Friday, January 20, 2023

The Other Housing Project

On Tuesday, the Common Council unanimously passed resolutions to sell three City-owned parcels, on Rossman Avenue, Mill Street, and at the corner of Fourth and State streets, to Kearney Realty and Development Group for the purpose of developing affordable housing. The total amount to be paid for the three lots is $450,000.

At the same meeting, the Council passed a resolution authorizing a PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) agreement for the multi-family developments proposed for Mill Street and for Fourth and State streets. 


As it was explained to Gossips by Councilmember Ryan Wallace (Third Ward), the resolution regarding a PILOT was needed because Kearney must show, for the purpose of applying for public financing from New York State Homes and Community Renewal, that the City is willing to allow the PILOT within its power. Although there is an amount mentioned in the resolution, the actual amount of the PILOT will be set based on a review of ongoing and projected finances to determine the appropriate level of exemption required for the project to remain financially viable. The PILOT benefit, which might be complete or partial exemption from real property taxes, could continue for up to forty years. When the time comes, the actual exemption and the term of the PILOT will be subject to approval by the Common Council. 
COPYRIGHT 2023 CAROLE OSTERINK

13 comments:

  1. If there's so much demand for housing in the city of Hudson, why is every nail driven subsidized by our tax dollars? Has Alderman Wallace ever met a hand-out he wasn't willing to personally deliver? How can a city with falling population have a housing crisis? No one at City hall is even asking the right questions. It's no wonder they're getting the wrong answers.

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    1. The lack of affordable housing forces people to leave? Thus the falling population? Not saying I'm right, just my guess.

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    2. If that many people are leaving then surely a large number of rental units are available which suggests that prices should fall. Traditionally, housing starts lag demand and, given the long lead time to bring new construction to market, new units come online after demand has peaked. Which means building in to demand often fails.

      Nope, the reliance on taxpayer funding to "make these projects fly" implicitly indicates they are poor economic choices. They are, therefore, not built as a business, but as a scam. It's neither novel or unknown around here -- Galvan's been nursing on the public teat for over a decade right here in Hudson.

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    3. Yes, I totally get what Galvans up to. Been watching it for a long time, and it is definitely a scam. Was just wondering if there's any truth to the idea that so many buildings with apartments have been returned to or turned into single families, that the apartment stock has dropped substantially which drives up rent. I don't know the stats to know if there's truth to that or not. And could be there's truth to it, but it's not the main culprit?

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    4. Don't fall for the broad-brush statements with zero data behind them, MS! I think a big driver of increasing rents in the City is the amount of investment people have made to their properties (Hudson was in a pretty sad, neglected state some 20+ years ago when I arrived), coupled with the crushing property taxes (which will only get worse with the multitude of PILOTS the City is handing out like candy).

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    5. Rising rents due to investment? More likely people will simply charge whatever they can get based on what everyone else is charging. Rents, like chicken, eggs, milk, utilities, etc., are all skyrocketing based on greed and price gouging now being an acceptable social norm. So people complain about escalating rents and those in charge cynically ride the wave of this discontent to press their own social engineering agenda and sell off city property with tax discounts to developers who are sniffing around the Hudson Valley like hyenas. It's simple primate social dynamics.

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    6. Two sides of the same coin: as long as energy costs are high everything else goes up.

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  2. The 4th and State apartment building with retail will have 21 residential units. If they have parking on site it will be for just a few cars, though there is likely no room at all for parking. Where will tenants park? 21 units, figure at least 30 cars added to the neighborhood. Plus the retail customers coming and going in a primarily residential area.
    When this comes before the Planning Board it might be interesting to some to see where the developer figures all this parking will be found. The county workers will still be there using many spaces on 4th Street. State Street isn't exactly waiting for 30 or more more cars to park along it near 4th, is it?

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  3. Who else besides me is getting fed up with these developers coming to town, proposing a project and then saying, "Oh. But we can't do it without a PILOT."? I've been paying my outrageous taxes for over a decade as have many of Gossips readers. Where's our PILOT!? Instead we get tax increases with nothing to show for it besides a failing school system and broken sidewalks. Enough already!

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    1. Yes but you should be happy and feel good that your high taxes are financing subsidized apartments for people now living in the Bronx, Poughkeepsie and Albany who are on the Bliss Towers and Terrace waiting list.

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  4. Clear and resounding need for more housing that is affordable to people making low- and moderate- incomes. Kudos to Johnson for flat taxes every year. Before him, it was tax increases with nothing to show for it.

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    1. Tax increases in past years? In Hudson? Nothing significant in over a decade.

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    2. The reason taxes have remained "flat" is because the city's practice of unequal assessments and using that to take advantage of the post-covid housing boom. New property purchased has been reassessed at market value, while property not sold in recent years has not been updated to the current market value. Therefore, the city has been taking advantage of newer residents to cover annual increases to the budget, while keeping the mil rate the same, hence making it seem "flat." Kudos, I guess, for at least working within this method and not just jacking it up by the maximum 2% anyway like the school system chooses to do. But since nobody pays attention to the school budget vote they can do what they want. The city has no desire to accurately asses yearly to market rate, as the state requires, since it benefits in the short-term the people who've owned longer (and thus more likely to vote) and unfairly taxes newcomers (sometimes double their neighbors in similar homes), who are assumed to be either too rich or too dumb to notice. It works out for a few years until the state punishes the locality by decreasing the equalization rate so much that they have to do another massive reassessment, thus shocking long term residents when they have to fairly support the current budget (as what happened in 2019). If the city accurately assessed all properties to their relative increase in market value (like NYC does), any increased spending by the city would be noticeable on an annual basis, and therefore more noticed by voters. Instead, they pass the buck to the next administration unlucky enough to be around when it's time to even out the tax burden.

      So, back to the actual topic of the post, PILOTS are another way to pass a ticking tax time bomb to the future. The administration that awards the PILOT gets to take credit for bringing in the project. But years later, once people start moving in and increasing the need for city resources like water/sewer, police/fire, school and social services, the project will not have to pay the taxes needed to cover the extra costs, so the rest of the property owners in town that are not lucky enough to live in these new apartments, or dodge taxes under the guise of being a non-profit, will have to make up the difference. So we can fight against these type of giveaways in the now, or we can just wait until we get the bill down the road and wonder how Hudson got so expensive. But hey, most people don't understand how property taxes work, and renters are removed far enough from the process to understand how it effects them.

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