<aside>
</aside>
Hudson is not the "Tale of Two Cities" you were sold at the last fundraiser. It is a tale of Three Cities.
The Wealthy Class treats Hudson as a weekend playground or a laboratory for experiments its members never have to endure. The Welfare Class rides on the state and city safety net and everyone else's taxes. The Working Middle Class, squeezed between them, pays the bill: homeowners directly, market-rate renters through landlords.
Notice the alliance. The Wealthy hold the Luxury Beliefs: defund, decarcerate, decarbonize, redistribute. The Welfare collects the rents and subsidies those beliefs generate. The bill goes to the people who built this once-great city: the homeowner, the contractor, the civil servant, the small landlord, the family that has run a Warren Street shop for three generations.
That is the Hudson Hypocrisy: the language of compassion, of showing up for Community™ and care, deployed to cover an arrangement in which the Wealthy and the Welfare do business at the Working Middle's expense, with the nonprofits manning the toll bridge between them.
The Hudson Handicap is what it costs: the drag of taxes, regulations, and assessments that fall hardest on the people who can least afford it but try valiantly. The homeowner whose taxes exceed her mortgage. The contractor who waits for permits and pays for others' fraudulent benefits. The family that quietly leaves for Greenport or another county.
The mechanism has one name: Municipal Capture. Public money flows to nonprofit intermediaries who lobby for more public money. Tammany in modern dress.
We all know it is broken. The Welfare Class was promised entitlements that cannot be maintained. The Wealthy Class thought it was buying status and Community™, and now finds itself scolded for the privilege. The Working Middle Class is too busy getting by to change the system.
Every year individuals notice. We editors call it the Radicalizing Moment: the split-second when you watch a resident bullied at Common Council, or read your reassessment slip beside your neighbor's, or return from a town that simply works and wonder why yours does not. The rabbit hole opens. Tammany Hall comes into view. They run for Common Council, file petitions, circulate appeals. One by one they burn out and quit. The Tammany machine, the funded labor unions, the nonprofits win. The house always wins. Until it doesn’t…
And yet Hudson is not lost, because Hudson is not empty. It is full of Hudson Heroes, the people who never showed up to the fundraiser because they were working.
The Builders. The Hudsonian who created her own job, then created jobs for others. The contractor, the shopkeeper, the founder, the small landlord. The people whose payroll is paid out of revenue, not grants. They do not require a press release to justify their existence. The receipts justify it.
The Stewards. The custodians of Warren Street and the wards beyond it. The owners who restored the brick rather than razed it. The families who kept the church, the theater, the corner store, the trade. They inherited a city worth inheriting and intend to leave one. Continuity is their politics.
The Citizens. The Hudsonian who reads the footnotes before the vote, files the FOIL, attends the meeting after a full day's work, and runs for the seat no one else will take. Self-government is not a slogan to her. It is a calendar entry.
The Working Middle wears three faces. The Builder funds the budget. The Steward protects the building stock that anchors the assessment roll. The Citizen holds the council to account. None of them ask for thanks. All of them deserve a city that returns the favor.
Until now they have fought alone.
Our work at Hudson Common Sense (HCS) is to connect these scattered Heroes across issues, across neighborhoods, and across decades of fatigue, into a Cadre of Common Sense.
The Cadre fights on three fronts. Against the housing industrial complex: fairer, more frequent citywide reassessment and Missing Middle zoning reform. Against the youth industrial complex, which manufactures jobs for adults instead of opportunities for children, in a city that needs businesses, not bureaucrats. And against Hudson's Tammany, the part-time political class with a full-time pose, who cobble together a living and a little influence from government jobs and nonprofit roles that did not exist a generation ago — net tax takers, not tax makers, phoning it in while the assessment roll rots and the potholes spread.
The long-term fixes are structural, not personal. Charter reform, to retire a constitution written for a smaller, simpler Hudson and rewrite one fit for the city we actually live in. Fairer, more frequent reassessment, so the tax burden tracks the market rather than the year a parcel last changed hands. Consolidation, of towns, of school districts, and of the duplicate services a city of fewer than 6,000 residents cannot afford to run alone. Three reforms, one principle: stop subsidizing dysfunction.
Our remedy is unfashionable for being unremarkable: local government that is Efficient, Evenhanded, and Equal under the law.
