Local Ocean accepts a $250,000 check from National Grid in 2011, as Congressman Chris Gibson looks on. PHOTO: Michael Farrell for The Albany Times-Union
Winner of the 2010 Crystal Apple Award from the Columbia County Chamber of Commerce just months after opening, Local Ocean recently lost its sweet PILOT (Payment In Lieu of Tax) deal with Columbia County.
Welcomed with great fanfare and largesse by local development agencies, and much-celebrated in the regional press, Local Ocean has been bedeviled by two patent lawsuits—and laggard in making payments to the County.
Local Ocean’s meteoric rise and fall from official favor is not a unique path. The tight-knit and often insular County development elite has a history of patting itself on the back, awarding its own most favored projects before they even get off the ground.
Beaten out by Local Ocean, another 2010 Crystal Apple nominee was the rebranded and renovated Historic Blue Stores Restaurant and Bar—reopened under new management just prior to their nomination, then went under again. (Today, it is back open under yet another set of managers, Darren and Tara Buffa, and appears likely to survive.) Passed over that year were the Columbia-Greene Dialysis Center, Catamount Adventure Park, Taconic Farms, and the BeLo3rd business coalition.
A longer look at the Crystal Apple award-winners over its history is instructive.
Among all award winners listed on the Chamber’s site from 1992-2013, more than one in five (20.5%) are out of business or have retrenched locally. For example, Kaz, Inc. won the award in 2002 and shared the award with Stageworks again in 2005. Dunn Builders, the Crystal Apple winner in 2004, closed its downtown Hudson location after a rash of employee thefts, then had its huge Greenport operation swallowed up by Herrington’s. The Old Chatham Sheepherding Inn (1996) closed, though farm operations continue.
A little less than another one in five (18%) have become mired in controversy, fallen out of favor with officialdom, or just fallen into disrepair—such as the once-vibrant St. Charles Hotel, which won the 1997 Crystal Apple but after several management changes no longer features a public restaurant or bar. Its private meeting room and large public event space, once highly-popular gathering spots, today are seldom used.
That renders nearly 40% of the 1992-2013 award winners either defunct, disappeared, or discredited.
This year’s award-winner, the Columbia Land Conservancy, tarnished its image last year by its coy, behind-the-scenes enabling of the City of Hudson’s heavyhanded seizure of the century-old Furgary Boat Club—using a black-suited SWAT team toting machine guns to subdue three older, sleeping men in their ancestral cabins.
Meanwhile, roughly two-in-five awards (38%) have been given to large, established companies and businesses which are closely embedded in the County development establishment, such as Herrington’s, Kaz or Columbia Memorial Hospital. The Chamber’s Board includes Paul Colarusso, whose company A. Colarusso & Sons was the 2009 winner. Other awardees have had seats or representatives over the years on many of the same boards (HDC, CEDC, local and County IDAs, the Chamber itself) which arrange corporate tax breaks, grants and other incentives. Such coziness—bordering on conflict-of-interest—makes the awarding of the Crystal Apple that much less prestigious.
Most laughable and conflicted of all, though, is the original Crystal Apple, awarded to The Columbia County Board of Supervisors for its “development” of Commerce Park. Considered a boondoggle from its very inception, Commerce Park took years to find tenants, and two decades later still is sparsely populated. With the Chamber of that era almost entirely controlled by political interests, today’s equivalent of the ’92 Crystal Apple Award would be like this site awarding itself a blue ribbon for Best Columbia County news source.
Smaller local businesses—such as the Kline’s multigenerational, family-owned Traditions, or the longest-running merchant on Warren Street, Arenskjold Antiques, here since the 1980s, or the rock-solid folks at Jimmy’s Auto Body in Livingston—rarely seem get invited to the Crystal ball.
This is not to say that the Award committee never finds its mark. 2003 winner FACE Stockholm continues to manufacture and maintain a storefront locally, even as it continues to thrive and expand internationally. Camphill Ghent, the 2012 winner, does spectacular work with its residents. The likeable director David Colby, who was brought over from the Berkshires several years ago, has cleared out cobwebs and freshened up the fusty, good-old-boy atmosphere which once pervaded the Chamber’s offices.
But these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Perhaps the trophy should be recast as a giant wooden acorn, and renamed The Blind Squirrel Award.
It hasn’t been reported in the local press yet, but on Wednesday the Greenport Town Board unanimously passed a resolution expressing its opposition to the payment-in-lieu-of-tax plan for Premier Brands.
The PILOT proposal under consideration by the Columbia County Industrial Development Agency would allow Premier to avoid paying its full share of taxes over the next 10 years. The Westchester-based company intends to site a warehousing operation in the now empty Wal-Mart space on Fairview Avenue, in the Price Chopper plaza.
Notably, the attorney representing Premier is Bill Better, the former Columbia County attorney who stepped down after three female County employees filed sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits against him in 1997. One of those suits alleged that that “Better forced her to contribute to the local GOP, and was sexually harassed and stalked by him,” and was settled for $120,000. Another similar suit was reportedly settled for $210,000. Better denied the charges, with his attorney characterizing the suits in the Times-Union as “a stick-up.”
