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.

Either I’m tilting at windmills — routinely polluting the Enterprise with doomsday admonitions to repent before the future swallows us whole — or there really is something to the economic efficacy of smalltown USA.

But we don’t need to choose right now, because it’s my column and, rather than defend my perspective, I’ll just demand that readers presume its merit. So with the abiding thesis that a sense of place is the most stable and fertile ground on which to construct a business, I write to tell y’all about two new websites — NewScotlandHistory.org and OurNewScotland.com — which extend the Town of New Scotland from the physical to the digital.
 

The New Scotland Historical Association

On June 13, 2023, the New Scotland Historical Association launched its new organizational website at www.NewScotlandHistory.org.  Designed by an “elder Millennial” — those vanguards of the generational cohort who came into being even before the release of Nintendo’s “Mario Bros.” — this website was immediately stale upon launch. It boasts no generative artificial intelligence integrations, it has no mobile application companion, it can’t cook your dinner or fold your laundry.

And yet it still fulfills its core mission of making New Scotland more accessible to residents. New Scots reading this column online should click its embedded links to tour the dramatic Xennial upgrade of NSHA’s predecessor website.

It offers a brief history of both the town and organization.  

It exhaustively lists every historical marker in the jurisdiction.  

It provides information about the New Scotland Museum and its featured exhibit. (Psst! If this is the first time you’re learning that New Scotland has a museum, you need to get our more — or, I suppose, you need to spend more time on your phone’s web browser, since many of the museum’s collections may be digitized and presented online in the years to come.)

The site offers both web-and-mail-ordering options for a slew of “New Scottish” literary titles, to include “A Sketch of the Beginnings of a Nineteenth Century Railroad Town” — Dennis Sullivan’s heartstring-tugging treatise on Voorheesville — as well as an “Images of America” series installment entitled “New Scotland Township.”

There’s “Times of Our Lives: New Scotland Memories” — a compendium of memories and materials published by NSHA in 2011 — and a history of the Indian Ladder Region by Tim Albright and Laura Ten Eyck (New Scottish institutions in their own right).

There’s also corporate sponsor information, membership applications, a list of ways to volunteer with NSHA, and a donation page where site visitors can lend financial support to this not-for-profit’s mission of “preserving, protecting, and promoting history in the Town of New Scotland through the stewardship of material culture directly related to the Town.”

You can additionally peruse nearly two decade’s worth of issues of The Sentinel, NSHA’s quarterly newsletter. (Check out my winter 2018 contribution entitled “The ‘New Scot’ Defined: What It Means to Be New Scottish at This Moment in Time and Space,” edited as it was by my seventh-grade English teacher.)  

As an NSHA trustee and New Scottish entrepreneur, I’m militantly committed to securing New Scotland’s rural and agrarian traditions — both for their own sake and because those bucolic, pastoral landscapes that bound the drive from the city of Albany up into the Helderbergs directly impact my business. Any threat to that environment or the community therein directly jeopardizes my brand.

That’s why I’m also proud to be a charter member of another estimable organization, to wit:
 

“Our New Scotland”

“Our New Scotland” is the trade name for New Scotland’s business community. Accessible online at www.OurNewScotland.com, this organization promotes the interests of small businesses located within New Scotland and just outside its borders. (The consensus was that the group’s Hilltown members warrant distinction as honorary New Scots.)

Conceived in 2022 but officially launched just this year, Our New Scotland remains a work in progress. It’s currently experimenting with annual membership fee structures and various service benefits under the guidance of organization founder Craig A. Shufelt (a local entrepreneur himself).

Most recently, Craig has introduced a “speaker series” wherein group members give mini presentations on business-related topics ranging from best practices to social-media marketing techniques. The objective is to help local businesses network among themselves and raise public awareness of their offerings.

Craig is the proprietor of Shufelt Group, a public relations and marketing firm based right here in New Scotland. In assembling this article, I called him up to ask how’d he articulate the premise of Our New Scotland.

“For 30 years, I’ve heard the same refrain when I talk about businesses in town,” Craig said.  “It’s always ‘I had no idea such-and-such even existed!’ Mind you, I’m usually talking about a local enterprise that’s been up-and-running for over a decade. This community is packed to the gills with successful small businesses; they’re what give New Scotland its richness and identity. But you have to seek them out.

