As goes the city, so goes the county. And both will be irreversibly injured if Albany sleepwalks into the misapplication of nearly half-a-billion once-in-a-generation dollars.
Hi. My name is Jesse; you may remember me from such prophetic “told ya so” divinations as the Central Warehouse debacle. While the adults in the room ultimately spared us the indignity of that nine-figure boondoggle, we’ve arrived at the precipice of another.
In her executive budget for the 2026 Fiscal Year that kicked off April 1, New York Governor Kathy Hochul proposed a “City of Albany Rescue Plan,” to wit, a colossal $400 million financial injection into the heart of our capital city. But the devil is in the details, and details have a way of winding up in the clutches of special interests.
And so I present my latest quixotic screech into the void. It’s the first in a two-part last-ditch effort to guide Albany’s revitalization by grandiosely borrowing from the legacy of Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 “Albany Plan of Union,” which sought to unify the 13 colonies under a central government. My 2025 formulation of the “Albany Plan” seeks to unify the 15 wards under a more dynamic one.
This new plan introduces the Six Pillars by Which to Guide Albany’s Rejuvenation. And to ensure digestibility despite our collective incapacity to focus for more than four seconds, I’ve contrived an easy acronym by which to convey my “R-E-C-I-P-E” for revitalizing Albany.
Rehabilitation.
Education.
Civic services.
Innovation.
Preservation.
Empathy.
Unless our city, county, and state leaders justify expending those $400 million pursuant to these Six Pillars, we risk bearing witness to a graft-fueled public works fiasco the likes of which Albany has never seen. And that’s saying something.
PILLAR #1: REHABILITATION
Municipal investment should focus on rehabbing Albany’s existing neighborhoods, not on creating new ones. Rather than finance construction of large ambitious projects, the executive budget should mobilize area contractors to restore blighted properties, and thereby return them to the tax rolls.
The future will condemn our failure to undertake a beautification campaign targeting Albany’s economically impoverished neighborhoods specifically via subsidies to local architects, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and remodeling outfits. Political leadership must resist the impulse to outsource this mission to large developers selling either snake oil or soccer stadiums — the latter of which would require $180 million in state aid to establish a Capital District presence for New York’s fifth most popular sport.
While it might be attractive to deploy funds in one-shot infusions to the politically well-connected who're already clamoring for them, how many times must we be (Red)burned before we learn our lesson? To a developer, there exists no problem that can’t be fixed with a residential high rise. But hallucinatory proposals to convert the Corning Tower into condos aren’t what Albany needs when it’s already pockmarked by massive apartment complexes facing foreclosure or abandoned midway through construction.
Instead of more egoistic glass-paneled monuments, could we first address the city’s run-of-the-mill dystopia? It’s on full display during any aimless drive through mid-to-downtown Albany’s jungle of dilapidated buildings adorned with red placards crisscrossed by diagonal white stripes — an aesthetic needlessly similar to the Confederate battle flag.
In accordance with §§ 311.5.2 and 311.5.4(3) of the 2006 International Fire Code, these “Unsafe Vacant Building Signs” signify “that structural or interior hazards exist to a degree that consideration should be given to limit firefighting to exterior operations only, with entry only occurring for known life hazards.” According to the results of my recent Freedom of Information Law request, there are currently 873 of these tumors within city limits.
Local pundits who dream of a thousand new apartments down in the parking-lot district seem oblivious to the fact that — in a city legally ineligible for rent stabilization because the rental vacancy rate is nearly 10 percent — it isn’t just housing scarcity that’s driving away would-be residents. Indeed, the prospect of living in Albany has become so repellant that the city is scrapping its decade-old residency requirement for municipal employment just so it can fill 60 open jobs.
So no, I think we’re good on the construction of new apartment complexes underwritten by eight-figure taxpayer-subsidized wealth transfers to Westchester-based development behemoths. Instead, let’s look to the heart of the city, where nearly a thousand vacant properties are scaring off everyone except The Walking Dead franchise’s most junior location scout.
