Love reading your articles, as a writer you get right into the heart of what you are writing about, so that the reader can feel and visualize the topic you are writing about. I remember when Bliss Towers was being built along with Schuyler Court, and Hudson Terrace Apartments. I believe Hudson Terrace was built during the time Urban Renewal happened to the City of Hudson. All houses near the river, and above were torn down. Residents who either owned homes or rented in these areas had to leave and “figure out where they were going to live”. Soon Hudson Terrace was built, next came the town houses on lower State Street, Schuyler Court, and Bliss Towers. All of these buildings were beautiful buildings, and maintained at the time. As years went by, Bliss Towers seemed to be the forgotten building, it was as if whoever was managing it gave up on the building. Over the years of not maintaining a building like Bliss Towers, eventually if it’s in disrepair it will crumble. The residents living there shouldn’t have to live in conditions like they are. The discussions of renovating has been going on for years, by now what should have been renovated is no longer. Now, the Planning Board and a new developer are going to give it a go, the pictures of what is to be built are very nice, giving some hope to the residents, instead of the residents knowing the only answer is to leave. Those who were born and raised in the City of Hudson, are getting the feeling of being pushed out, the residents are getting the feeling that they no longer can call Hudson their home. Keep on writing Caitie, you are a voice for so many!
Thank you for this kind (and informative) comment, Carol! I am learning so much as I write these, and I hope they are contributing to a collective memory or shared understanding of what Hudson was (and can be!). Thanks for reading along!
Thank you again, we are having the same conversation out here on the Cape, although it may look like it has totally different needs/history. Many of us are coming up with solutions but there is a lot of push back by people concerned about property values etc. I loathe the idea that my grandchildren will ask me why so many houses are empty (second home owners) while people have nowhere to live
Thanks, Kathe! I think the babes have so much wisdom to share when it comes to topics like this. To my 8-year-old, it is completely baffling that some folks have multiple homes while others don’t have one. We learn to accept the conditions around us pretty quickly. I find discussing this with my kids motivates me all over again!
I'm living in a ten-story condo building in West Palm Beach, Florida. I am the Treasurer of the Home Owners Association Board of Directors. It was built in 1968, so it's not much older than Bliss Towers. For decades, there was little maintenance done to the infrastructure of the building, roof, waterproofing, hurricane safety, and structural concrete. Since the collapse of the condo building in Miami in 2021 that killed 98 people, the state government has stepped in to require a system to evaluate buildings and create ongoing funding mechanisms to assure that maintenance is in fact done. This works through an engineering review of the main systems of the building and a thirty-year-plus projection of when a system, like a roof, would need to be replaced. The building is then required to set aside funds in protected accounts so that, when, say, a $1.5 million roof replacement is needed, the money will be available. In the case of a condominium association, these funds come from the owners. Obviously, for publicly funded housing, this requirement would be part of some government's budget.
For our building, we have the engineering firm that does the structural audits, also review the non-structural elements of the building, like carpets, the pool and all the elements associated, elevators, and so on. This means that we can plan along similar lines to build cash reserves so that repair or replacement doesn't come as a financial surprise.
This process is hardly painless. We have people who have been living in the building for many decades for whom the additional costs are not easily borne.
I might note that we humans don't like to think so far ahead, so there appears to be a natural tendency not to plan ahead. And, in an era that is still typified by Ronald RFegan's famous quip about government being the problem, we as a country have done a terrible job at maintaining our infrastructure, except for our sacred war machine (using Trump's terminology). You can see an overview of our scoring here: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Executive-Summary-2025-Natl-IRC-WEB.pdf
Nothing you wrote here has anything to do with what Caitie's talking about in her post. It will furthermore also entice very few people, if any, to acquire your self-published book.
Perhaps I was not direct enough. There are tools available to assess the life span of virtually every element of a structure. These can be used to construct a phased finance plan to ensure that funds are available to repair or replace when required. For example, here in Florida, an asphalt-built-up roof system has an expected 20-year life. Our building’s roof has 18 years of life remaining. So, every year we set aside money that will accumulate and provide the required funds in 2044, when the roof will likely need to be replaced. This sort of planning should be required for multi-family housing, public or private, so that you don’t get into the elevators described in Caitie’s piece.
Thanks for mentioning my book, THE HEIST – how the rich and corporations stole the American dream. I didn’t realize that my note was serving to promote it?
Yeah, a little more directness would have indeed been helpful.
The problem with Bliss and why it's so contentious in Hudson is that it's not "normal" housing. I can't imagine that anyone in the city truly and rationally believes it isn't due for a rebuild. We know that a bunch of units are out of service and that elevators never work because the building is crooked.
