Roger Hannigan Gilson has an article in the Times Union today about the proposal for affordable housing presented to the Common Council on Tuesday by Hudson's chosen development partners, Kearney Realty & Development Group and Hudson River Housing: "Hudson hopes to ease housing crisis with scores of affordable apartments."
Gilson posted the link to his article on Facebook, on the Hudson, N.Y - Public Community Board, which generated a number of comments, including some from Mayor Kamal Johnson. There is also an announcement about the project on the City of Hudson website, which provides links to Tuesday's PowerPoint presentation and to a statement from the mayor's office about the project.
The following comment was submitted by email by Susan Meyer:
ReplyDeleteMy comment has to do not with affordable housing but with the image used by development partner, Kearney Realty & Development Group and Hudson River Housing, to illustrate the two houses, each with a rental unit, proposed for City-owned property located on Rossman Avenue. I thought the days of designing houses with the predominant architectural feature being that of a front-facing garage were long over. This design, not only visually sad, suggests that the user, upon returning home, drive their car into the garage, enter their home through the garage and, if going outside, enter their yard by way of the back door, thereby never engaging with their neighbors or the larger community. Hudson, and Rossman Avenue, one of the most beautiful and historic streets in Hudson, deserve a better design. Everyone deserves a better design. The goal is to make Hudson an inclusive, robust community, not an outdated version of suburbia.
A great read on the subject:
The Geography of Nowhere traces America's evolution from a nation of Main Streets and coherent communities to a land where every place is like no place in particular, where the cities are dead zones and the countryside is a wasteland of cartoon architecture and parking lots.
In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Geography-Of-Nowhere/James-Howard-Kunstler/9780671888251
I hope the developers can do better than their image implies.