first year as Governor - coming up on my fifth year, by the way, two more weeks, it's the fifth year - the first year we announced $25 billion across the state to build housing, and we're going to renew that project in a couple of years when we meet our goals. But we're almost on, we're on our way to 100,000 already.

And we cut through red tape, and those who talk about SEQR reform. I spent a lot of years - I saw how SEQR could be the reason a project gets stopped by the NIMBYs. And County Exec's raising his, shaking his head, the local electeds. I lived it, always in court because somebody, "I don't want that to come here. You must be violating the environmental laws, so let's invoke SEQR." And it never goes well. So bringing local officials like Mayor Ferguson and others to Albany, we were able to persuade the Legislature that we'll make sure we protect the environment. I'm from Western New York. We're always going to protect the environment. I know what it's like when it isn't protected. Lake Erie is pristine now. It wasn't when I was growing up. But also, we want projects to happen, and we don't want barriers, so we're going to save more time.

I'm told in certain parts of the state it's going to save two years. Affordable housing projects not to have to go through everything the state required them to do since 1975 - save two years on a project and thousands of dollars per unit. That's how you build more housing. You break down the - you cut the red tape, you make it less expensive, and you invite the developers in.

So what we're building is a community where young people can afford to stay in the place they grew up, find a home, find the childcare they need and a family can put down their roots. So I'm excited about this. The more homes we build in Dunkirk, the more homes we build in Chautauqua County, the more we're going to attract more people who want to live in this incredible quality of life.

So that's how we make our communities successful. We invest in them with projects like this. So I cannot wait to come back for the ribbon cutting. And Larry, I'll let you continue the conversation and tell us what this is all about, but thank you very much for believing in Dunkirk and Chautauqua County.