Perched atop an Adirondack mountain, the 131.5 hectare site for sale seems to have everything a developer could want: spectacular views, an artificial lake, close proximity to the tourist destination of Saratoga Springs and, oh, former US president Ulysses S. Grant lived out his final days in a home next door.
However, the property on Mount McGregor was also a former New York state prison, and if history is any guide, it will be a tough sell.
States have found out the hard way that stunning views and good locations are not enough to overcome the baggage that comes with former prison sites.
Massive, thick-walled cell blocks, dormitories and infirmaries tend to be too expensive to tear down, and too restrictive to turn into viable enterprises.
Nationwide, at least 22 states have closed or announced plans to close 94 state prisons and juvenile facilities since 2011, and only a handful have been sold or repurposed, according to a report published in December last year by The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based criminal justice reforms advocacy group.
“This is new territory in a lot of respects,” the report’s author, Nicole Porter, said. “This will require some creativity from developers for what to do with these spaces.”
Mount McGregor Correctional Facility, on the market for a second time in two years, is among 13 prison and incarceration camps in New York state that have been closed since 2011. Only four have been sold.
Some of the more than 60 buildings sprawled across the mountaintop date back a century or more to when a tuberculosis sanitarium operated on the site.
New York state bought the property in 1945 for a rest-and-recreation camp for servicemen returning from World War II.
In 1960, the state turned the facility it into a center for developmentally disabled people. Sixteen years later it was repurposed yet again as a state prison.
“You look at the bones of the building and how it can be repurposed,” Peter Cornell, an executive with the Pike Co, a Rochester, New York-based developer, said during a recent tour.
Jon “Jack” Kelley of Albany-based Prime Companies real estate called it a “unique property,” but said “if somebody pays more than US$1 million for that property they’re being taken to the cleaners.”
William Moore, a Saratoga Springs real estate executive, predicted that whoever buys it will have “somewhat of a nightmare to deal with.”
Standing amid the peeling paint and unlit hallways of one of Mount McGregor’s empty dormitories, Cornell said the state needs to offer at least four or five times the US$8 million in redevelopment incentives to make it work.
“I don’t see anybody taking the risk,” he said.
However, a few states have seen successes. In Virginia, a former District of Columbia prison built in the 1920s has been sold to Fairfax County, which is overseeing redevelopment that will include more than 270 single-family homes, townhouses and apartments.
In Tennessee, the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, closed in 2009, is being turned into a whiskey distillery and tourist attraction.
Some among the handful of potential developers on the Mount McGregor tour had a similar vision.
William Browning, head of a Florida-based television production company specializing in reality shows, liked the razor wire-topped chain-link fences and The Walking Dead vibe the place gives off.
Among the potential uses he envisioned: conducting law enforcement or military-related training or setting up a virtual reality theme park.
“We can theme out each building,” said Browning, chief executive and executive producer of Weston, Florida-based Browning Productions and Entertainment. “You can be fighting Transformers or be Harry Potter for the day, depending on the building that you go into.”
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