Aesthetics and HHA

Recently, a reader brought to my attention an article titled "Can America build beautiful places again?" More intriguing than the title is the subtitle: "Ugliness has more to do with the housing crisis than you think." The thesis of the article is stated in these two paragraphs:

Housing advocates and social scientists alike have long attributed NIMBYism to, at best, personal financial stakes (like property value) or logistic concerns (like traffic), at worst deeply rooted racism or classism. And all those explanations are, to varying degrees, surely an important part of the picture.

But there might also be something more foundational at play here. People like neighborhoods with consistency and, it turns out, style.

This calls to mind the neighborhood opposition to the pair of apartment buildings to be constructed on Fairview Avenue, at the eastern edge of "the Boulevards," and well as the opposition to the grossly out of proportion and out of character buildings proposed for Mill Street.

The article elaborates on the importance of aesthetics in this paragraph:

It might feel a bit frivolous to fixate on aesthetics at a time when we face an acute housing crisis and urgently need to build lots of housing in the high-opportunity places where people want to live. But beauty matters, even if it's harder to translate into wonk language than is something like floor area ratio. Our built environment is the physical container for our lives, shaping our entire daily existence and our interactions with our families and communities. A beautiful, humane habitat can be emotionally uplifting, inspire awe, and lower the ambient stress of daily life; a bad one does the opposite. And NIMBYs are not wrong to feel that even if we are not the ones living in a new building, if it's in our neighborhood or broader daily environment, we still live with it.

The article asserts there is "a growing body of research finding that aesthetic concerns play a meaningful role in driving public opposition to new housing." This came to mind last night during the Hudson Housing Authority Board of Commissioners meeting. 

Jeffrey Dodson, HHA executive director, and John Madeo, from Mountco, spoke of a meeting that is happening today with HUD, NYS Homes and Community Renewal (HCR), and Hudson's new mayor and Planning Board chair. The goal of the meeting, as Madeo described it, "is for the mayor and the Planning Board chair to hear from HUD and HCR that they are committed, and they want to City to get on board." According to Madeo, HUD and HCR are "ready to move."

To meet their scheduling goals, HHA and Mountco want site plan approval from the Planning Board by May. Madeo said they needed to "impress upon the Planning Board and the mayor that the Planning Board must begin its review promptly," and the Planning Board "must review the project expeditiously." Madeo claimed they had "showed them [the Planning Board] the intended design" and had gotten "public input on the overall design." By "overall design" Madeo must mean the arrangement of buildings on the site (shown in visual below, presented in November 2025), because what the proposed buildings will actually look like, what the people of Hudson will have to see and live with, has never been shared.  

The cynics among us might get the idea that Mountco and Alexander Gorlin, the architect, know all about the research that finds aesthetic concerns play a significant role in public opposition to new housing, and for that reason, they are deliberately withholding any information about the actual architectural design of the buildings until everyone is "on board" and it's too late for public comment and concern about the design to have any impact. We can only hope that renderings that show the buildings as they will actually look in their context will be part of the presentation to the Planning Board, and if they are not, the Planning Board will insist on them.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CAROLE OSTERINK