It needs to be replaced and there's no alternative to this. There is currently money, both public and private, and they should get going on this before that disappears. I get a strong vibe that this new Planning Board chair is setting the table here to make this difficult. I am convinced that at least to some degree this has to do with who is living in these structures.
As someone who lived on Warren St for fifteen years(until 2024) within a 150 yards of Bliss and knew a few people who lived there, I was not entirely surprised by Caitie’s description….. certainly at this point there are on,y two paths. Shut the building down entirely or tear it down and replace the units lost with new construction.
The uneasiness of the Ron Bogle declaration on the realities of those living in Bliss Tower and what this should mean for its replacement is justified. It was extremely carefully worded but ultimately not that well camouflaged: He, and that probably includes a lot of the first ward, find the whole idea of Bliss distasteful.
I can't help but think that bringing up objections like human scale and durable materials may just be a NIMBYism-delivery-vehicle because he of course is fully aware that the funds to do it "more nicely" don't exist. And therefore, we can't do a replacement at all.
The ability to “see the beauty of the country around them” is probably a sensibility not shared by every resident of Bliss Towers either and yet here he is making himself the spokesperson for Bliss Towers residents when maybe he shouldn't. If there's one thing that I am certain of is that these residents know what they want and need, likely far more so than Ron Bogle.
"" When he first moved in, he remembers a stronger sense of neighborliness in the building. “Everybody pretty much got along and looked out for each other,” he told me. Neighbors helped one another with childcare, shared food, and kept an eye out for each other’s families. ""
The above comment can be interchanged with any neighborhood in Hudson or in fact in any town across America. I grew up on 8th St. in Hudson from 1956 until I was married and moved out in 1980. I can fondly recall the neighborhood kids playing (and fighting) together, shoveling neighbors sidewalks when winters were winters, my mother baking cookies for elderly neighbors and running to Young's Deli for those that could not do it on their own. To this day I can tell you next door neighbor Ruth's order of potato salad, rice pudding and TAB soda ! I can sit here 60 years later and tell you who lived in each house, what kind of car they drove and where they worked ! Sadly times have changed.
Nice job Caitie. Thanks for putting a personal touch on a problem that has been years in the making. Hoping a reasonable solution is coming soon.
Love reading your articles, as a writer you get right into the heart of what you are writing about, so that the reader can feel and visualize the topic you are writing about. I remember when Bliss Towers was being built along with Schuyler Court, and Hudson Terrace Apartments. I believe Hudson Terrace was built during the time Urban Renewal happened to the City of Hudson. All houses near the river, and above were torn down. Residents who either owned homes or rented in these areas had to leave and “figure out where they were going to live”. Soon Hudson Terrace was built, next came the town houses on lower State Street, Schuyler Court, and Bliss Towers. All of these buildings were beautiful buildings, and maintained at the time. As years went by, Bliss Towers seemed to be the forgotten building, it was as if whoever was managing it gave up on the building. Over the years of not maintaining a building like Bliss Towers, eventually if it’s in disrepair it will crumble. The residents living there shouldn’t have to live in conditions like they are. The discussions of renovating has been going on for years, by now what should have been renovated is no longer. Now, the Planning Board and a new developer are going to give it a go, the pictures of what is to be built are very nice, giving some hope to the residents, instead of the residents knowing the only answer is to leave. Those who were born and raised in the City of Hudson, are getting the feeling of being pushed out, the residents are getting the feeling that they no longer can call Hudson their home. Keep on writing Caitie, you are a voice for so many!
Thank you for this kind (and informative) comment, Carol! I am learning so much as I write these, and I hope they are contributing to a collective memory or shared understanding of what Hudson was (and can be!). Thanks for reading along!
Thank you again, we are having the same conversation out here on the Cape, although it may look like it has totally different needs/history. Many of us are coming up with solutions but there is a lot of push back by people concerned about property values etc. I loathe the idea that my grandchildren will ask me why so many houses are empty (second home owners) while people have nowhere to live
Thanks, Kathe! I think the babes have so much wisdom to share when it comes to topics like this. To my 8-year-old, it is completely baffling that some folks have multiple homes while others don’t have one. We learn to accept the conditions around us pretty quickly. I find discussing this with my kids motivates me all over again!