The Albany County Land Bank claims it will take “more than $200 million to rehabilitate Albany’s vacant buildings.” Word; guess who just found more than $200 million dollars lying around?
We need a “Revitalization Czar” tasked with coordinating lines of effort among government agencies, regional not-for-profits, and the Capital District’s small-business construction outfits to reanimate crumbling edifices or, if unsalvageable, tear them down — paving the way (figuratively/literally) for new installations in blighted communities. More on this about 10 minutes from now when you reach Pillar #6.
PILLAR #2: EDUCATION
Fortifying Albany’s reputation as a world-class academic destination begins with a steadfast focus on secondary education. Our public schools do more than just teach our adolescents; they also mold, occupy, and inspire them. We must all rally to marshal manpower and resources in taking responsibility for our kids. If they live in Albany, they’re our kids.
I don’t know enough about the collapse of Saint Rose to opine on whether that college could’ve been saved. But I lament its loss, as our region’s esteemed higher learning institutions are critical foundations for neighborhoods’ economic vibrancy, magnets for diversity in culture and thought, and open-armed entreaties that former students establish roots in their adopted Capital District home.
Still, while it’s imperative that we entrench Albany as a premier hub for collegiate education and graduate research, we face a far more dire scholastic funding prioritization: public schools, and the heroic educators on whom we depend to care for our teenagers.
Have you yet processed New York Times reporting on the gruesome adolescent literacy crisis revealed by last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress? I’m more concerned, derivatively, about the high velocity lead puncturing the peace outside my house on Albany’s Lark Street — the source of which presumably has yet to complete his algebra homework.
Albany teens as young as 13 are routinely arrested on firearm charges. Worse, many victims of gun violence themselves are barely halfway through puberty, as was the case of the 17-year-old shot about 250 feet from where I’m writing this column, or the case of the 13- and -14-year-olds shot last month mere blocks from the governor’s mansion just one day after a 19-year-old was shot “several times” on Madison Avenue approximately 10 hours after a 21-year-old was killed a mile-and-a-half up the street.
Chyrons crawling across local newscasts on Independence Day last year blared a chilling report: “Six teens shot in Albany overnight.” And, while cynics will trip over themselves to note that guns are a threat to children in school, too, that’s sophistry; nothing stops us from improving secondary education while simultaneously debating the Second Amendment in uncivil social media comment threads while perched on the toilet.
The fact, fellow Albanites, is that we face a problem uniquely afflicting our youth, and better resourcing the teachers to whom we entrust them is nonnegotiable. Until we’ve thrown the better part of $400 million at this problem, I don’t want to hear a f***ing word about no soccer stadium.
PILLAR #3: CIVIC SERVICES
“Before we prosecute the arsonist, we must put out the fire.” Law enforcement is not the solution to illicit drug use, mental illness, and the homelessness that too often results therefrom. But it’s a condition precedent to finding that solution, and the governor’s proposed $1 million award to the Albany Police Department is scandalously insufficient.
Why has Donald Trump’s approval rating reached an all-time high while the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has dropped to an all-time low? An answer might be gleaned from public comments responding to security camera footage I posted to my “Sheriff of Lark Street” Instagram account, wherein yet another thief brazenly crosses my threshold to steal an Amazon package.
I have no solid proof that the people shrieking at me to “take [my] NIMBY ass back to the suburbs” are fashionably rocking pierced septa and ACAB bumper stickers, but an educated guess wagers that these voices emanate from a political perspective increasingly at odds with the lived experience of many city residents.
And don’t blame what you thought was the gut-reflexive bolshevism of Gen Z, either; according to Democratic political “data guru” David Shor, “young people have gone from being one of the most progressive generations to one of the most conservative,” with a majority of 18-year-old white men, white women, and men of color voting Republican in the last election.
This is why Albany needs to seriously, fundamentally, and urgently reevaluate its perspective on policing.