Better is also currently representing PCB processors TCI of NY before the Ghent Planning Board, and was retained last year by the Stuyvesant Town Board at a $250-per-hour rate to address lawsuits related to Will Pflaum’s dog boarding business.
NOTE: This summary of the Americlean controversy was written about ten years ago as background for a (successful) nonprofit grant application. Citizens who were involved in the fight to stop Hudson’s old glue factory—what is now the Basilica—included Philip Alvaré, Jennifer and Kim Arenskjold, Carole Clark, Jack Harrell, Peter Jung, Peter Meyer, Sara Sterling, myself and many others, including some no longer in Hudson (such as Byrne Fone and Edward Gomez).
During a four-month controversy in 1999, local residents discovered the importance of face-to-face grassroots organizing, diligent research, media exposure, sustained public pressure, and savvy use of the internet for making change at the regional level.
As a result, a unique relic of the Valley’s industrial architecture was spared from becoming a sketchy toxic waste center, and instead preserved to become Basilica Hudson—arguably the most dynamic art and performance center in this stretch of the Hudson River.
Below is a detailed review of those four hectic months, explaining how citizens prevailed against long odds to protect their quality of life and preserve a prime opportunity for more positive development.
In the waning days of 1998, some residents of the City of Hudson, New York, spotted an obscure legal notice in our local paper.
The bland notice indicated that Hudson and Columbia County intended to apply jointly for $600,000 in grant funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Canal Corridor program to attract “a business”—the name was unspecified—to the City’s waterfront. I said there would be an informational meeting about the application in early January.
As is all too typical of such meetings, this one was scheduled inconveniently on a weekday, during work hours, a time calculated to draw as few audience members as possible. But much to officials’ surprise and dismay, several residents did attend.
After a lot of hemming and hawing, the County development agency was finally convinced that residents deserved to know the name of this mysterious “business” which would benefit from a $600,000 in Federal largesse.
“I think it’s called ‘Americlean,’” he said. About the nature of Americlean’s business, he was similarly vague: “Something to do with supplies for the dry cleaning industry—wire hangers, polybags, that kind of thing.” After further grilling, citizens determined that the proposed site would be an imposing brick building, a former glue factory, adjoining the wetlands of South Bay and a stone’s throw from the Hudson River.
Alarmed by the obvious evasiveness, citizens went home to look up Americlean on the web—a relatively novel task for many in the late ’90s.
It was soon learned that the main business of Americlean (a Canadian company, despite its name) actually involved shipping and “processing” huge quantities of a hazardous waste generated by the dry cleaning industry: a chemical called perchloroethylene.
Thanks to a relatively new search tool called Google, residents then figured out that “perc” is one of the more carcinogenic substances known to man. Once considered a miracle substance, many places such as New York City had begun to ban perc’s use altogether as a health risk to dry cleaning workers and their neighbors.
Americlean’s website claimed to have a miraculous, patent-pending process which would allow the company to recycle perc safely, then resell it to the drying cleaning industry with relatively little leftover waste product. The company claimed to have a pilot plant in Canada that had successfully tested this process.
When we brought this new information to the attention of our local Common Council, its members professed to be both unaware and unconcerned by Americlean’s real intentions. So what if they were hauling and processing hazardous waste, instead of making coat hangers—they were eager to believe the company’s claims of creating 100 well-paid jobs for local workers. Besides, the deadline for applying for the grant was rapidly approaching, and if Hudson didn’t submit something, the funding would be lost. So the Council hurriedly voted in favor of applying to HUD.
In other words: City and County leaders actually wanted the Feds to pay a little-known and even less-tested Canadian company $600,000 to to truck hazardous waste through local neighborhoods, down to the Hudson River, when an unspecified process would be used to neutralize it.
“You people have no idea how much toxic waste already goes through Hudson,” lectured then-Mayor Rick Scalera, as if this would reassure his listeners.
Those who questioned the wisdom of the Americlean plan were subjected to all manner of personal attacks from public officials, from public meetings to the pages of the local newspaper. One woman took the initiative to call Americlean’s president directly, hoping to learn more about his plans—then found herself falsely accused of “impersonating a Common Council member” as elected officials rushed to discredit her unflattering account of the conversation.
In an apparent reference to the sexual preferences of a few of those speaking out against the project, 5th Ward Alderman Bob “Doc” Donahue read a prepared speech in which he insinuated that “these people speaking out don’t have children, they only have pets.”
Weeks of verbal sparring in newspaper articles, public meetings and letters to the editor ensued. It became obvious that the politicians wanted to make this an us vs. them issue, and the local paper was all too happy to help pit neighbor against neighbor.
