Of Interest

This morning, mayoral candidate Peter Spear, who is not on the ballot in today's primary because he is running on his own independent line, commented in one of his regular alley chats on the article about Mayor Kamal Johnson that appeared on Saturday in the Times Union: "Hudson mayor refuses to reveal rent for home owned by Galvan." That chat, which is currently available only on Instagram, can be accessed here. 

There is one thing Spear gets wrong in his comments regarding the Galvan plan for the Depot District. The building proposed for the west side of the street, the one whose development has now been suspended for an indefinite period of time, was initially supposed to be for lower income households--households with incomes between 50 and 130 percent of the area median income (AMI). That is no longer the case. 

When it was discovered that Galvan had disqualified the project for NYS Homes and Community Renewal funding by demolishing the three houses on the site before securing funding for the new construction, Galvan changed the nature of the building. It was now to be primarily market rate with some affordable units. Of the 75 units in the building, 15 would be reserved for households with incomes of less then 80 percent the AMI and 5 units for households with incomes of less than 130 percent of the AMI.

The Depot District was the "huge plan for housing" Johnson talked about in an interview on News10 in October 2019, claiming then he had been working on it "for about a year now." Galvan announced the project on January 7, 2020, six days after Johnson took office. The announcement declared, "First and foremost, the Depot District will help relieve Hudson's housing crisis." Six years later, how are we doing with that?

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