Throughout the past year, I’ve excoriated city officials all across local media not for failing to eradicate the city’s scourges, but for refusing to acknowledge their magnitude. In that time, a weirdly loaded phrase has crept its way into the capital zeitgeist ever since the Times Union editorial board missed the boat on its coverage of Lark Street:
“Mayor Kathy Sheehan’s administration says it’s trying to address the concerns of merchants who warn that fear of shootings and other forms of violence is driving customers away …. Whether that’s perception or reality on the part of business owners is in some ways beside the point …. Concerns about violence certainly seem to have some basis in hard facts.”
Um, what? The Times Union thinks it’s beside the point to assess whether it’s “perception or reality” that a half-dozen Lark Street shootings in the past two years is driving away customers? It thinks concerns about violence “seem” to have “some” basis in hard facts?
Roger that.
The Times Union’s masterclass on gaslighting must’ve been attended by the governor’s inner circle, because her office soon proclaimed that the $400 million in question would be dedicated to combating Albany’s “struggles with perceptions of public disorder and elevated crime.”
Did ya catch it? The $400 million won’t combat Albany’s public disorder and elevated crime, but rather the perception of such.
And if that’s how the governor conceives of this problem — that it’s just a matter of optics — then of course she’s dedicating only $1 million to the Albany Police Department’s “Public Safety Surge.”
One-million dollars is 1/65th of the Albany Police Department’s total 2025 budget. If perception is all you’re worried about, a million bucks might fit the bill. But Times Union columnist Chris Churchill says it best: “That pittance will have little meaningful impact on policing or crime.”
The Albany Police Department claims there aren’t enough officers to field a more robust police presence. As of March 22, 2025, it’s “seeking to fill 82 officer positions, as it faces a staffing shortage of nearly 25 percent.”
If only capitalism afforded a mechanism to competitively attract talent. *Sigh.*
Gun-related homicides increased in Albany from 2021 to 2022. They increased again in 2023. And while the number of fatal shootings declined in 2024, the total number of shootings last year ballooned — strongly suggesting that the decline in lethal violence is less a “promising trend” than an “indictment of assailants’ competence with a firearm.”
But the guns aren’t even what bothers me most. As one mayoral hopeful put it: “[Albanites] are not worried that they’ll get shot or stabbed. They’re worried that they’re going to be harassed and asked for money and made to feel uncomfortable ... walk[ing] by someone sleeping in front of a store, or urinating in front of a restaurant.”
I’m a full-time city resident and a Lark Street retail business owner. What most degrades my quality of life are quality-of-life offenses, like flagrant mid-day drug use, senseless late-night vandalism, prostitution, aggressive panhandling, pickpocketing, burglary, shoplifting, skyrocketing needle use, public inebriation, and unrepentant curbside defecation.
I’m routinely dragged on Reddit by anonymous Albany residents who insist I’m overstating the incidences of criminality. But when I bring receipts — posting videos of dudes shooting up in front of my Tasting Room’s bay windows or urinating on my front door — I’m then defamed by those ever-shadowy Redditors who lambaste me for being “exploitative.”
All of these misbehaviors are, in fact, crimes; aggregated, they keep residents indoors and customers in the suburbs. Forget your party registration — you know it’s true.
Over the past few months, people wiser and far more patient than I have reintroduced me to the human suffering underlying so many of these social ills. Albany’s full-blown mental-health maelstrom is on full display every day at the Plaza concourse, on Lark and Pearl streets, up-and-down Madison and Central avenues, and in every single city park.
But while addressing the poverty and hunger and desperation afflicting Albany’s most vulnerable is the key to any long-term regeneration of the city’s health, we have to staunch the literal bleeding — by putting more of the Capital District’s best and brightest in blue uniforms and on the streets.
Because when it comes to perception, the one worrying me is the perception that you can commit petty crime in Albany and get away with it scot-free.
PILLAR #4: INNOVATION
Just because it’s the seat of state government doesn’t mean Albany can’t also be the hub of upstate ingenuity, entrepreneurialism, business, and industry. But posturing it as such requires a renewed focus on fostering commerce, expanding employment opportunities, and rehabilitating the city’s image throughout the broader Capital District. “Build, buy, believe in Albany.”