A major turning point came when challengers of the hazardous waste plant shamed the Mayor into holding a public hearing in which the company would present its plans, and residents would have a chance to question Americlean in person. Up to that point, none of the company’s executives had ever appeared publicly in town.
In preparation for the big hearing, challengers raised $800 to take out a half-page ad in our local newspaper to increase awareness of the event. Even this caused a new controversy, as The Register-Star’s publisher decided to preview the citizens’ planned back-page ad for Americlean in advance of its publication. The paper also ran a front page story the same day featuring the company’s one-sided rebuttal, in an apparent attempt to blunt the ad’s impact.
Undeterred, residents followed up with a one-page insert in the paper (see For the Record, below). This contrasted Americlean’s own claims with contradictory evidence to the contrary found in mainstream publications and scientific research reports.
More crucially, citizens made three key decisions:
(1) Going door-to-door in their neighborhoods with flyers about the hazardous waste proposal;
(2) Garnering coverage by the area’s local television stations, bringing a broad range of residents together to be interviewed; and
(3) Meeting privately to review research and stategy, drawing up a list of questions to be raised, and parcelled out among those who would attend.
Previous to these three actions, there was a surprisingly low awareness of the controversy, despite its being the subject of numerous newspaper articles. Going door to door, citizen activists discovered that even most residents living within 300 yards of the proposed toxic waste plant had never heard about it. Exposure on area television also greatly increased awareness among those who hadn’t been attending meetings or following the bitter debate in the papers.
Detailed research about the company, its plans, its technological claims, and track record were boiled down to a list of important questions and revelations to be delivered at the hearing. The process of sharing information about the company, its technology, and the associated health concern was greatly expedited by the (then-novel) internet. Corporate, scientific and regulatory information once hidden in obscure libraries and agency files was readily available to anyone with a computer. A net-savvy new resident set up Hudson’s first “list-serv,” an automated email discussion list. This allowed conversations and debates which might have taken weeks to arrange were condensed into a matter of hours.
Operating as a combination early warning system, round-the-clock roundtable and independent research institute, this email list helped residents to discuss new developments, share research, refine strategy, and mobilize members on a moment’s notice for a public meeting or media opportunity.
Hoping to create an impression of public apathy about the proposal, the powers that be chose a huge auditorium for the hearing, located as far as possible from the proposed toxic waste site without quite leaving town... Officials expected that many would not bother to make the trip, and even if they did the room would look empty.
But much to the Mayor’s obvious annoyance, citizen grassroots organizing resulted in a full hall, packed by a diverse array of local residents from many different walks of life. The company’s representative, Brett Walker, came across as smug, overdressed, overcoiffed and stunningly unprepared for question after painstakingly-researched question. In many ways the audience seemed to know more about perc processing than Walker.
One resident brought along a chemist and safety consultant for labor unions to testify—to devastating effect, as Americlean’s glib spokesman could not answer her direct, technical questions. Walker professed not even to be able to remember where his company’s much-touted “pilot plant” was located, furthering the growing impression that the project was a sham. Many started to believe that Americlean’s real agenda was to take the $600,000 grant, and get paid to accept waste that would wind up in Hudson’s wetlands, or river, or get incinerated in the St. Lawrence Cement proposal, which had just been announced just up the hill in Greenport.
Especially effective were the parents, health care professionals, and lifelong residents who had been reached through our door-to-door outreach. Many spoke out forcefully against the project—debunking the official spin that only “outsiders” were opposed to it. A statement by City of Hudson consultant Bill Loewenstein that the Hudson waterfront was always an industrial wasteland was met with hoots and groans.
By the end of the hearing, even those who had gone in supporting the project left with about the hazardous waste plant. “I was trying to help you out here,” said one exasperated company supporter, who Walker did not recognize as an ally and treated shabbily. The lone exception may have been Mayor Scalera, who complained at the meeting’s conclusion that he had “never been so embarrassed by the behavior” of Hudson residents—who had just saved him from making a catastrophic blunder in welcoming what had just been exposed as a sloppy, fly-by-night development partner.
Over the coming weeks, citizens kept up a drumbeat of letters to the editor, television appearances, and pressure at Council meetings. Finally in mid-April, the headline broke in our local paper: The City had delivered the bad news to the company that the Hudson did not want them to truck any hazardous waste into the City, and would only welcome them if they limited their activity to the original hangers-and-polybags line. Americlean withdrew its proposal in short order, and was never heard from again in Hudson.
Soon enough, the former glue factory found a healthier, more forward-looking purpose, when a developer and restoration expert from Florida purchased it to found an arts center. While that developer ran into obstacles from embittered City leaders (who denied him access to water and sewer services), a second set of developers bought the building and managed to overcome those political obstacles.
Today, the factory complex has been impressively renovated, operating as Basilica Hudson. It features a year-round schedule of exhibitions, performances and festivals, as well as hosting weddings and charity galas. Rather than a dumping ground for toxic waste, “The Basilica” serves as a venue for both local projects and businesses, and internationally-acclaimed artists and groups.