“People know Gracie’s Kitchen and Northern Barrell. OK. How many have never once set foot inside? How many people trek out to Central Avenue for a car wash when Advanced Car Wash is half a mile from their front doors?”

Craig notes that many of New Scotland’s businesses are hidden; they either lack a storefront or have one off the beaten path. “People know where to grab a pizza, get some ice cream, or fill their tank. But do they know of New Scotland’s photographers and engineers, beauticians and woodworkers, landscape architects, contractors, dog walkers, dentists, and yoga instructors [and intrepid, debonair, distillers-cum-Enterprise-columnists]? We need to change that.”

Craig is excited by the many vibrant businesses in town, and believes the forthcoming Blackbird Tavern and Romo’s Pizza will further position New Scotland to be a celebrated commercial destination throughout Albany County.

“But these are still just the visible tip of the iceberg,” Craig says. “There’s well over 150 businesses registered to a town with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. That’s one business for every 66 residents. We can’t expect the community to fully flex its potential if our native entrepreneurs are losing patrons and foot traffic to the malls or Amazon.”
 

Community Day

This is why “Our New Scotland” is hard at work preparing to execute the town’s first ever Community Day in Voorheesville’s Jim Nichols Park on Sunday, Aug. 20, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“This’ll be a chance for people to familiarize themselves with the goods and services right beneath their noses,” Craig says. “We’ll have food, a live band, and more than a dozen local vendors sampling their wares and informing their neighbors what they offer. We’re doing everything we can to make sure people come out to support the businesses that contribute so much to New Scotland’s culture, tax revenue, and livability.”

There’s much to be said about people’s charitable impulse. In reality, though, helping a neighbor often begins at the point of sale. And, with that in mind, I want to share a personal anecdote.

I’m a small business owner. Though I launched my enterprise in 2016, the nature of whiskey distilling is such that it wasn’t until last year — after I’d left military service and had aged my spirits for more than half-a-decade in charred oak barrels — that I began selling my “Helderberg Whiskies.”  

New Scotland Spirits has grown by leaps and bounds in those 16 months thanks to the generous support of my fellow New Scots.  

Yet this summer’s crucial sales season has proven vastly different from last year’s; attendance at every one of the farmers’ markets where we’re operating vendor booths is down. Way down.  

This is not unexpected; the economic downturn has left money as tight for families as it is for fledgling startups. Yet the cruel irony of economic recessions is that the only way out of one is to spend. Unlike with the pandemic, this time we won’t be able to depend on the government’s money-printers. We’re literally going to have to shop our way out of this.  

Where consumers shop determines how the economy will be salvaged. Giving your money to big-box stores with corporate headquarters in Delaware ain’t the way. Anxiety shopping online is akin to overnight shipping wads of cash to China’s President Xi.

Farmers’ markets and other such vendor popups are where the community comes to keep the money inside itself. It’s where “neighbors” become a “neighborhood.”  

When you buy a local merchant’s products, you’re equipping him to pay the employees who live down the street from you. You’re enabling her to manufacture more product with partners right here in the Capital District. You’re empowering me to support local not-for-profits that enrich the fabric of our hometown.  (Seeing my whiskey company’s name on the backs of the local Kiwanis T-ball jerseys remains my crowning comedic achievement.)

Like all my fellow Our New Scotland members, entrepreneurs seek neither your charity nor your pity.  But we do seek your business. Our wares might be a few dollars more than the name-brand alternatives, but those extra dollars end up right back in the community.  

That’s the point of Our New Scotland. It’s about keeping the money in town — buying from the local business owners who employ our friends and family so we all can spend your dollars locally in turn. Your friendly neighborhood craftsmen, farmers, artists, chefs, barbers, and service providers have woven the web of this local economy in ways that uplift us all.  

So now let’s bring this full-circle: Our New Scotland exists to give the New Scotland Historical Association a community to chronicle. It’s how we make a living that makes life worth living.