This fight is worth picking because Hudson is America in miniature. If you want to see blue-state America up close, its promise, its capture, its capacity for renewal, try to fix Hudson. We want a Hudson families stay in, because it is worth staying in. Liberty. Merit. Rēs Pūblica. We write for one reader: the Hudsonian with reason. We ask one kind of question: the uncommon one.
A rotating cast of Classical Liberals (free people, free markets, equal law, accountable government) from at least three continents and four Hudson wards, each lured to town by spouses who promised the Cotswolds or Napa and neglected to mention the socialists. We believe in freedom, pluralism, and the dignity of argument.
We are immigrants, locals, and the occasional sixth-generation Hudsonian. Some of us are new enough to America to ask the obvious questions out loud. Others have lived here long enough to know the answers, and to remember when the questions were different. The mix is the point.
Our contributors are friends and acquaintances across the city and the county. The active ones we call, tongue-in-cheek, Bureau Chiefs, especially the ones in Germantown and Kinderhook. The original iMessage thread still exists. It feeds editorial ideas, Op-Ed pitches, and Shallot bits.
We publish without bylines, in the tradition of The Economist, because ideas matter more than authors and continuity matters more than personalities. If you want to meet, write to us. We talk over coffee.
These are our values. Our operating principles, the rules we hold ourselves to, are three:
Government decisions should be based on evidence and public interest, not party loyalty or personalities. On rare occasions, when evidence compels it, we endorse individuals and positions, not parties. We assess candidates, budget votes, planning decisions, and ballot measures on their merits. We will never tell you to vote blue no matter who, or red no matter what. We are evidence-driven, not team-driven.
See our brief post defining “Apolitical” and related but distinct American political terms.
City services must deliver the greatest benefit with the least waste of taxpayer money, time, and effort. Every public dollar is extracted from a Hudson household; every hour wasted in process is an hour the taxpayer paid for. We measure government not by what it announces but by what it delivers per dollar spent.
Every resident is subject to the same rules and entitled to the same protections. One bar, one set of fines, one assessment formula. When two Hudson households with identical homes pay different tax bills because of who they know, the city has stopped governing under law and started dispensing favor. Equal protection is not a slogan; it is the test of whether Hudson is a republic or a club.
These principles are not abstract. They produce a city worth staying in: predictable Planning Board decisions, so a homeowner can add a porch without hiring a lawyer. Top-quartile public schools, so families do not have to leave to give their children a fair shot. A government efficient enough to make Zurich jealous. Pluralism, not diversity for its own sake. Ambition, not nostalgia. The Blue Ribbon Schools program is a target. So is a balanced budget. So is a Hudson where families stay, because it is worth staying in.
Our work proceeds through three instruments:
🗣️ Commentary: We write Editorials, commission Guest Op-Eds, and publish knowledge guides. Sharp opinion on issues that matter.
🎯 Critique: We challenge avoidable failures and satirize hypocrisy in The Shallot (inspired by The Onion).
⚖️ Courts: When persuasion fails, we pursue (or support) litigation as a last resort to protect residents’ rights and ensure equality.
<aside> ⚖️
“The courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.” ~ Alexander Hamilton
</aside>
<aside>
Get the latest Hudson Common Sense Briefing straight to your inbox every last Sunday of the month.
Each (monthly-ish) issue includes updates on local governance, analysis, and civic insights from Common Sense. We respect your privacy, your time, and your inbox, so outside of election season you will only receive one newsletter from us per month.
We send a monthly email, this is not a typical “reply-all” group email, so you will not get responses from other subscribers, and no one will ever be able to see your membership status.
Click the link below to sign up: ⏬
If the link doesn’t work, send us a quick note and we’ll add you manually.
Email us at: [email protected]
Curious what the briefings look like? Here are examples of past issues:
Election ‘25: Voter Guide / Why we endorsed Joe Ferris / Our First Foil Files
Briefing: Hudson's Housing Choice, Mayoral Mediums, Grant Snafus & New Website
</aside>
<aside>
</aside>
<aside> <img src="notion://custom_emoji/be149161-ee0f-4f09-b2d2-33113177d134/317cfc64-a5c2-8080-ba1f-007aefd05f64" alt="notion://custom_emoji/be149161-ee0f-4f09-b2d2-33113177d134/317cfc64-a5c2-8080-ba1f-007aefd05f64" width="40px" />
To avoid confusion and ensure utter clarity, we use different designs for different types of publications and content. Read the full story of our Brand Evolution here.
<aside> 🖊️