Albany was once the national capital in beer brewing. It’s the birthplace of modern toilet paper. Its former perch at the intersection of the Hudson River and Erie Canal once made it a certifiably global trading hub.
Can Albany regain or surpass its former status as an economic epicenter? Of course not; you’ve pretty much shot your wad when you invented toilet paper. But that’s no excuse for being ranked one of the country’s least business-friendly cities since back when Obama was in office.
In February, the Albany Business Review examined a slew of law firms trading their longtime Albany digs for greener pastures. A month later, it reported that the firm my father founded was following suit.
That exodus isn’t confined to the lawyers, either; downtown Albany’s “office vacancies and empty storefronts are on the rise,” CBS affiliate WRGB reported back in November 2023. The Upstate New York wing of real estate investment firm CBRE has also confirmed that Albany’s commercial “vacancy rate in the second half of 2024 increased to 14.8%.”
It isn’t even just the businesses that are taking flight; our county government is currently angling to sell the Probation Department building on South Pearl Street for half its appraised value, in due recognition of the Albany commercial real-estate market’s decline.
This sad state of affairs is due to lots of factors, be it safety concerns, the collapse of foot traffic, or “the cost/availability of parking.” It’s a death spiral that feeds on itself.
Some Albany restaurateurs claim the city’s cabaret laws have decimated its nightlife. An aspiring whiskey magnate who moonlights as an Enterprise columnist is aghast at the lack of parking lots (to say nothing of the recent attacks that have occurred in the few that exist). Some would-be developers who refuse to identify himself say that “high taxes, excessive city regulation, hostility to landlords, and traffic camera extortion” make investing in Albany commercially untenable.
In truth, I haven’t many personal complaints when it comes to Albany’s support of the business sector. Sure, maybe the city doesn’t need separate building and planning departments, but staffers at those agencies have always been really helpful and responsive. And I wouldn’t have been able to kickstart construction of the Tasting Room without critical assistance from the Capitalize Albany Corporation, which rightfully touts Albany’s immense economic potential as “home to the State Capitol, Albany NanoTech, world renowned hospitals, [and] a number of world-class educational institutions ….”
Still, near-universal anecdote declares cities like Saratoga, Schenectady, and Troy to be superior business gambles. That needs to change. “Commerce is the cornerstone of community” reads a flyer publicizing an “Albany Innovation” meeting of business owners and city/county/state officials on Friday, April 4. Hopefully, stakeholders at this meeting will compile areas of needed attention and devise systems to methodically track progress.
The local business climate is a reflection of the neighborhood that produces it. So let’s bring back the customers and clients! Proof of $400 million well-spent will be an Albany in which residents can productively derive a living, exchange goods and services unencumbered by bureaucracy, and safely indulge in a beer or two like the forebearers who birthed this city.
PILLAR #5: PRESERVATION
Albany’s historical legacy — its myths and machinations, its styles and skylines — is its single greatest resource. By highlighting the city’s architectural traditions and rehabilitating aged infrastructure, we will rediscover a long-dormant “Albany identity” to orient our efforts.
Established in 1614 (officially chartered in 1686), Albany is the oldest city in New York and in the top 10 of America’s oldest cities (technically, it’s the oldest continuing settlement in the nation). Those are distinctions that should be fiercely protected and commercially exploited.
From Center Square’s brownstones to the State Capitol’s Romanesque flourishes, from the Internationalist Brutalism of the Empire State Plaza to the Quackenbush House’s Dutch signatures, Albany’s flairs, streets, and trappings are ripe for rededication.
Tourism. Artistic inspiration. Prestige, pride, purpose. Whether through tax incentives or grants, the city should underwrite a rehabilitative ethos that benefits taxpayers. Façade repairs, removal of extraneous phone and cable lines, installation of historic accoutrements in new bars and restaurants — there are many areas where we can take cues from the likes of Burlington, Charleston, and Savannah in enshrining a historically distinct city character. It would betray our past to forgo it in forging our future.
