How Many Are There?

In the discussion of vacancy studies and rent stabilization, what is missing is any data on how many buildings and how many units would be eligible for rent regulation under the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019. Proponents of doing a vacancy study maintain it would be worthwhile no matter how few buildings would be affected; those advising against spending money on a study argue that the impact would be neither equitable nor significant. 

The information on how many buildings in Hudson, constructed before 1974, have six or more residential units is available in public records, and Gossips decided to take on the task of assembling it. It began with a list of properties with six rental units or more obtained by Alderman Dominic Merante (Fifth Ward) from the Columbia County Office of Real Property and shared by Merante with Gossips. There were fifty buildings on that list. When the buildings whose units are lodging rooms not apartments, the buildings that are tax exempt, those currently unoccupied and/or undergoing renovation, and those in which some of the units are not residential but commercial were eliminated, the number of buildings remaining--the number that would be the subject of the vacancy study--was twenty. (See Update below.) The following are those buildings.        

1.  7-9 South Second Street--6 units

2.  208 Warren Street--6 units

3.  245-247 Warren Street--8 units

4.  221-225 Allen Street--6 units

5.  301 Warren Street--6 units

6.  329-331 Allen Street--7 units

7.  358 Warren Street--6 units 

  
8.  412-416 Warren--7 units

9.  426-428 Warren--8 units

10.  433-435 Warren--11 units

11.  87-91 Short Street--9 units

12.  27-29 North Fifth Street--6 units

13.  508-510 State Street--6 units

14.  602-604 Warren Street--12 units

15.  44 North Sixth Street--6 units

16.  720-724 Warren Street--9 units

17.  701-703 Warren Street--6 units

18.  66-70 Green Street--6 units

19.  816-818 Warren Street--6 units

20.  725-727 Warren Street--9 units

The number of residential units in these twenty buildings totals 146. This may not be the final count. Gossips has made a FOIL request for records from the City of Hudson Code Enforcement Office of all buildings with six or more residential units. This data will confirm or correct the information already in hand. When that information is received, the list may be amended or augmented. For now, this is still a work in progress, but it provides some needed information.    

Bear in mind that Hudson has 525 units of subsidized housing, with their own income-based rent controls, in Bliss Towers and the low rise, Hudson Terrace, Schuyler Court, Providence Hall, and Crosswinds, and an untold number of units in the seventeen tax exempt properties once owned by Housing Resources of Columbia County and now owned and managed by Galvan Asset Management.

Update: Gossips has learned from a tenant in the building that 358 Warren Street in fact has four residential units not six. That information reduces the number of buildings that would be the subject of a vacancy study to nineteen and the number of units involved to 140. 
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