The next time your cupboard is bare, or your grass needs mowing, or your wedding needs a DJ, remember this mantra: 

Shop New Scotland.  

Taste New Scotland.  

Drink New Scotland.  (Spirits.)   

And did I mention that cash is king?

 

On the sixth of January, 2022, a correlated pair of articles appeared in Albany County’s leading periodicals.

In this newspaper, my annual shriek for the Central Warehouse’s demolition lambasted both the building’s then-owner and the local political establishment for their inaction. The Times Union, meanwhile, published a report on the death of Richard Garrity, one of the Central Warehouse’s many erstwhile owners.

This concurrent reporting accentuated what several successive generations of Albanites long ago accepted as twin inalienable truths: that the Central Warehouse is an unconquerable eyesore, and that it will outlast us all.

Yet there persist visionaries who rage against this sorry state of affairs from opposite sides of the same ideological camp. On the one side are those who dream of a rooftop bar atop a rehabilitated Central Warehouse o’er which the sun rises each morning to cast its fiery glow upon a downtown in the throes of renaissance.

On the other are those who dream of a rooftop bar atop some other building constructed in the cratered footprint of a demolished Central Warehouse, the rehabilitation of which would constitute an unconscionable taxpayer boondoggle were it even remotely feasible, which it isn’t.

As a proponent of that pessimistic latter perspective, I felt compelled to get my message out. Thus I’d included in last year’s column an antagonistic broadside calculated to bait upstate New York’s fastest-growing web media company into giving me access to its expansive audience.

Proving once more that The Media loves discussing nothing more than itself, three weeks later I was summoned to appear on Two Buttons Deep’s “Behind the Buttons” podcast to defend myself against the online retaliation I’d invited.

Ever the survivor renowned for my “strategic cowardice,” I immediately disavowed all prior criticism and passionately tongue-kissed the ring while nonetheless advancing my cause. Listeners later called my appearance “a cringeworthy display of opportunistic weakness”; I called it “Tuesday.”

Yet in the days that followed, I received dozens of gushing emails/texts/DMs thanking me for so rationally advocating the Eyesore’s demolition. My message had been sent; it was now upon Destiny to receive it.

But I wasn’t the only savvy partisan postured to manipulate the media that month. I’ll get to Jeffrey Buell in a second.
 

For posterity

Though out of fashion in contemporary journalism, taking a yearlong beat to opine on a topic allows for a more deliberative evaluation of trends. And in contemplating the jagged thorn that’s been side-stabbing Albany for generations, the “long view” is more instructive than the hysterical amnesia wrought by social media’s turbocharged 60/24/7 clickbait battlefield.

So with an eye towards the historical record, here’s an accounting of the last twelve months:

In early March, notorious Eyesore owner Evan Blum — illiterate to the writing on the wall — sought a judicial order to vacate a Feb. 15 foreclosure judgment against him. The action languished in state court for months.

Then, in April, Mr. Blum turned to the federal courts, filing for bankruptcy for the second time in a year to demand that he be allowed to sell the property — the one on which he paid zero taxes after purchasing it for a single dollar — at auction for a minimum of $500,000. The presiding judge dismissed the motion that same day.

In response — and forgetting that Mr. Blum moonlights as a neurotic terminator zombie immune to both compromise and exhaustion — the Times Union triumphantly announced that the Central Warehouse owner’s bankruptcy bid had ended. This prompted Mr. Blum to whisper “hold my beer” while repurposing his state court motion from March to initiate an identical federal lawsuit seeking $1.5 million in damages for Albany County’s alleged “failure to follow the proper steps” in seizing the Central Warehouse via tax foreclosure.

And so it was that on my 40th birthday — with the judicial system thoroughly tied in knots by the money Mr. Blum wasn’t using to pay his overdue school and property taxes — I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Turning to a more ancient arbiter of justice, to wit, God, I made a single birthday wish: that the Central Warehouse immediately implode. And in what initially seemed proof that the Almighty works faster than municipal government, just one day later, on July 28, 2022, a vertical portion of the Eyesore’s façade crumbled onto the railroad tracks.