But more relevantly, this Pillar offers an olive branch to a state apparatus hellbent on spending $150 million to upgrade the New York State Museum, plus another $35 million to study the dismantling of Interstate-787.
Color me ambivalent. That $185 million price tag feels reprehensibly out of touch when the unhoused are legit sleeping overnight in Washington Park’s port-o-johns. Yet I acknowledge the merits of the idea, and this pillar makes philosophical room for upgrades which would equip the museum to serve as a state-of-the-art expression of our entire Empire State.
I just ask that the governor “zoom out” and take a more expansive view of her proposal. For example, it’d be great if schoolkids could tour a dust-free and digitally-interactive museum with displays informed by modern science. But it’d be even better if they could do so without first being introduced to the state capital’s “progress” in ameliorating homelessness, which persists on vivid display out the window as the wheels on the bus go round and round down Madison Avenue.
Similarly, I’d feel more comfortable about the museum’s proposed facelift if the effort began in the plaza’s subterranean parking complex, whose dark-and-dreary labyrinthian unnavigability intimidates every single soul who’s ever been condemned to park there. Like could we at least paint the f***ing walls?
Don’t come at me for questioning why the state government is spending so much as a dime on revamping I-787 — an auxiliary in the Interstate Highway System — when that fancy will undoubtedly require federal funding, coordination, and approval. It’s a great idea, but do we need yet another study to so prove? Let’s just take the Albany Riverfront Collaborative’s word for it, and then put that $35 million towards something more immediately beneficial while we concurrently lobby USDOT to pick up the tab.
What I’m trying to say is that the executive budget’s funding priorities — as depicted in recent town halls and local media — seem out of order. There are lots of ways to shore up Albany’s grandeur; shovel-ready projects should probably receive an extra look.
PILLAR #6: EMPATHY
“Ending poverty is good for business.” Whether it’s your heart or wallet talking, we can all agree that homelessness is unconscionable, hunger is a curse, and racialized socioeconomic inequality is a subtext pervading every discussion about Albany’s rebirth. This is the crux of the matter; there can be no progress amidst a sea of so much suffering. This moment calls on us to be heroes. We may not have all the answers, but we now have $400 million with which to start testing them.
Six years ago, the Urban Institute “mapped the gap between white and black homeownership rates in the 100 cities with the largest number of black households.”
It wasn’t the ostensibly racist South that registered the widest homeownership gaps between Black and white residents — it was the Northeast. And, at 49 percent, wanna take a swing at which city ranked #1 in the Northeast’s racial homeownership divide?
Cue the music, because this distinction calls for the vocal stylings of Mason and Sheehan singing the 1986 classic “Let’s Have a Party, Albany.” And toss us that silver medal while you’re at it, as Albany now boasts the second-highest racial gap in homeownership of any city in the nation. The f***ing nation.
But wait, there’s more.
Nearly 30 percent of Albany’s children live in poverty — more than double the national average — right here in the capital city of a state boasting America’s third highest gross domestic product.
Worse, approximately 700 people are homeless in Albany — the highest number “since at least 2020.” I say “worse” because homelessness is more than just an incomparable nightmare; it’s also a social malady that cripples commerce and thereby delivers a stew of toxic second- and third-order effects.
County Legislator Sam Fein’s rallying cry is more concise:
“We cannot ignore the real effects homelessness has on our communities. But we must also remember that the individuals we see on our streets are human beings — each with a story, each deserving of dignity …. We must develop innovative solutions to permanently house the people in our shelters and on our streets, restoring their dignity while enhancing the vitality of our neighborhoods and the well-being of our entire region.”
So now, just shy of the 4,000-word mark, I present to you the foundational initiative undergirding each of these Six Pillars: deed transfers.
Talk about burying the lead. Here are Pillar #6’s broad contours; they extend directly from Pillar #1’s effort to transform Albany’s 873 vacant properties into homes addressing the needs of two key demographics: the socioeconomically disadvantaged and the socioeconomically devastated.