Back in the mid-1990s, Hudson citizens blew the whistle on the City of Hudson’s Federal grant programs. A lesson from that incident speaks to certain claims about Eric Galloway’s Lantern Group by the director of his new Galvan Initiatives Foundation.
David Kermani (who then operated a high-end Warren Street rug shop) and other compatriots alleged that the City had made an improper side deal with L&B Contract Industries, later known as LB Furniture. Prompted by citizen complaints, HUD’s inspector general indeed found major “irregularities” in the City’s handling of a $556,000 grant to L&B, plus a host of problems within Hudson’s development agencies. [PDF of the report] Those irregularities included not just the company’s failure to make interest payments, but also the connivance of Hudson Development Corporation (HDC) staff in allowing L&B to make just one repayment of $4,998.25. Nice deal, if you can get it: $551,000 in free government money.
In addition, HUD discoverd that HDC had “subordinated” the grant lien to obtain a further $3,000,000 bank loan. All the while, the report said, local leadership never alerted HUD that it was making any of these arrangements. HUD’s Inspector General was not pleased, and reprimanded both L&B and the City. Moreover, HUD identified apparent “conflicts of interest” and “procurement weaknesses” at HDC and the Hudson Community Development and Planning Agency (HCDPA). For example, the wife of a Board member was getting paid up to $170 per hour “without competition.” Meanwhile, the agency’s “Rehabilitation Specialist” awarded over $27,000 in work “to a company owned by his brother,” again without giving anyone else a chance to compete for the contract.
The Inspector General’s scathing report was issued to 13 Federal, State and local officials.
And then: HUD continued to award the City of Hudson more development grants from these same pool of funds. And City agencies continued to help the perpetually-failing L&B. Despite years of public largesse, the company finally closed up shop a few years ago, throwing some 150 people out of work.
Through it all, the City was given more grant money to play with; and still it continued to botch projects... For example, issuing $1.8 million in bonds to lure a mysterious Californian corporation called Wittcomm, which disappeared and according to inside sources never repaid its obligations. That’s just to name one among many of the chronic failures of these agencies to manage public funding to achieve real economic development, or alleviate poverty.
In short: HUD knew and acknowledged that the City of Hudson had a lousy track record of managing grants—and yet kept coughing up more grants, often in the face of public concern and opposition.
So, how does all of this relate to the latest controversy instigated by Eric Galloway’s local activities? In response to the detailed exposure of numerous complaints and violations on record for Galloway’s Lantern Group in New York City, Galvan director Tom Swope offered the following dodge:
“That the Lantern Group continues to get funding for their projects should be a testament to the high quality of their management.”
Based on the above examples of HUD and the City, can anyone say that continued funding is a testament to anything except bureaucratic ineptitude? We’ve just seen how the City had made an illegal side deal with a grantee, and its development agencies were found to be rife with problems. And yet HUD continued to give the City grant money to play with, and failed in many cases to monitor its use, in spite of past debacles. Continued funding is no proof of even mediocre performance, let alone success.
Yet based on Swope’s fallacious logic, one would also have to conclude that:
Sustained City support of (the now-bankrupt) L&B was a rousing success;
The ever-increasing budgets of FEMA and the Army Corps reflect the heck of a job they did in dealing with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans;
The Kardashian sisters’ continued popularity is reflective of their immense talents; and
George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004 served as a clear testament that he was a terrific President.
In making such flimsy arguments, Swope is asking people to believe that bureaucrats are stewards of excellence, and never act to protect their own buddies (or rumps). Someone please furnish Galvan’s director with a copy of The Peter Principle, posthaste.
Today’s the last day of Rick Scalera’s most recent two-year term as Mayor of Hudson. (I won't say his last day ever, because he could always run again if he doesn’t get the leadership positions he covets on the Board of Supervisors.)
Since 1993, Scalera has been ruling City Hall with an iron fist for all but two terms: 2001-2002, when he chickened out of running and put up Cappy Pierro in in place; and 2006-2007, when he again was afraid of losing and backed Danny Grandinetti. Both of his surrogates lost, mainly due to situation’s Rick created but ran away from, so that he could run two years later against his successor’s mistakes, and claim to have been “undefeated.”
Alderman Doc Donahue recently pronounced the signing of an agreement with Colarusso to mine around Hudson’s backup water supply as the Mayor’s “legacy.” It’s tempting to agree, because that document sums up a lot of what has been so wrong with his tenure as Mayor. Scalera’s tenure as Mayor is indeed well-encapsulated a sweetheart deal with a former campaign contributor, feebly negotiated with financial terms highly unfavorable to the taxpayers (what's $100,000 per year going to be worth in 20 years, with no increase in payments to account for inflation?). It represents Rick fumbling away one of the City’s most important assets. The next time there’s a drought, or your tax bill goes up, do remember Donahue’s pronouncement.
But Scalera’s actual legacy is bigger than deals like the one with Colarusso. His true legacy to Hudson is that of job-killer.
