At the informal Common Council meeting last week, Councilmember Vicky Daskaloudi (Fifth Ward) asked Michelle Tullo, housing justice manager, how many units of new housing are being proposed for Hudson and where the people to occupy the new housing would be coming from. The latter question is one Gossips also wonders about. To answer the question about how many units of new housing are being proposed, Gossips created this chart.
By Gossips' calculation, there are 445 units of new housing be planned, 417 of which are meant to be some level of income-based "affordable." The construction of 63 of those units is currently underway.
According to the most recent census data, there are currently 3,408 housing units in Hudson, 25 percent of which are vacant.
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Great work, Carole. I'd be curious to see an additional column showing which of these is getting a PILOT or other tax exemption. The point being, as we try to think of smart development, how much will each additional resident add to the City/County/School budgets and how much more will taxes need to be raised on current residents to subsidize the developers and their projects for new residents.
ReplyDeleteHow is the rest of the county pulling their weight on the "affordable" housing front?
Sorry, Union Jack, I should have included that, although for some of these projects it's too soon to know if they will be seeking PILOTs. This much we do know. Both buildings in the "Depot District" have been granted PILOTs. The Hudson Housing Authority project will likely be, all or in part, tax exempt. The Common Council recently passed a resolution allowing HudsonDots to be taxed on seven of its properties based on rental income rather than property assessment, which will result in reduced property taxes.
DeleteI think we can assume that when the term "affordable" is used to describe a project, there is some kind of tax abatement involved.
There is no shortage of people who would like to move from crummy housing projects in Albany, Poughkeepsie or the Bronx, and hotels filled with migrants in Manhattan and other cities, so filling up the apartments with people will be easy. The question is, why? What's the point? Particularly in the case of Bliss Towers. You have a decrepit, gigantic out of place hulk of a building that has to be demolished after only 50 years, and rather than see this as an opportunity to replace it with something nicer, smaller in scale that would blend into the neighborhood and provide humane housing for its residents, the plan is to replace it with something more massive, doubling its size.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 70s when the HHA projects began, the neighborhood it replaced was in ruins, the economy was depressed, is that the case now? The economy here is better, the run down houses are all gradually being restored. There are no longer blocks of impoverished people living here in tattered, falling down houses. At this point, if HHA wants to replace Bliss Towers, they should not be allowed to replace it with another massive, sardine can blockhouse prison complex twice the size of the one that is there now.
It seems that history will be repeating itself. With so much affordable housing, including blocks of buildings as in the Bronx I hope the empty apartments wont be advertized out to New York City as they were in the '70's by HUD. (Hudson Urban Development). In the '80's and '90's 'sweat equity' was put into refurbishing the buildings by the antiques dealers. The ground floors' shop windows which had been converted to apartments and whose windows were covered with some form of curtains were gone.. As the buildings were gradually restored the ground floors returned to being shops again. I'm afraid the City is going backwards with so much "affordable housing" efforts and the burden will be on the existing taxpayers. Rents are high in Hudson, 'yes' but that is because the taxes are already high.
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