While the Legislature hoped to enlist local community support, the restrictions in the Adirondack Park Land Use and Development Plan were imposed from the top down. The Adirondack Park Agency is resented by many Adirondack residents who see the plan as a usurpation of local authority and property rights. Since 1972 only fifteen towns and villages in the Park have adopted plans approved by the Agency.

Although Adirondack real estate had experienced booms before, the explosion in the market during the 1980s was different. Despite the restrictions in the Adirondack Park Land Use Plan, sales of subdivided property tripled between 1982 and 1985 and doubled again by 1988. Increases in the price of real estate encouraged the break-up of large landholdings and the development of sensitive lakeshore areas, threatening the region's distinctive open space and water quality. National hotel and retail chains discovered Lake Placid, Lake George, and Old Forge, at the same time that older hotels were being split up into condominiums. Family owned estates fell victim to increased taxes and costs, rising property values, and squabbling among heirs. The boom also priced many people out of the local housing market and threatened the unique, small town way of life of Adirondack communities. In January, 1989, Governor Mario Cuomo established a Commission on the Adirondacks in the Twenty-First Century to examine problems growing out of the 1980s boom in Adirondack real estate. Many, both inside and outside the Park, also felt the time had come to make adjustments to the twenty-year-old Adirondack Park Agency Act. For example, the Adirondack Park Land Use Plan left lakeshores, the most valuable real estate in the Park, largely unregulated. By the late 1980s, polluting runoff from shoreline development was routinely closing bathing beaches on Lake George, and summer algae blooms had become a serious problem on Upper Saranac Lake and Little Wolf Pond.

The Commission on the Adirondacks in the Twenty-First Century was to report to the governor on April 1, 1990. In the first months of that year the nation slid into a recession, and real estate values in the northeast were particularly hard hit. Release of the Commission's report was delayed through April and into May. Rumors of its contents surfaced in the press, and one commissioner, hoping to spark anxiety and anger among Park residents, published a minority report emphasizing a handful of the report's most restrictive recommendations. The release of the Commission's report on May 5 was anti-climatic. People had made up their minds from the newspaper stories; few would take the time to actually read the report. In May, 1992, the 100th Anniversary of the creation of the Adirondack Park, Governor Cuomo proposed legislation based on the Commission's report. He recommended increased protection of undeveloped lakeshore and tax incentives to help preserve the backcountry. He also included proposals to bolster the chronically depressed Adirondack economy and to make changes in the state's administration of the Park. The Legislature, split between a Democratic Assembly and a Republican Senate, failed to agree on any of the proposals.