During Rick’s tenure, at least 1,000 local jobs were lost. One need look no further than an op-ed Scalera co-wrote with his then-consultant, Bill Lowenstein in 1998, to find the evidence. Stung at the time by criticism of the City’s mishandling of HUD grants, Scalera touted all the good that Federal and State grants had done for Hudson, by proclaiming a list of jobs these programs had created locally. His list of valued local businesses aided by grants included:
Emsig
Foster’s Refrigeration
L&B Furniture
Kaz, Inc.
McGuire’s
Schroeder’s Chevrolet
Today, with Scalera leaving office, all of these businesses (and more) are gone. Several of them continued to receive fresh infusions of public cash long after it was clear they could not survive even with assistance.
Others, such as Wittcomm —which Scalera announced in 1998 he was giving a big loan to bring 100 jobs to the City—never even opened their doors. The money went out the door, but the jobs never came in. (Later, the City forgave much of this debt in a complicated land swap among its own agencies.)
While these 1,000-plus jobs disappeared, others outside City Hall independently, without Scalera's aid, and often with his overt hostility, slowly built a new economy based on small, locally-owned businesses. Individual entrepreneurs steadily created 1-50 jobs each—bit-by-bit, and building-by-building.
As this rejuvenation of a once-abandoned river city gained critical mass about a decade ago, it started to attract still others to invest in crumbling real estate, restore boarded-up storefronts and homes, jumpstart main street activity, support the City’s flagging tax base, and giving people something to do both before and after 5 pm. Yet these same merchants and property owners were the frequent target of Scalera’s scorn and ire, and were thanked for their faith in Hudson by getting to the max with increased property taxes. Shunning those creating actual jobs with limited capital and sweat equity, Rick spent much of his time cheerleading for destructive, incompatible, foreign corporations such as Americlean and St. Lawrence Cement—neither of which offered any paid work except to those willing to help promote phony promises, imaginary pollution control technologies, and cooked job numbers.
Had Scalera been at all thoughtful about the changes our post-industrial society was undergoing, been attentive the many voices suggesting a different path to a new economy, considered open government and sound planning something other than a nuisance for his closed-door deals, and embraced the changes occurring around him, he might have had the best of both worlds: A lot less day-to-day on the job stress, and a lot more cooperation. The benefits of those changes might have been seen a lot more quickly, and been spread around more broadly. Hudson still has a long way to go, and that’s in part because Scalera has been fighting positive development and putting the brakes on progress for so long.
Instead he fought the changes, and closed his mind to new energy possibilities. Thus his legacy: Rick Scalera, Job Killer.
BetaBeat, a tech journal published online by The New York Observer, reports that Etsy CEO Rob Kalin is stepping down. Kalin is known locally as the driving force behind Etsy’s decision to open a customer service center in Hudson, but from the sound of things this shouldn’t have any effect on the expected 50 or so jobs being created there. A source tells me that six new hires were made there just recently, and are looking to find another 5-10 people by September.
The current issue of the normally-astute Hill Country Observer contains a sadly shallow article about an important topic, entitled “The Second Home Economy.”
As is too often the case when the press wades into such complex issues without really sounding their depths, we’re offered only a surface analysis of just two possible development directions for Columbia and Berkshire counties. Evidently, we have only two choices: either an artsy-fartsy tourism model, or a 1950s smokestack model.
Naturally there are many other choices; and in reality there is a much greater mix of populations and business in both places than the press would have us believe. Such Either/Or-ism leaves out many obvious examples of businesses which don’t fit either oversimplified model (e.g.: Etsy’s move of 50 jobs to Hudson). It also ignores the local history and national trends which led to current conditions in both counties.
The article first offers a sympathetic look at the lifestyle of a second-home couple, as well as thoughts from solid sources like Nat Karns of BRPC and Bert Freed of The Kinderhook Group. But then come the less-nuanced but more-predictable quotes from (a) someone who says their area has gotten too expensive and their kids have to move away, and (b) a habitual doomsayer who predicts his town’s whole economy is on the verge of collapse.
Two specific examples cited are Lee, Massachusetts, and Hudson, New York. But neither example lives up to the article’s reductive billing.
In both cases, the author and several commentators ignore the obvious and crucial fact that both places were essentially moribund 20 years ago. (Yes, I remember the closing of the five-and-dime in Lee, and the toy factory. Both have been gone a very long time now.) Culture and tourism and second home owners didn’t push people out of these places. Rather, small businesses and new taxpayers filled a gaping void left behind by heavy industry, which abandoned them. Without those willing to risk their modest savings on an abandoned town, where would either place be? Probably still dying a lingering demise. Yet the Either/Or-ists like to scapegoat the one, while waxing nostalgic about the other.
