SamPratt.com

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).