A resident statement on the Hudson Housing Authority's plan for 41 North Second Street, submitted for the public record before the Planning Board.

Based on your feedback: 🔒🐳 You can sign the petition and verify your contact details without displaying your real name publicly by clicking on the "Privacy Settings" link beneath the orange "Sign Petition" button.

We are residents and taxpayers of Hudson: renters, homeowners, immigrants, artists, and housing providers, living across all five wards. We support more homes in Hudson, at every price point.

We believe most Hudsonians, whatever they think of the plan as a whole, agree on 3 things:

1. Every current resident deserves a secure home. All 85 residents now living in Bliss Towers and Columbia Apartments should be rehoused safely, with a written commitment stating where they will live, at what rent, and by when. It is the law.

2. Bliss Towers should come down, and come down safely. The tower is Hudson's last major legacy of 1970s urban renewal. Its own owner reports that roughly 40 percent of its units are offline. Before demolition begins, the asbestos and lead surveys and a dust containment and truck route plan belong in the public record.

3. Hudson can do better than re-building bigger, over a 5-10 year period, on the same site at $800k per apartment. The Housing Authority is proposing approximately 276 units on this one site, where 135 stand today. That gathers subsidized housing onto a single concentrated block. Hudson's own Common Council adopted Housing and Comprehensive Plans call for the opposite: new homes spread across neighborhoods. So does 30 years of federal (HUD) housing policy and the research behind it. And the previous HHA leadership confirmed that the site plan soil is not stable enough for this big a project.

We ask the Planning Board to take a genuine hard look at the soil, the structures, the environmental record, and the effect on the Second Ward, and Hudson.

We ask the Common Council to examine whether this plan serves the city's social and fiscal future.

Hudson deserves a better alternative: We urge the Hudson Planning Board (Chair Bogle) and the Hudson Housing Authority (ED Dodson) to work together on an alternative that keeps every promised home: new homes for every current household, built across Hudson's neighborhoods on sites the city already controls, as the City of Hudson's Housing Plan and its recently adopted Comprehensive Plan direct.

Hudson made this mistake once, on these same blocks. It should not make it twice.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Read more:

1. Hudson Planning Board Project Website:
https://hudsonny.municollab.com/planning-board/projects/hudson-housing-authority-mountco-construction-and-development-corp/dashboard

2. Hudson 2025 Comprehensive Plan:
https://www.hudsonny.gov/business/comprehensive_plan/index.php

3. Hudson's 2018 Strategic Housing Action Plan and 2021 Affordable Housing Action Plan:
https://www.hudsonny.gov/departments/housing/plans_studies.php

4. US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/investing_people.html

Re: 🔒🫍 Residents' Public Anonymity

Due to public pressure and fear of retaliation residents have asked to sign the petition without their real names being displayed online. By request, the organizers of Hudson Friends of 2nd Street can share the list of residents with Mr. Bogle, the Chair of the Planning Board, without transmitting the private resident names onto public City servers or documents.

You can sign the petition and verify your contact details without displaying your real name publicly by clicking on the "Privacy Settings" link beneath the orange "Sign Petition" button.