A kid with whom I went to gradeschool in the Berkshires returned to the area after a long absence, and created a successful brewpub in downtown Lee, catering to “locals” and weekenders alike. Lee, whose main street businesses mostly bled out in the ’80s and early ’90s, is on the upswing again. Likewise over in Great Barrington, two brothers with whom I rode the schoolbus started and built a small business over the past two decades into a very successful clothing and outdoor furniture business, frequented by a wide demographic of customers, largely thanks to their terrific customer service.
Yet The Observer seems to imply that all three of these kids would have been better off growing up to work somewhere like “The G.E.” in Pittsfield—where our forbears were expected to dip their arms up to the shoulders into vats of PCBs for much of their adult lives. Yes, General Electric once employed thousands in that city, where my father was born. The company also left behind vast quantities of pollution in both the Housatonic River as well as schoolyards and other private properties all over town. But ah, the glory days of good-ol’ American industry!
(It also should be said that the Berkshires are a far more racially diverse place today than when I was growing up in the ’70s. But you wouldn’t know that from the Observer piece.)
Ditto Hudson. While commenter Matt Frederick needlessly inflames the debate with a gross exaggeration that Hudson is dominated by stores only open two days a week, in fact the vast majority are 5, 6 or even 7-day operations. And overwhelmingly, local Hudson businesses are owned by full-time residents, with hardly a national chain store in sight besides the Subway attached to a laundromat. Such high levels of local ownership and downtown activity are all too rare in 21st Century America. Other main streets are mainly dead or dying, with business having moved to the nearest mall, into stores owned by megacorporations; yet we’re supposed to lament the rejuvenation of Lee and Hudson?
(Frederick elsewhere has spread the misinformation that it’s unusually difficult to operate a home-based business in Hudson due to zoning restrictions. I'm not the only one who’s asked him to specify which codes he’s talking about, and provided numerous counterexamples, to no avail. Both formal economic studies and on-the-ground evidence suggest the exact opposite: that Hudson has an unusually high concentration of self-employed people, cottage industries operating out of homes, and former residences converted to storefronts.)
Most of all, Hudson’s business mix has significantly diversified over the past decade. We can thank the pioneers in the culture and antiques trades for making that possible, since it was their businesses which patiently developed enough foot traffic and buzz to attract other investment, and create other centers of economic gravity. Much of the dining, hospitality, music, nightlife, housewares, coffeehouses, food markets and other types of business found here today were not present in the late ’90s. Arts and culture jumpstarted the process, and no one seems happier to see other types of stores and industries opening locally than those much-maligned antiquers themselves.
Meanwhile, quality of life in the Hudson area has helped retain and attract the very types of businesses those who favor the Either/Or, Us vs. Them script claim to support. A new light manufacturing business was found to fill the empty Kaz factory, nextdoor to Local Ocean, a fish farm; further down the road on Route 9, European giant L’Eurial is filling the former Entenmann's warehouse with a goat cheese operation, which over the long haul will aim to source its dairy locally. (Good time to go into the goat-raising business, as apparently there’s a real shortage.) Organic agriculture is thriving and rapidly-expanding, thanks both to local interest and the proximity to lucrative NYC markets.
And of course there are the countless other boats which have been raised by this tide, which has crept up from a low ebb in the late ’80s/early ’90s. Hardly anyone around here except lawyers earn more per hour than competent local plumbers, electricians, HVAC, and other contractors. The stabilization, renovation and expansion of the area’s amazing housing and building stock has been a prime driver of the local economy. Yet articles like that in the Observer leave the impression that few jobs have been created here except minimum-wage part-time dishwashing gigs.
And as for rising real estate prices: I’ve never heard of anyone, local or new, who was eager to sell their house for less than they paid for it. Are empty-nesters and retirees who’ve lived here all their lives, who now want to move into a more manageable house, and maybe spend the winter in Florida, supposed to take $100,000 less at closing in order just to satisfy some pundit’s pseudo-nativist ideology?
In any case, both rents and asking prices have moderated nicely after the national real estate bubble of the last decade burst. Where, precisely, can you rent a decent apartment cheaper than in Hudson, unless you’re willing (as I was in my youth) to live in an unsafe neighborhood, in an apartment lacking steady heat and hot water, and little of interest to do within walking distance? One might save $50 a month by relocating to the worst blocks of Rensselaer, pronounced "Rent-ler" by some denizens, but it’s unlikely anyone’s economic or personal prospects would be improved by such a move.
The false choices of Either/Or-ism not only present a distorted, defeatist picture, they also serve to pit residents against each other. Those residents pigeonholded as “weekenders” and “lifelong residents” have a lot more in common than those making snap judgements based on a windshield view of Main Street. Is the economy perfect in either the Berkshires, or Columbia County? Hardly. But I’d like to know where economic Nirvana has been achieved and sustained in any part of America today. Overall, the prospects in both counties seem a whole lot better than average.
For those who wish to turn back the clock and live in a dead, dangerous town dominated by polluting industry, there will always be Gary. For those who prefer a main street full of Ye Olde Saltwater Taffy emporia and doily-draped inns, there’s no shortage of tourist traps all along the New England coast. The rest of us will continue to live somewhere in between—or preferably along some long detour off that straight-line highway, which exists mainly in the mindscape of the media.