I later learned this had less to do with prayer than with physics. Because the day prior — on my birthday — the city of Albany had received a structural engineering report warning that the Central Warehouse was in danger of imminent collapse. And though inexplicably caught off guard by the exact scenario of which I’d previously warned, Albany mobilized with a seriousness of purpose heretofore maddeningly absent.

Mayor Kathy Sheehan declared a 30-day state of emergency, County Executive Daniel McCoy ratcheted up the smack-talk with which he’d been lashing Mr. Blum for the better part of six months, and Albany Building Commissioner Rick LaJoy toiled through the weekend alongside work crews to stabilize the Eyesore’s rotting exterior.

Within four days, Amtrak had restored commuter rail service and the public servants who’d rallied in response to this latest of the Eyesore’s potentially lethal hazards were rightfully commended for their diligence.

But because I’m dispositionally prone to drown in the glass half full, I’m obliged to note that our municipal officials were reacting to a predictably avoidable threat. Indeed, this wasn’t even the first time that the Central Warehouse’s state of decay had compelled suspension of Amtrak rail service.

To adapt an old adage: Some leaders make the trains run on time; others arrange for buses when the trains can’t run at all.

Neither politician nor pundit could reasonably claim excuse for their surprise. But that didn’t stop Chris Churchill — the Times Union columnist who on at least three prior occasions has proposed “fixing” the Central Warehouse by painting murals on the very walls which now splattered across the tracks — from seizing the conch shell.

“[The] Central Warehouse is everyone’s problem now,” he declared, as though it hadn’t been everyone’s problem throughout the half-century that it economically condemned an entire urban quadrant while intermittently catching on fire.

And that was just the title. Within the column itself, Mr. Churchill — who’s practically turned unsourced reporting into an art form — derisively claimed that razing the building would cost more than $20 million. Whether this unsubstantiated figure was parroted or concocted, the investigative reporting Mr. Churchill didn’t do now confirms that there exists no agency-led assessment of competing demolition bids, no formal evaluation of environmental mitigation metrics, and no documented examination of deconstruction-and-removal feasibility.

Yes, there are lots of enablers whose gut-reflexive contrarianism has had a pernicious impact on the inertia surrounding this building. But Mr. Churchill is in a league of his own. The man is silent about the impact on Amtrak routing when Assemblymember Patricia Fahy trots out yet another call to dismantle Interstate 787, but when confronted with a four-day demonstration that there exists a successfully workable contingency with which to ameliorate the suspension of rail service, he declares that demolition “isn’t a realistic option.” Unlike wall murals.

Penetrating the cacophonous din of elected leaders spouting from both sides of their mouths should be easy for sophisticated columnists like Mr. Churchill. Yet he’s never once noted that the very same officials who refuse to even consider leveling the Eyesore because “its debris would overwhelm the capacity of area landfills” also just allocated $5 million to study the demolition of I-787, as if the rubble from that fancy could just be left curbside on trash day.

Whatever. For all but a single upstart/upstate web media company to clearly see, the fiasco of July 28 was the willful fault of one man:  Evan Blum, the tax-dodging charlatan hellbent on holding Albany’s skyline hostage.

In the crisis’s immediate aftermath, the city gave Mr. Blum ten days to implement all due repairs and then stuck him with a $225,000 bill. He busted that deadline (along with a half-dozen others) and added the invoice to the cancerous mass of unpaid debt he’s been flagrantly expanding since 2017. As of press time, Mr. Blum hasn’t paid a dime. His litigation continues, as does local media’s curious tendency to keep publishing the bullying emails sent by his attorney.

This historical accounting doesn’t intend solely to consolidate castigation of Mr. Blum. No, my principal objective is to remind municipal officials that the charming, visionary developer they’d once held in such high esteem (and to whom they gave inordinate tax advantages) ultimately betrayed them, weaponizing the judicial system in a costly multiyear campaign of obfuscation and delay.

You’d thus think that city, county, and state officials would require the next smooth-talker with big ideas about the Central Warehouse to agree to certain express conditions before receiving title thereto, like waiving procedural rights to contest foreclosure, agreeing to an automatic reversion of the deed if deadlines are missed, and reinstatement of forgiven back-taxes if deliverables go undelivered.