It starts with that Revitalization Czar coordinating municipal agency purchase (or seizure) of vacant buildings, then soliciting bids to award project contracts, then overseeing renovation, and finally facilitating issuance of the certificates of occupancy.
Lastly, and in conjunction with the zoning and planning boards to ensure compliance with applicable multifamily zoning — or, as necessary, working to secure the necessary variances — the Revitalization Czar will refashion these formerly vacant buildings into deeded condominium units ready for habitation by members of one of two groups:
— GROUP 1: Low-income tenants.
I’ve yet to do the research to ensure any of this could pass legal muster and could survive legal challenge, but the gist is that a city or county (pseudo) agency will orchestrate a lottery, soliciting applications by individuals who meet an extensive array of criteria, some of which could be: (1) no possession of any real property or external sources of income; (2) a minimum of 36 consecutive months of full-time employment; (3) a minimum of 36 consecutive months of tenancy at the same city of Albany residence; (4) no arrests or convictions in the past 36 months; and (5) a letter of support by his or her Common Councilmember.
Applicants meeting these criteria and who are then selected per the lottery will be granted clean title and an offer of immediate occupancy to one of these newly refashioned condominium units. Lottery winners would be responsible solely for continuing to pay the monthly rent to their (former) landlords until they’re released from the lease provisions — a doable requirement, given that the awarded condos would require no competing monthly mortgage payment.
There would obviously be deed restrictions. For example, the deed could be subject to reversion if it were discovered that the property wasn’t owner-occupied at any time during the first seven years of ownership. Similarly, the new owner could be obliged to extend the city/county agency a right of first refusal to buy back the condo at some specified amount within those first seven years. But all this can be easily worked out so as to reinforce the policy objectives.
Those policy objectives are two-fold:
— FIRST, instant homeownership would provide existential breathing room to the hardworking residents of our city who just can’t get ahead. They hold down jobs, they pay their rent, they follow the rules, they do everything right — and yet they remain one illness away from being destitute and homeless; and
— SECOND, it could meaningfully combat Albany’s undeniably glaring racial injustice. Just ask Kerwyn Kirton. He’s the local real estate agent-cum-investor whose mission is to expand homeownership in the historically Black neighborhoods (West Hill, Arbor Hill, and the South End) impoverished by Albany’s 1938 redlining.
What Kirton realizes — and what well-intentioned bleeding hearts often don’t — is that absent a mechanism for awarding property title to the people who actually live in poor neighborhoods, any targeted investment therein ultimately raises the cost of living and thereby drives out existing residents.
It’s called “gentrification,” player; as investment improves environmental conditions, that locality becomes more attractive to outsiders, and rents rise to meet demand as taxes increase to accommodate expanded services. Before long, the intended beneficiaries of those investments are driven to ZIP codes just as penurious as were the ones they inhabited until the new streetlights were installed, the cooperative grocery store arrived, the park was cleaned up, the sidewalks were repaired, and the community center was built.
The only way to prevent that unintended consequence is by awarding clean title to a neighborhood’s struggling yet diligent tenants. Community enhancements then won’t serve to exile residents now impervious to rent hikes. That’s how you ensure a neighborhood’s existing population is the one that actually gets to enjoy the fruits of municipal resourcing. That’s how a historically Black neighborhood maintains its cultural character while shedding its financial distress.
Besides, I’m sick of taxpayer dollars paying for rental vouchers that tenants pass along to landlords, many of whom refuse to make necessary capital improvements and thereby depress area property values. It’s well documented that “owner-occupied properties are better maintained than rental properties”; ergo, facilitating home ownership — not just housing — is itself a community investment that must be the animating policy principle.
Fundamentally, the only thing that matters in this society is home ownership — a home free and clear of mortgages and liens, a home full of memories and belongings, a home offering warmth and safety, a home with a roof and a shower and a bed — a home, as it were, to come home to.
