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Publication Date: August 11th, 2026
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Tonight, Hudson's Planning Board decides whether to close the hearing on the largest development in the city's modern history: the quarter billion dollar rebuild (and potential doubling) of Bliss Towers. The editors of Hudson Common Sense have read the full public file and filed the open letter below. It asks the Board for exactly one thing before any vote. Every document cited, and every letter in the series, is at www.HudsonCommonSense.com/docket-hha.
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Images remixed, adapted from, or inspired by The Economist visual language. Satirical image based on MountCo senior leadership and real City of Hudson organizations related to the Bliss 2.0 issue, and current affairs.
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A quarter of a billion dollars, at last statement. The only publicly reported total, roughly 220 million dollars, belonged to an earlier 315-unit concept. No updated total for the current plan appears in the public file*.** It would rise on the same ground where Hudson's urban renewal program leveled a neighborhood to build Bliss Towers in 1973. The developer was chosen three years ago. Yet tonight, the application on file counts 250 apartments and the drawings show 276. No current total cost appears in the record at all.*
Start with what everyone agrees on. Bliss Towers is failing, with 55 apartments standing offline this year. The waiting list reached about 200 names before it closed. Current residents deserve secure, better housing. We have said from the start that the tower should come down. Nobody writing to this Board disputes any of that. The question before you is narrower. Is this plan defined enough to approve now?
This is not our characterization. It is your own consulting engineer's. In a memo dated the 20th of July, 2026, Rennia Engineering Design records that the application indicated 250 units. The current plans show 276. The same memo notes a submission built from drawings dated between 2023 and 2025, with no title page and no table of contents. It also records building heights mislabeled as over 100 feet. The applicant has not said which count is right. At this point we would settle for either.
None of that is the serious part. The engineer's open items are. Variances appear to be required for lot depth, front and side yards, usable open space, and lot coverage, which reaches 96.3 percent. Water and wastewater will-serve letters and approvals are still pending. Several comments are marked Comment Remains, and the memo calls itself part of continued review. That was three weeks ago.
Cost is no clearer. The quarter billion figure above comes from an earlier version of the plan. No current total development cost appears anywhere in the file.
One further record point tells its own story. This Board voted 6 to 0 for a negative declaration on the 28th of May, 2026. The Board adopted the negative declaration on the 28th of May, 2026. The written determination was posted to the public file months later. SEQRA requires the negative declaration to be documented and handled according to its filing and notice requirements. The public record should show when that occurred. The paperwork caught up only after residents checked.
Then there is the ground, in question for years. Alan Weaver, the Housing Authority's own former chair, said so on the record at this Board's public comment period on Tuesday, July 21st. Recalling an earlier redevelopment attempt, he told the Board the soil “would not support the building we had proposed without extensive, huge, major foundation work that... that make it cost prohibitive, and our structure was smaller than what you are proposing.” That statement has never been retracted in public. It sits in the file beside a plan for two new buildings, with a third to follow.
Scale is unsettled as well. The site houses 84 residents today, a figure the Housing Authority's former chair confirmed. The plan would grow that to more than 500 people on the same blocks, at 276 apartments and just two people each. That re-concentrates subsidized housing on one site. Hudson's housing plans point the other way. The 2018 plan calls for balanced, mixed-income housing throughout the city, while the 2021 Affordable Housing Development Plan explicitly favours distributing affordable housing across multiple neighbourhoods rather than concentrating it on a few blocks.