In the past couple of months, much attention was paid to the City's application for a Restore New York grant on behalf of the Hudson Housing Authority's redevelopment plan. When a resolution in support of the application came before the Common Council on April 24, the resolution failed to get the six affirmative votes needed to pass. Four members of the Council were absent from that meeting, so Council president Tom DePietro called another special meeting to vote again, hoping for a better outcome. That meeting took place on April 29 and resulted in the sought-after outcome: Council support for the application.
More than two weeks later, on May 16, the Common Council held a public hearing about the application. The public hearing was a requirement of the application process, but some thought it would have made more sense for the hearing to be held before the Council voted to support the project. At the public hearing, few people who were not HHA residents had anything good to say about seeking Restore NY funds for the project. The fear was that supporting the application would be interpreted as support for the entire project, about which very little information has been shared.
Today Gossips offers an update on the situation. According to a reliable source, the City's Restore NY application was rejected because it was submitted too late.
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The perfect coda for Hudson's backassward efforts. It also seems that the application was destined to be denied even if submitted on time: apparently NYS frowns on providing demolition funding for inhabited buildings. Ooops.
ReplyDeleteis condemning the building as uninhabitable the way to go ? I had heard that 25 % of the units were not occupied because they were sub standard.
DeleteSeems to me if the building is unsafe as the director of the HHA claimed during the City meeting, it is the responsibility of the HHA to provide its residents with a safe place to live now, not to allow them to live in unsafe conditions while they imagine a new housing development. The thing to do would be to move everyone up into Galvans new building on 7th street as soon as it is finished, then the tower could be knocked down and replaced with something much nicer and smaller in scale without turning that whole corner of Hudson into a mini version of the Bronx.
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