There’s no intergenerational transfer of wealth without ownership of real property. There’s no economic security without ownership of real property. There is no guarantee of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without ownership of real property.
And here, the left finds common cause with the right, since the National Alliance to End Homelessness believes that “Everyone Deserves A Safe, Stable Home” while the CATO Institute declares that “Property is the foundation of every right we have, including the right to be free.”
— GROUP 2: Unhoused persons.
A word on terminology: the word “unhoused” is apparently preferable to “homeless” as a more “person-centered and less stigmatizing term” which “emphasizes the condition rather than defining the individual.”
At best, I have no idea what any of that means. At worst, it’s the latest obnoxiously pedantic bulls*** through which I have to suffer when my Gen Z staffers call me “out of touch” and “cringe.” But if that’s the term preferred by people without a house, I’ll use it; they’ve been through enough as it is.
I will never surrender my American birthright to publicly expound on topics about which I’m clueless. But having spent the past two months getting educated on this issue, I’m prepared to say that I have no earthly idea how someone who’s unhoused is supposed to get housed. I’ve now seen firsthand how much energy an unhoused dude has to expend in finding shelter for the night while securing his next meal, and here’s what’s up: There’s no way out. None. Not without our help.
Albany has more than a dozen shelters accommodating more than a dozen different categories of the needy. They’re staffed by wonderful people doing their best, and used by wonderful people down on their luck — or in the throes of addiction, or mentally unstable, or clinically sick, or whatever.
But many unhoused people avoid these shelters because they’re afraid — rightfully — that they’ll be robbed, assaulted, or exposed to drug use by others experiencing the same horror of homelessness. What to do?
Let’s return to the Revitalization Czar, whose secondary task will be to coordinate the interagency provision of support to unhoused persons who will be granted temporary access to dedicated condominium units (“pods”) fashioned from those previously vacant properties we’ve now restored.
These pods will be equipped with: lockers wherein people can store their belongings; multiple restroom facilities wherein individuals can bathe; a washer-dryer unit to clean clothes; and three to four twin beds in doorless but otherwise private quarters — not unlike an Army training barracks — all of which will be monitored by a minimally invasive security camera apparatus.
Occupancy will be extended to individuals who meet the requisite qualifications to receive assignment to specific pods, and will be permissible only during the daily “occupancy hours” from 6 p.m. till 8 a.m.
From 8 a.m. on — “office hours” — independent contractors will provide basic cleaning services while mental health counselors (and other service providers) use the pods to provide individuals with on-site assistance at scheduled appointment times.
(This approach of proactively meeting needs where they exist borrows from the “Lark Street Treatment” pilot program championed by newly-elected Assemblywoman Gabriella Romero during her tenure on the Common Council.)
The policy objectives are two-fold:
— FIRST, assigning individuals to dispersed “pods” prevents the centralized massing of people experiencing homelessness. Rather than siting shelters and treatment centers in neighborhoods otherwise hostile to them, this approach better integrates unhoused people into the community. Sure, it makes service provision a little more logistically complex, but that’s an ancillary problem with a hundred different solutions and you’re welcome that I’m not addressing them in this marathon column; and
— SECOND, it introduces stability into a small segment of Albany’s unhoused population. How do you provide clean clothes to those who haven’t a place to store or wash them? How can they “get a job” if they don’t have a place to shower, shave, and clip their finger nails? How do they get their Social Security checks without a mailing address?
(For your bathroom reading: a study showing that the provision of long-term housing to homeless people has positive impacts on health, crime, and employment.)
I’m not romanticizing any of this; the particulars that precipitate homelessness won’t disappear with a room and a shower, and a similar program erected in San Francisco was a harrowing failure. But Californians are a lot like Floridians in that they’re the worst, so I’m confident Albanites will do better.
And when one of the assigned pod occupants gets violent because she’s off her medication, or gets obstreperously drunk with the cash for which he begged, then of course the supervisory systems will bar them from their assigned pod and thereby make space for another individual in need of such resources.
