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Publication Date: July 21st, 2026

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The public hearing is at 6:00pm today (Tuesday) July 21st, at the Central Fire Station, 77 North Seventh Street.

Hudson residents can send letters with input to: Planning Board Clerk Ms. Fenoff at [email protected]

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Images remixed, adapted from, or inspired by The Economist visual language.

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Catch Up Quick

A town of fewer than 6,000 people is being rushed to approve one of its largest construction projects ever, on ground that HHA says requires engineered improvement and specialised foundations.

The only publicly reported price tag, about $220 million, belongs to an earlier 315 unit concept. HHA has not published an updated total for the current phased plan. Hudson carries planning, service, and execution risks, but the applicant has not published a municipal fiscal impact analysis.

Why it matters: The same rush-and-shame routine has failed here twice since 2024. Some officials use public housing residents' real hardship to bend the rules and cast anyone who asks hard questions as the enemy.

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The Briefing Box:

• The Show: Hudson has run the same four-beat formula three times since 2024: rush the vote, play the compassion card, shout down opponents, and arrive at the predictable finale.
• The Record:
  • The Restore NY grant was endorsed nine to two, on the 2nd try, and never submitted.
  • Mill Street received a negative declaration and conditional site-plan approval despite documented objections over flooding, drainage, density, emergency access, and municipal costs. Before approval, Jason Foster submitted a detailed letter asking the Planning Board to deny the height variance and require further review of flood risk, below-grade floors, emergency egress, bus access, and the project’s cost to city and school services. Foster later resigned, see his resignation letter below. Residents sued the City and Kearney Realty in July 2025.
• The Ground: HHA borings found primarily silt clay around Bliss Towers. HHA abandoned an earlier redevelopment scheme on the same property in 2019 after reconsidering the project amid environmental review and public comment. Later local reporting attributed the reversal in part to site constraints, but the underlying geotechnical report has not been made public.
• Unknown Costs: The authority says the site is buildable only after soil densification and engineered piers; the cost of that work has not been published, and neither has an updated total for the current 266-unit plan.
• The Reform: Finish the review before approving. Put the full plan, committed financing and a municipal cost analysis in public before the vote. Get the money in writing. Follow the city's own plans, which call for scattered sites at human scale, not a mega-project on difficult ground. </aside>

“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”

Matthew 7:26-27

In Hudson, the sand is clay. The flood risk is already on the record.

The Planning Board holds a public hearing on Bliss 2.0 this week: a proposed redevelopment of approximately 266 apartments across several parcels, including land where an earlier HHA proposal encountered serious soil constraints. HHA has not published an updated total cost for the revised plan. Hudson has run this show twice already. Both times it has ended the same way.

The TV Show Formula

Hudson keeps greenlighting the same show. It has a formula, four beats an episode, and reality cancels it every time. Then the city renews it for another season.

Hudson has two settings for a bad idea: greenlight and gaslight.

1. The rush. An important vote is forced onto a short clock, before the homework is done.
2. The get-out-of-jail-free card: “Community Care.” A story of compassion, real suffering, urgent need, is played to skip the rules, the eligibility test and the legal process. Ask a hard question and you are recast as cruel.
3. The compassion shield. The residents’ genuine suffering is raised to drown out the handful of officials who actually read the law. Question the plan and you are cast as the enemy of the people it claims to help.
4. The predictable finale. What the dissenters warned about happens, on schedule. You saw it coming from the cold open.

The story is not one bad vote. It is the show, made into re-runs. Three episodes, all recent, from 2024 to 2026, and there are almost certainly earlier ones, including during the COVID-19 years, that deserve their own accounting. One grant effort was abandoned. The Mill Street litigation remains unresolved. The third reaches its public hearing this Tuesday.