To the Editor:

I sent a complimentary email to my Central Warehouse pen pal, Jesse Sommer, on his April 3 column in The Altamont Enterprise setting forth his RECIPE for revitalizing Albany using the $400 million allocation in Governor Kathy Hochul’s budget [“The Albany Plan (v.2): Six Pillars by Which to Guide Albany’s Rejuvenation,” April 2, 2025].

He responded by giving me homework to write a letter to the Enterprise editor in support of his views if I truly did indeed support them.

Since then, while I have been stewing on a response in support of Jesse’s RECIPE, he has served up a second course about the 21 Albany County leaders and luminaries who would be (could be? maybe at least should be?) instrumental in bringing his RECIPE to fruition, whom he calls the Albany Avengers, but who in view of the culinary theme of his proposal, might just as easily be called the “Capital City Celebrity Chefs” [“‘The Albany Avengers’ or whatever,” April 23, 2025].

To this group, which already has all of the cooking utensils needed for the RECIPE, he recommends naming a Revitalization Czar to manage the age-old cooking problem of “too many chefs.”

For those of you who might have missed Jesse’s cooking course in earlier editions, the core of his RECIPE to revitalize Albany to the benefit of even the suburbs is to use a substantial part of the $400 million to put Albany’s 873 vacant and in many cases derelict properties into the hands of financially strapped city residents who want to and need to live there, but increasingly can’t afford to, with the appropriate renovation capital so that they can start to regrow a city community that their families can proudly live and work in and suburbanites can happily visit.

Otherwise, if they can’t find somewhere to live in the city of Albany, they might have to come looking for apartments, houses, and development in your neighborhood, making one suspicious that zoning laws and boards and apartment development moratoriums are there for more than one reason.

Competing with this vision is the proposal to use some of the money to build a soccer stadium that could further displace the residents who need to live in the heart of Albany and that will sit empty for a good part of the year before the soccer franchise probably fails, like for example the hockey, baseball, basketball, arena football, lacrosse and, yes, soccer teams of years gone by.

Proponents point out that a restaurant and entertainment district will grow up around the stadium, like, for example the ones-not-near the MVP Arena, Times Union Center, Pepsi Arena, Knickerbocker Arena; or the RPI Field House, or the Tom and Mary Casey Stadium — the what? (that’s where UAlbany’s Great Danes play football during the late summer and fall) and the Joe Bruno Stadium.

A stadium deal and suburban zoning will no doubt work in harmony to ensure that people — many low-wage earners known heroically as essential workers during the pandemic, on the cusp of being homeless — are in fact made homeless or motivated to leave New York state further playing into the narrative of those who would “Save Our State.”

Pundits and developers are pushing this concoction — picture a giant collapsed $150 million-plus stadium soufflé leaving commercially deserted (not desserted) streets populated by more people living out of supermarket carts with food pantry vans serving as the neighborhood version of Door Dash, surrounded by uninhabited buildings sporting the red X of decay. That’s not the place where families will want to come visit.

People and families need to live in housing that they can afford in the current economy. Development that makes neighborhoods even more unaffordable is a recipe for disaster and should be a non-starter for the Capital City Celebrity Chefs — at least those who hold elected office and their subordinates.

The funding priority should be to livability for current residents over riverfront set-ups for further gentrification that will work to push out current residents. Any funding that is left over could then be allocated to revitalizing the New York State Museum.

Use the money to make the city’s uninhabited properties available to the people who need them and who alone can create a community that all the residents of Albany County can be happy with and proud of — following the RECIPE along the lines recommended by Jesse Sommer.

Here’s the chance for the governing supermajority in the city of Albany, in supermajority Albany County, in supermajority New York state to do a really right thing. Otherwise, what good is this trifecta of supermajorities if they repeat past mistakes or just do what the other side would probably do.

Thank you, Jesse Sommer, for taking the time to crystalize this vision.

William Cooney

Guilderland