Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Why Does the City Still Own This Building?

Once upon a time, 429 Warren Street housed the office of the city court, and the building next door, 427 Warren Street, was where the actual courtroom and the police department were located. 

It has been five years since the police department and the court moved to their new location at 701 Union Street. In the summer of 2019, 427 Warren Street was sold at auction, and today the building, wonderfully transformed and now the location of Finch, is getting a second story.



The code enforcement office was located at 429 Warren Street, and until that office could be relocated, the building could not be sold. Beginning in July 2021, however, the City began leasing space at 751 Warren Street for the code enforcement office. For more than a year now, there has been no obvious reason for the City to continue to own the building at 429 Warren Street, which, now abandoned, has become an eyesore on Warren Street, a magnet for handbills and litter.





In 2021, when the Common Council was worried about depleting the fund balance during the pandemic, there was an ad hoc committee called the Properties Committee tasked with selling surplus City-owned properties. There were five buildings on the committee's list of properties to be sold--429 Warren Street, the cemetery house, the house near the water treatment plant, 1 North Front Street, and 10-12 Warren Street; 429 Warren Street headed the list. In 2022, the ad hoc committee, which was made up of Council president Tom DePietro, councilmembers Jane Trombley and Rebecca Wolff, and Housing Justice Manager Michelle Tullo, ceased to exist. Now, more than a year after the Council was resolved to sell 429 Warren Street as soon as the code enforcement office was relocated, no apparent effort has been made to sell the building and get it back on the tax rolls.
COPYRIGHT 2022 CAROLE OSTERINK

6 comments:

  1. Thank you Carole. It's worth noting that the building right next door at 431 Warren is now on the market for $1.825 million. Yes, that building is grander, and well renovated, but if the City could get even half that price for 429 Warren, it would be great.

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  2. Surprised that a Council committee — especially one “managed” by Tom DePietro — failed to accomplish it’s stated goal? Really? Actual work, useful work, work that makes meaningful advances for the city, are all foreign concepts to Tom and his cronies. All they care about is government as theater. Selling those buildings requires capacity, determination and the energy to follow through.

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  3. I've wondered about that languishing city property for a while, too. Just friggin sell it. Or at least try to. The true head scratcher of a city property, though, and one that is strangely NEVER mentioned, is the vacant lot at or close to 518 Columbia, across from the city hall municipal lot, and with an enormous dead tree in the center soon to fall on the adjacent house. What on earth is the City of Hudson holding on to that property for? The sidewalk in front of it -- city property and a city liability -- is up there with the worst of the awful portions of sidewalk on a block and city full of them. Thanks for doing your part, Hudson City Hall. You are part of the problem!
    There is someone, some department, something missing at City Hall that allows this to happen. Maybe just competence is missing, fiscal and otherwise . These are piles of money doing nothing at all, just waiting for the value to drop. You don't need to be a real estate tycoon to see that something is screwed up at Hudson City Hall.
    Bill Huston

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  4. Another example of bad management. Like the furgary shacks sitting there rotting, no action taken to recover the park for public use. For how long? Seems the only thing they are interested in doing is helping Galvan build absurdly oversized and inappropriate housing developments. I suppose they don't want to sell the building unless the new owner would agree to make it into a homeless shelter.

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  5. I also wonder what has happened to the new owner of Mexican Radio, which is equally defaced with posters and notices all over its windows in the 500 block. I think it sold about a year ago.

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  6. Hudson does not excel at the business of land use / management. There are multiple examples of how little attention is paid to our infrastructure. A city manager might be the answer, because politics as usual isn't getting the job done.

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