But that didn’t happen. Bear with me; I’m getting to Jeffrey Buell.  
 

Two Buttons Loose

In the midst of Mr. Blum’s self-immolating temper-tantrum, Two Buttons Deep (2BD) again inserted itself into the fray. Following an intrepid live-recorded Aug. 12 phone call with Mr. Blum, 2BD’s Jack Carpenter issued an out-of-the-blue demand to know what Mr. Blum intended to do with the building.

It was a jaw-dropping display of tabloid fortitude; Mr. Carpenter’s uncharacteristically aggressive tone was more than justified by a shameless Mr. Blum who displayed no compunction about making deranged excuses for his inaction. “I wanted to go into the building so I could start doing repairs,” Mr. Blum claimed, speciously, “but the city won’t let me in. If I [walk in] they’ll arrest me  ... that’s what they told me.”

Yeah OK, Evan. Roger that.

Mr. Carpenter’s call was rabidly entertaining, and he was clearly having fun. (“I’ll make you a deal:  I’ll pay you $2, you’ll double your investment, and I’ll take the building over.”) Then, flexing his innate business savvy, he extended Mr. Blum a chance to tell his side of the story — deftly slipping in a shoutout to one of 2BD’s commercial sponsors in so doing.

Lo and behold, on Aug. 26, 2022, having scored his exclusive interview on location in New York City, Mr. Carpenter again warranted instant praise for deploying the only journalism yet to determine how Mr. Blum’s last name is actually pronounced (rhymes with “slum” as in “slumlord”).

But the rest of the interview crumbled into a misguided approach to journalistic objectivity. Mr. Carpenter accepted without challenge Mr. Blum’s self-anointed victimhood, he credited Mr. Blum’s publicly verifiable misrepresentations, and then he went to great pains to show even-handed empathy towards a “misunderstood guy” ostensibly down-on-his-luck. 

“I want my audience to decide how they feel about the issue,” he said in behind-the-scenes comments before telling his audience how to feel about the issue.

More egregious was the propaganda 2BD released just days later in its “Behind the Buttons” treatment of the excursion. Now joined by his venture partner, Taylor Rao, the 2BD team went full Soviet.

“I’m sorry [the Central Warehouse] is not good to look at…. The entire issue citywide is a little bit blown out of proportion,” said the *checks notes* resident of Saratoga Springs.  “People care, seemingly, more about what the outside of it is than what the inside is, because they just don’t want to look at it on the highway.”

“This building isn’t hurting anybody,” Ms. Rao continued, either unaware of or unconcerned by the mortal peril to firefighters that the Eyesore has repeatedly posed in the past. Her comments were flippantly oblivious to the recent raft of Eyesore-inspired statewide legislation proposed “to better combat the property neglect and abandonment that inhibits healthy development and which costs taxpayers millions of dollars every year in lost property taxes and remediation expenses.”

In fact, the building is hurting anybody, which was something for which Mr. Carpenter allowed in a rare burst of self-awareness: “I have no problem with the building, except when it interrupts interstate commerce with Amtrak.”

“Yeah but that was a week ago,” Ms. Rao retorted, as if the interruption of a major arterial rail line were an irritant as forgettable as a Kanye tweet, as if the quarter-million-tax dollars that this ticking time bomb required to finance emergency repairs were just a rounding error in a 2BD merchandising report.

The podcast was reckless; 2BD had handed to Mr. Blum a megaphone through which he could softly articulate his persecution while fluttering his eyelids and wondering why the critics had been silent until now.

And this is why reading is important, folks, because the press record shows that people had been clamoring for the building’s restoration or demolition — for decades — roasting the many former owners whose neglect had blighted the area. That was why municipal officials had been so eager to offload the Eyesore to Mr. Blum when he rolled into town promising progress.

“Is Mr. Blum a freaking Jedi?” I wondered as the podcast approached its denouement. How could one man so deleteriously impact Albany’s skyline from a plush Manhattan residence while making a couple upstate influencers feel so sorry for him?

While the 2BD team could be forgiven for being seduced by the same congenial charm with which Evan Blum had manipulated the city of Albany, their commitment to propaganda was impossible to excuse. By the end of the podcast, the hosts were literally depicting Mr. Blum as the perfect suitor for their mothers. No, like, literally.

