Over at The Gossips of Rivertown, Carole Osterink has a post entitled Hudson Renaissance Blamed for Homelessness, taking to task a Reg-Star report on a County housing study.
Those of us who remember Hudson in the ’70s and ’80s—I grew up about 20 miles to the east, and moved to the Not-So-Friendly City in the late ’90s—don’t remember there being any abundance of quality, affordable housing here. But we do remember there being a surplus of abandoned buildings, as well as grossly substandard housing managed by slumlords. Much of the “affordable” housing was often more suitable for squatters than families.
Sure, you could rent stuff for cheap back then. But dirt cheap might also mean a dirt floor. Whether a tenant could get heat, hot water, a roof that didn’t leak, safe wiring, decent appliances and a vermin-free home was another matter entirely. Enforcement of the most rudimentary requirements—for example, that landlords at least provide working fire alarms—only came about more recently.
So any suggestion that Hudson was once some kind of renter’s paradise ignores several decades when City Hall and HUD turning a blind eye to substandard housing, egregious code violations, and landlords soaking Section 8 for guaranteed rents, while their tenants suffered their neglect.
Does anyone seriously think Hudson would be better off if Gellert and Kravitz got all of their buildings back?
It’s certainly true that some multifamily buildings have been converted to single-family dwellings. But it’s also true that many buildings are sitting either empty or seriously underutilized. The practice of “warehousing” apartments (keeping them off the market, in anticipation of a bigger payday at a later date) is a topic I dealt with in depth last Spring.
Rather than scapegoating those individuals who risked their own time, money and sweat equity to improve one building so they could live in it comfortably, why not pose these questions to those few speculators who have bought large buildings, emptied them of their existing tenants, and left them unused for five or more years?
Ask Eric Galloway why the large apartment house on the corner of 2nd and Warren is still locked up; or Eleanor Ambos what she plans to do with her huge Allen Street and Union Street properties. Ask why Richard Cohen’s buildings on Warren and Fourth are likewise sitting fallow, with neither renovated apartments nor the long-awaited hotel. Instead of pointing the finger at those taxpayers who are filling the City’s coffers and taking pride in their homes, ask why other absentee owners are keeping so many units empty. Even a casual stroll around Hudson will turn up a big inventory of opportunities to house people and alleviate rental pressures.
Whether such buildings and apartments would be best used as temporary homeless shelter, or instead as affordable housing, is a separate debate. But if the City better served the latter, there might be a lot less of the former...