This program isn’t a fit for everybody, which is why Albany must still rely on programs like Albany Navigates and the Sheriff’s Homeless Improvement Project, initiatives for which the Sheehan and McCoy administrations warrant full-throated ovation.
The point is that we have to make the infrastructure available first, and we’ve never before had access to the type of funding that could make this “halfway house” approach a reality while fixing up blighted properties.
You got me: I propose none of this altruistically. The entire programmatic fantasy is born of a selfish desire to forget that inequality even exists.
I don’t want to see homelessness. I don’t want to smell homelessness. I don’t want to catch myself thinking “at least the cold keeps the bums away” only to then lie awake wondering where “Ben” went, or how “Purple” is surviving, or how I can ethically justify the fact that I even get to have my own bed.
I didn’t want to be morally challenged back when I used to mumble some stupid reason for why I couldn’t spare a dollar, and I don’t want to feel morally compromised now that the unhoused on Lark Street know not to even ask my hardened heart.
I don’t want to hear former Tasting Room customers say they no longer want “to deal with all the beggars,” or hear current patrons complain about “David” as he panhandles right outside, now that I know — having regrettably straight up asked him why he’s homeless — that he’s learning disabled and was molested multiple times in foster care before being dumped on the streets.
I don’t want to suddenly recognize an injured homeless dude on the I-90 Exit 5 off-ramp as the guy who graduated Voorheesville High School two years behind me, just as I didn’t want to be caught off guard by my conversation with an attractive young woman to whom I once gave $2 when she approached my Jeep at a stoplight.
“Why are you out here, Miss?” I’d asked, ashamedly forking over the only cash I had. “You don’t have anywhere to go?”
“Not anymore,” she’d replied. “I lived with my grandmother but I lost the house when she died.”
Well guess where that house was? F***ing New Scotland, people. That girl was a fellow New Scot, and I didn’t know how to help her, but I saw her six months later looking two decades more wretched while engaging in prostitution on or about Lark Street. I later discovered she’s now incarcerated. Greatttt.
I don’t care if homelessness is a result of “the system” or “their fault” or “institutional racism” or “drugs.” I just don’t care. I’m tired of being psychologically affected by the urban realities my upbringing in New Scotland’s forested depths hid from me.
I don’t have the emotional coping mechanisms to deal with this s***, which is why social media is littered with my angry public meltdowns and pleas that God just send the next flood already.
“They say once you start cutting, it’s a wrap,” said a woman at one of the National Union of the Homeless meetings I’ve been attending. She was referencing the surgical amputations that’re part and parcel of life on the street.
“Oh I knew when he lost his toes they’d take his foot,” said the guy sitting across the circle. “He’s past the knee now.”
Ladies and gentlemen, what are we doing? F*** the museum, f*** the soccer stadium, f*** the bus station and Liberty Square and I-787. Until “Eileen” isn’t securing nighttime shelter in a Washington Park port-o-john, we don’t need any more big ideas coming out of Albany.
Let’s house the unhoused and give a few paycheck-to-paycheck hostages a new lease — not on an apartment, but on life.
In grand summation:
It’s taken me Six Pillars to express what former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanual said with six words: “Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city’s going to be fine.” He’s right, though I’ll credit my column with more fully expounding on what those prescriptions actually entail.
And now, watch as I deftly bring this column full-circle by making note of the state Supreme Court judge whose recent injunction just delayed, yet again, demolition of Albany’s Central Warehouse.
It’s a reminder that investing $400 million in Albany shouldn’t be about building sky-high edifices that end up vacant because of what’s happening down at ground-level.
It should be about policing on Pearl Street and parking on Lark Street, about making homes from once-abandoned buildings and entrepreneurs from once-troubled teens, about repurposing a quarter- millennium-old “Albany Plan” to unify not colonies but citizens in recognizing our inextricable destinies.
And so I bequeath unto the Kathys at the helm of state and city government my RECIPE — let’s get cooking.
Jesse Sommer is a lifelong resident of Albany County. Email him at jesse@altamontenterprise.com.