I’m not trying to invite the ire of the regionally powerful Buttonista army; trust — I have a monthly budget dedicated to 2BD merch. But it’s precisely because “Jack and Taylor” are so likable that their stamp of approval is so dangerous.

Their interview with Mr. Blum was their “Jimmy Fallon tousles Donald Trump’s hair moment,” humanizing a man who continues to commit measurable harm to New York’s capital city and its financial ecosystem.

Jimmy Fallon came to regret his moment, but 2BD never atoned for its own sins, despite the fact that just three weeks after the gang’s self-congratulatory exclusive, Mr. Blum blew his legally-obligatory deadline to make repairs to the derelict building. His justification?  “I didn’t see the point,” he said.

Oh, well, in that case.

The essential fallacy of the “fairness doctrine” — and the reason it was wisely abolished — is that while there may be two sides to a story, there’s one side to a building about to collapse on commuter rail. When does an advertiser-driven entertainment platform inherit the solemn mantle of journalistic integrity? It’s hard to say exactly, but it’s a Rubicon that 2BD crossed long ago.

This increasingly influential operation — run by a humble team of Millennials genuinely oblivious to their emerging power — has become a central part of the Central Warehouse.

If you’re not tracking 2BD, then you’re unaware of this company’s capacity to define Millennial and Gen Z perceptions within the Capital District. You’re missing out on entertaining, compelling, irreverent, authentic, and estimable original content. And you’re overlooking the extent to which 2BD directly, tangibly, and unaccountably influences local development.

And that, at long last, brings me to Jeffrey Buell.
 

Saved by the Buell

At a press event on Dec. 22, 2022, Jeffrey Buell — the most conspicuous principal of Redburn Development Partners — became the Eyesore’s latest hot-potato recipient of the Central Warehouse deed. A late October court ruling had cleared the way for the forcible transfer of property, and Mr. Buell was again poised to steal the limelight after trampling all over my call for demolition eleven months earlier.

He had meticulously laid the groundwork for this moment more than a year and a half prior, having assembled an impressive brain trust to submit a bid to develop the Eyesore in partnership with Columbia Development Companies. Though openly acknowledging that he wasn’t sure how the Central Warehouse would be salvaged, he’d remained committed to his cause throughout Mr. Blum’s yearlong litigation circus.

By all accounts, this charismatic 42-year-old is a wonderfully selfless man with a proven track record of bringing dreams to life and a beard sculpted to perfection in a secret government lab somewhere. No wonder local media tripped over itself to fawn over Mr. Buell’s swashbuckling bravado.

But almost immediately there were troubling indicia of déjà vu, the first instance of which was the tax holiday. Albany County wiped out $549,708 in back taxes in consideration for a single payment of $50,000, which, to be sure, was a better deal than the $1 giveaway Mr. Blum enjoyed in 2017, except that the “plans” Mr. Buell’s consortium articulated were just as riveting in their vagueness and disregard of basic accounting.

On Valentine’s Day, the Albany Business Review reported that Mr. Buell’s estimated cost of renovation had been revised upward from the initially-bid $68 million to $100 million — an increase of more than 47 percent. From where would that $100 million materialize? From “everybody and their brother who might have money to help us out,” Mr. Buell said.

If I’d known my own bid would be taken seriously despite misstating the projected cost by a third and documenting no discernible source of financing, I would’ve tossed a set of blueprints into the ring.

I wasn’t the only one to recognize the implication of Mr. Buell’s astronomical cost estimate. In a letter to the Times Union, Albany County resident William Cooney put a finer point on what CW Skyway — the subsidiary consortium owned by Redburn and Columbia — meant when it said the project “would rely heavily on public support.”

“[Y]ou and I will have to pay for this concrete cubical whimsey in this desolate location abutting Interstate 787,” Cooney complained. “The Albany County Legislature needs to let its voters know the cost of development or demolition of the Central Warehouse and let them vote their preference,” Cooney later wrote in this paper, echoing public comments he’d made at the March 14 meeting of the Albany County Legislature whereat legislators resoundingly ignored his sentiments.