The Gossips of Rivertown and others have taken note of an Albany Times-Union article entitled “Nobody home, for now,” about demographic shifts in Columbia County—with a focus on Hudson.
The piece is anecdotal and shallow at best, misleading and inflammatory at worst.
For example, the reporter quotes a random pedestrian who implies that Warren Street went straight from Mom & Pop stores to antique stores (a/k/a Pop & Pop stores). Other comments in the article deepen this false impression, one with little relation to reality on the ground.
But few journalists making a whirlwind tour of a place can resist an easy us vs. them narrative; it makes writing the story so much quicker and easier. And so the paper, abetted by several of those quoted, would seem to have us ignore the following:
• Nevermind that the downfall of downtown markets and shoe stores and the like was caused primarily by the growth of Fairview Avenue in Greenport—long before antiques or art or restaurants came into play. Shoppers across the country killed their own beloved main street businesses to save a few pennies at big box stores, and Hudson was no exception.
• Nevermind that there was a long gap of 15-20 years between the collapse of the “old” Warren Street and the slow but steady arrival of new businesses. During that interim period, much of downtown was given up for dead. Yet the “new” entrepreneurs (most of them middle-class or below) who saw Hudson’s promise and opportunities, rather than looking at it as a ghost town. And they keep getting scapegoated for having taken a chance on Hudson when it had hit rock-bottom, then succeeding with their small businesses against long odds.
• Nevermind that virtually every store in town is locally-owned by a Hudson or County resident. Or again, that these folks have turned a once-forsaken street full of empty storefronts, derelict buildings and street-level apartments back into a vibrant commercial district (propping up sales and property taxes in the process).
• And nevermind that there are many other types of businesses thriving in Hudson today besides antiques, from Vasilow’s to Steiner’s to coffee roasters and hair salons and more. Or that larger-scale businesses, from online marketer Etsy in Hudson to goat cheese manufacturer/distributer Coutourier in Livingston are moving jobs into the area, bucking expectations and trends. Why? Because this rural-but-sophisticated area is attractive to certain types of businesses. That they don’t have belching smokestacks or workers who routinely get injured doesn’t mean they don’t count as economic development.
Bottom line: Can anyone say with a straight face that the Columbia County or Hudson economy between 1975 and 1995 was thriving, healthy, or in any other way enviable? Those who resent the positive changes that have taken hold in the past 15 or so years should at least stop making false connections between the collapse of previous models from 1-3 generations ago, and the positive attempts more recently to get the area back on its feet.
Meanwhile, we get Matthew Fredericks opining that “deindustrialization” will cause people to pack up and leave. For where, one wonders? Is there some fairy-tale part of the United States where the 1950s never ended, everyone carries a lunchbucket to work, and every child is apple-cheeked? And how, precisely, will those who find themselves destitute in our new economy (which is by no means perfect) find the means to move? Moving is always expensive, in both obvious and non-obvious ways.
Moreover, 90% of the loss of industry in this area happened already, much of it a generation or more ago. So by Fredericks’ theory, those folks who depended upon it should already be gone. The County’s stagnant-but-stable population figures don’t support that idea.
Next we hear from an armchair pundit that “they’ve jacked up rents.” (It’s always a nebulous They.) Where, precisely, can one find lower rents than in this region? If the rents are actually lower there, the likelihood is they have even fewer traditional job opportunities, or other major problems. How, one wonders, is that magic place managing to outmaneuver the same national social and economic trends which affect every American community? And if this Land of Eldorado, with its low rents and plentiful jobs, really exists, how long can their cost-of-living stay at that level?
The article (and its haphazard sources) of course never mentions that Hudson provides far more subsidized rental units per capita than virtually any other municipality in the region. Hundreds pay only that rent which their income allows them to afford in the Terrace Apartments and elsewhere; there is tons of Section 8 and senior housing in town. If anything, the quality and numbers of these units has improved over the past decade, with some exceptions.
Those who launch facile attacks on the economic changes in Columbia County rarely recognize that the move from a heavy manufacturing to a service-based economy has been a tectonic international shift, occurring for 40 years or more. U.S. consumer demand for ever-cheaper merchandise, coupled with vastly lower labor costs overseas, has steadily stripped manufacturing from the landscape pretty much everywhere. The vast majority of traditional manufacturing was out Columbia County’s door already when I was a kid, when second-home owners were few and far between.
(Not to mention: Where is the support for greener, more sustainable, compatible industry from official quarters? When a traditional boat builder wanted to buy a piece of land owned by the City on the south end of the Hudson Waterfront in the early ’90s and create jobs, he was spurned, and took his business to Ulster County instead. The City sold the land to St. Lawrence Cement, now Holcim, and it’s remained unused and blighted ever since.)
