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Publication Date: September 10, 2026
Image remixed creatively from The Economist Magazine.
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On Tuesday night, the day after Labor Day, Hudson’s Planning Board voted to close public comment on the Bliss redevelopment. The numbers have not changed: ~250 apartments, $220 million, roughly $800,000 per unit, before expected cost over-runs. The council chamber where Hudson has made most of its expensive mistakes was full. The room held the whole story.
Group one wore green. More than two dozen residents came as the Friends of 2nd Street, neither blue nor red. They did not ask for less housing; they asked for a better plan. Nobody paid them. They gave up an evening they will never bill to anyone, to question a project that will never make them a dollar.
Unpaid residents and supporters, Tuesday night. The paid consultants and Welfare Brokers showed up later.
Group two was smaller and familiar. Among the residents who spoke in favor of the project were Kite's Nest co-founder Kaya Weidman and 5th Ward Council member Claire Cousin, now the organization’s Director of Youth Power. That donor and taxpayer supported nonprofit is building a $14 million riverfront campus blocks from the Bliss site. The same faces made the same speeches in 2019. The group has not grown.
Group three stood at the back in vests and suits: consultants, subcontractors, and Mountco staff, paid to be in Hudson. The architect, Alexander Gorlin, did not drive up from the city. He sparred with board members over Zoom. This group grows every meeting. Persuading Hudson to take Albany’s money is now a business model, and for some in town a side hustle. The hurry has a reason. The development team has urged a prompt decision so the project can compete for state financing, which Mountco said could be considered in December.
The supporters have one strong argument, and we will state it plainly. Bliss Towers is failing, and the families inside deserve better homes now. Joan Hunt of Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood calls the objections stall tactics. If the choice were this plan or nothing, she would have a case.
It is not the choice. The real choice is between good housing and bad housing. Bad housing doubles the unit count on the same two blocks and shrugs at flood maps. It repeats the mistake Hudson made in 1972, when it concentrated subsidized housing on one site. Good housing follows the jobs, the schools, and the scale of the street, so that a child born there is not born into a default. Since the 1990s, federal housing policy has promoted reducing concentrated poverty and developing more economically integrated housing. Hudson is being asked to revive it at $800,000 a door.
There is a reason the plan arrived fully formed. The Hudson Housing Authority board settled key elements in executive sessions closed to the public, then delivered a deeply flawed plan to the Planning Board as a finished fact. Claire Cousin sat on that board as vice chair while it did so. Kite’s Nest, one of the plan’s few local beneficiaries, now pays her salary. For its sponsors to say the public has not weighed in is disingenuous. The public was never given the opportunity. And the claim that this concerns only one ward is flatly false. Every Hudson taxpayer is being compelled to underwrite the plan. Credible modern evidence calls it bad for its occupants, bad for the Second Ward, and bad for the city. That is no way to run a city.
Strip away the theater and three points command something close to consensus in this city. The towers should come down. The families inside them, a few hundred people at most, should get new replacement housing first. And the $220 million plan to remake the Second Ward at $797,000 a door is a mistake. The Friends of 2nd Street petition puts the third point in writing and has attracted 144 signatures. Ask any resident who does not draw a paycheck from the poverty economy and you will hear all three. The politicians have not caught up. The Planning Board may not have either. The next few years will do the catching.