I'm living in a ten-story condo building in West Palm Beach, Florida. I am the Treasurer of the Home Owners Association Board of Directors. It was built in 1968, so it's not much older than Bliss Towers. For decades, there was little maintenance done to the infrastructure of the building, roof, waterproofing, hurricane safety, and structural concrete. Since the collapse of the condo building in Miami in 2021 that killed 98 people, the state government has stepped in to require a system to evaluate buildings and create ongoing funding mechanisms to assure that maintenance is in fact done. This works through an engineering review of the main systems of the building and a thirty-year-plus projection of when a system, like a roof, would need to be replaced. The building is then required to set aside funds in protected accounts so that, when, say, a $1.5 million roof replacement is needed, the money will be available. In the case of a condominium association, these funds come from the owners. Obviously, for publicly funded housing, this requirement would be part of some government's budget.
For our building, we have the engineering firm that does the structural audits, also review the non-structural elements of the building, like carpets, the pool and all the elements associated, elevators, and so on. This means that we can plan along similar lines to build cash reserves so that repair or replacement doesn't come as a financial surprise.
This process is hardly painless. We have people who have been living in the building for many decades for whom the additional costs are not easily borne.
I might note that we humans don't like to think so far ahead, so there appears to be a natural tendency not to plan ahead. And, in an era that is still typified by Ronald RFegan's famous quip about government being the problem, we as a country have done a terrible job at maintaining our infrastructure, except for our sacred war machine (using Trump's terminology). You can see an overview of our scoring here: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Executive-Summary-2025-Natl-IRC-WEB.pdf
Nothing you wrote here has anything to do with what Caitie's talking about in her post. It will furthermore also entice very few people, if any, to acquire your self-published book.
Perhaps I was not direct enough. There are tools available to assess the life span of virtually every element of a structure. These can be used to construct a phased finance plan to ensure that funds are available to repair or replace when required. For example, here in Florida, an asphalt-built-up roof system has an expected 20-year life. Our building’s roof has 18 years of life remaining. So, every year we set aside money that will accumulate and provide the required funds in 2044, when the roof will likely need to be replaced. This sort of planning should be required for multi-family housing, public or private, so that you don’t get into the elevators described in Caitie’s piece.
Thanks for mentioning my book, THE HEIST – how the rich and corporations stole the American dream. I didn’t realize that my note was serving to promote it?
Yeah, a little more directness would have indeed been helpful.
The problem with Bliss and why it's so contentious in Hudson is that it's not "normal" housing. I can't imagine that anyone in the city truly and rationally believes it isn't due for a rebuild. We know that a bunch of units are out of service and that elevators never work because the building is crooked.
It needs to be replaced and there's no alternative to this. There is currently money, both public and private, and they should get going on this before that disappears. I get a strong vibe that this new Planning Board chair is setting the table here to make this difficult. I am convinced that at least to some degree this has to do with who is living in these structures.
As someone who lived on Warren St for fifteen years(until 2024) within a 150 yards of Bliss and knew a few people who lived there, I was not entirely surprised by Caitie’s description….. certainly at this point there are on,y two paths. Shut the building down entirely or tear it down and replace the units lost with new construction.
The uneasiness of the Ron Bogle declaration on the realities of those living in Bliss Tower and what this should mean for its replacement is justified. It was extremely carefully worded but ultimately not that well camouflaged: He, and that probably includes a lot of the first ward, find the whole idea of Bliss distasteful.
I can't help but think that bringing up objections like human scale and durable materials may just be a NIMBYism-delivery-vehicle because he of course is fully aware that the funds to do it "more nicely" don't exist. And therefore, we can't do a replacement at all.
The ability to “see the beauty of the country around them” is probably a sensibility not shared by every resident of Bliss Towers either and yet here he is making himself the spokesperson for Bliss Towers residents when maybe he shouldn't. If there's one thing that I am certain of is that these residents know what they want and need, likely far more so than Ron Bogle.
"" When he first moved in, he remembers a stronger sense of neighborliness in the building. “Everybody pretty much got along and looked out for each other,” he told me. Neighbors helped one another with childcare, shared food, and kept an eye out for each other’s families. ""
The above comment can be interchanged with any neighborhood in Hudson or in fact in any town across America. I grew up on 8th St. in Hudson from 1956 until I was married and moved out in 1980. I can fondly recall the neighborhood kids playing (and fighting) together, shoveling neighbors sidewalks when winters were winters, my mother baking cookies for elderly neighbors and running to Young's Deli for those that could not do it on their own. To this day I can tell you next door neighbor Ruth's order of potato salad, rice pudding and TAB soda ! I can sit here 60 years later and tell you who lived in each house, what kind of car they drove and where they worked ! Sadly times have changed.
Nice job Caitie. Thanks for putting a personal touch on a problem that has been years in the making. Hoping a reasonable solution is coming soon.