If every County second home owner left their house and went away, and every Hudson antiques store and gallery closed, would heavy manufacturing suddenly roar back to life here? Would Warren Street suddenly fill up with dress stores and supermarkets? Please. What we’d have left is abandoned homes, empty main streets, still very little manufacturing—and everyone putting their meagre paychecks into the hands of the Walton family at Widewaters Plaza, exporting our local capital off to Arkansas.
We also get from the T-U article the same old simplistic analysis of population and the schools: “The population is stagnant, but there are more second home owners, so our schools will suffer!”
Well, sorry, but all I can say here is... duh. If you have more properties but the same number of residents, with the same or fewer number of kids in the schools, the results should logically be:
(1) A lower tax burden on each property owner, since the costs of running the schools can now be distributed across more properties; and/or
(2) The ability to spend more per child without raising individual tax payments, since once again you have more properties to tax but the same or fewer number of students.
Here’s the real tax problem at the moment: With the State essentially bankrupt and cutting back aid, but with many School districts unwilling to be disciplined and transparent about spending, the opposite is happening... higher taxes but declining education. Ditto local municipalities: In the face of Federal and State cutbacks, towns and small cities are in many cases simply passing on those costs to homeowners (new and old) rather than seriously looking at where their budgets could be trimmed.
That has everything to do with a failure of leadership, not with the demographic bogeymen painted in the minds of T-U readers by such articles. But rather than take a hard look at the leaders responsible for such mismanagement, it’s a lot easier to point the finger at “those people” who arrived here in the past 30 years.
It makes one wonder whether the folks advancing these canards (“Warren Street was killed by antiques! The newcomers are destroying our schools! They’re driving us out!”) paid any attention in civics and math class when they were in 7th Grade. Whether these wolf cries originate in ignorance or malice, such misleading exercises serve only one real purpose: to sow more division and resentment, allowing those in entrenched positions of power to keep propping up their status quo.
And why does the American celebration of entrepreneurship and small business not extend to our area’s independent, doing-it-yourselfers? Does a business have to be poisoning its neighbor’s air and water, or demanding a handout in the form of a PILOT plan, in order to be deemed legit?
Is our local economy perfect? Obviously not. (Whose is?) Are there people suffering, who our society has left behind, both economically and educationally? Clearly yes. (And we should pay them more heed.) Does spreading bad information through superficial reporting and opinions help anyone who’s feeling left behind? Not in the least. Will scapegoating those who have tried to improve their homes and create small businesses help anyone at all? Yes: Politicos, slumlords and other predators (who benefit from the promotion of social resentment and profiting from boom-bust cycles).
The former Diamond Street Diner (forcibly closed in 2009 under less-than-honorable circumstances) was acquired at auction today by a pair of accomplished Columbia County organic farmers.
The new Ghent owners—who supplied the only meat served at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding—plan to add a local “farm-to-chef” angle to the usual diner fare. No timetable for reopening has been set yet; but the diner has always been an important part of the community’s life, making this excellent news for Hudson business and stomachs.
As promised, at the end of this post is a chart comparing the results of the 2000 and 2010 Census results by municipality in Columbia, Greene, and Dutchess Counties. Or, you can download the data as a PDF by clicking here. This table includes the raw numbers, the raw change in population, and the percentage change for each town (or city). This doesn’t include separate breakdowns for villages and other subdivisions within each town.
In presenting these simple comparisons, it should be noted that population figures are some of the most commonly-misinterpreted statistics cited by politicians and planners. To really understand shifts in population, one needs to look at larger universe of data and trends.
For example, population declines are almost always interpreted as bad news by civic leaders. But say a town’s population goes down while its residents’ average income or local sales tax revenues go up—isn’t that an improvement overall? What if the percentage of children under 18 goes down, while property values go up, improving the teacher/student ratios in the local schools—wouldn’t that also be an improvement?
One also has to look beyond the bottom-line stats to see if some key statistical method has changed, such as no longer counting prisoners in the local population, as has occurred in Hudson. (Without the 500-odd prisoners from 2000, Hudson’s decline in population is actually quite modest, more like 4%.) Taking a look at the results below, one suspects that there was some major redefinition of the Census’ definitions or borders for the Town of Milan, which surely did not lose half its population in 10 years.
Denis Ferentinos of Diehl & Denis has posted photos at the new site for the Hudson Antiques Dealers Association of two handsome conference tables he designed for the new Etsy workspace in Hudson.
Constructed of wood salvaged from a bowling alley, mounted on cast iron and steel pieces salvaged from factories in New England. Their vintage-meets-industrial aesthetic ought to perfectly complement the Cannonball Factory space; and it’s great to see that Etsy is sourcing fixtures for the job site locally. That’s precisely the type of spin-off business that one can expect when forward-thinking businesses choose a place like Hudson for its character, rather than on temporary tax incentives.
Note also that the HADA site (redesigned by yours truly last Fall) includes the regularly-updated Wideboard where member shops post new merchandise, events, celebrity sightings, and other news on and off Warren Street.
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