News from the Planning Board

Given the marathon Planning Board meetings of the past, this is news. Last night, the Planning Board got through its six-item agenda in just ninety minutes. But speed alone is not a good measure of a Planning Board's efficacy. 

Early on in the meeting, Planning Board chair Ron Bogle reported on this effort to establish collaboration between the Planning Board and the Conservation Advisory Council and the Planning Board and the Historic Preservation Commission. At the CAC meeting last week, it was suggested that Nathan Woodhull, who was recently appointed to the Planning Board and up until that time served on the CAC, might serve as the liaison between those two groups. Last night, Bogle reported that Woodhull that agreed to do that. He also asked for a volunteer from the Planning Board to serve as liaison to the HPC. Peter Spear volunteered to do that. Bogle explained, "The role of the liaison is informal. It's not a new layer of bureaucracy. It's just to keep the dialog open between these three groups, so that, when projects may overlap or somehow relate to more than one of us, we can share contact and collaborate together."

Ron Bogle at last night's Planning Board meeting

Bogle also made a statement about the Hudson Housing Authority project, the elevation drawings for which Gossips shared on Monday. Bogle prefaced his statement by assuring Jeffrey Dodson, HHA executive director, that he agreed the project was essential and the Planning Board would expedite the review process to enable a closing for the financing in October. What Bogle said merits being quoted extensively here:

The history of affordable housing in our country is not always a great story. Our first efforts in the mid-century were to create monstrous, institutional structures that were not welcoming and friendly to the folks that lived there. And they were not good for the cities they were in, because they created restricted areas of living for people living on low wages or in poverty. The DNA that were in those early designs still gets carried forward, and we need to be thinking of places of dignity, places of pride, places of belonging. 

People who live on low wages and affordability may not be able to take as many vacations as some of us, may not be able to see the beauty of the country around them. They only have their own town, and we believe that they deserve to have beauty just as much as any of the rest of us, and that's a guiding philosophy that I hope to carry through this project, but the problem is that DNA gets carried forward. 

If you look at Bliss Towers you can see that it carries the DNA of the early '60s affordable housing movement, and we've now learned, having lived with it for over 50 years, that there are so many things about that design that really diminish the quality of life of the residents and frankly doesn't really belong in the community. It feels like something that got parachuted in--the architecture, the design, the scale, the appearance. 

I think we need to be sure that we do not carry forward the DNA, or at least minimize it as much as we can, of those early 1960s projects. The folks that built Bliss Towers I'm sure were dedicated civic leaders who thought they were doing the very best for their community, but the fact that it's been there for fifty years. . . . I think probably it started out not being that well constructed in the beginning, but it lasted fifty years, so that should give us pause that we are making a decision as we deal with this process to build housing that will probably be with us beyond 2075, 2080, 2090. We are building a site that will serve multiple next generations of Hudson residents, families, children grow up, their children may grow in this facility. So it needs to be expedited, but it also needs to be done with thoughtful consideration about what this new piece of Hudson looks like and how it's going to define so many lives in our city. So we need to do better than to just follow past models. 

The current best thinking for affordable housing emphasizes the human scale, integration into existing neighborhoods, dignity of design, durability of materials, sense of home rather than a sense of an institution, and we also need to overlay green design as we move through the next fifty, sixty, seventy years. We need to be thinking about sustainability. We ought to look at US Green Building Council guidelines and other national guidelines that might help inform our thinking. Taking time to get this right is our most important job at the Planning Board. . . . 

I would conclude by saying we're not going to talk about the design tonight, because we don't have a lot of information yet. We've seen your elevations. But I will tell you we have work to do, because there's an awful lot of the mid-1960s DNA still existing. We need to look at it, we need to study it, and we need to understand what does it feel like to be a human being and a family living in that space. How do we make it the best possible experience for them? We cannot simply do what we've done in the past. but look at the paths forward in terms of how we think about investing our time, money, in these people's lives and in our community.

Bogle's entire statement can be heard here, beginning at about 24:20.

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