Interestingly, Mr. Cooney’s underlying presumption that the $100 million restoration was defensible in the first place actually begged the question. Because a comprehensive and mathematically responsible report published last February by both the Albany Parking Authority and Capital District Transit Authority established a baseline as to what downtown money could do.

At a projected cost of $81 million, the report laid out a path to demolishing Albany’s perennially disintegrating bus station and replacing it with a seven story “transit center” megaplex complete with a parking garage amenable to nearly 900 vehicles.

So even granting Mr. Churchill his $20 million demolition price tag, Redburn and Columbia could raze the Eyesore and still have $80 million left over to construct a major hub of public transportation.

And if that doesn’t cock an eyebrow, consider Mr. Buell’s concession that it would be “some time” before the public would notice any improvements to the Central Warehouse. “Probably the first $20 million, you won’t even see,” he said.

A state grant of $9.75 million for the resurrection of the Eyesore was the impetus for the Dec. 22 news conference, which I attended for want of friends and a life. I was triggered from the jump.

“We’ve always known this building would require public dollars to bring it back into use,” Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan stated in opening remarks. “And that’s why we need to have an open mind. Let’s not take any idea off the table.”

That is Olympic-level obliviousness, friends. Because the idea of demolition has never even made it onto the table, which was a point I drove home by raising my hand to inquire of Mr. Buell what, as an alternative, the cost of demolition could be. He answered honestly: “I don’t know.”

All of Mr. Buell’s answers were refreshingly frank. Maybe too frank. For example, without batting an eye, he conceded that the cost of renovating the building would exceed the dollar value of the resultant outcome.

Then, after cavalierly acknowledging that the $9.75 million grant would be just enough to let him “figure out what to do with the building,” he invited the public to submit ideas as to what could be done with the very structure he’d had an extra year to plan out and finance.

Pro tip: A project assessed to be underwater before ground is even broken should not inspire confidence. It should, however, inspire tough questions. Especially when even the Times Union is noting the Groundhog Day parallels.

That paper might’ve misspelled “Punxsutawney” in its March 2022 editorial about the Eyesore, but at least it got the gist right this past August in summarizing the perpetual musical chairs: “A new owner takes over only to run into trouble. A bank takes control, sells it for a dollar. A new owner, new promises, new dreams, only to be sold again.”

Even the Times Union editor got in on the action, satirically channeling the Central Warehouse in a first-person commentary that went entirely unheeded by the dignitaries at that Dec. 22 presser: “For decades, I’ve been handed off from one developer to another, each promising what quickly proves to be an even less viable scheme to spiff me up. And every time, local elected officials act like it’s the dawn of a new day.”

Yup. And so it was that I found myself up close and personally watching once again as Albany — county and city — stumbled headfirst into well-intentioned ambitions without a single iota of requisite due diligence. There was no indication that any of the state money — which has yet to be allocated towards specific uses — would be apportioned towards a formal and good faith “demolition feasibility study” the results of which could be published and scrutinized.

And by refusing to commission a competitively-bid demolition assessment with a portion of that “free” state grant, the officials in attendance were denying both reality and the will of their constituents.

Instead of devising a fail-safe kill-switch off-ramp, city and county officials evidently decided to accept as a matter of faith that this newest developer’s plans will work — no need for contingencies — and that Mr. Buell is somehow different than the dozen-plus contenders before him, all of whom are on public record screaming “Bingo!” with the same garbage heap of buzzwords: affordable mixed-use residential-commercial green space.

When it was her turn at the mic, Assemblymember Fahy turned to Buell with a plea: “Tell me this isn’t throwing good money after bad!” But I have it on good authority that she meant to ask the following:

“What is the total public financing you’re seeking, from what specific sources, and how will the project be impacted if you’re unable to secure that entire sum given emerging recessionary pressures? What is your timeline for assembling private financing, how much money are your investors intending to recoup and in what period, and what are the loan terms dictating your monetization of the property?”

Relatedly: “Given the regionally-unparalleled cost to rehabilitate this building, what are the projected lease and sale prices for the planned residential and commercial units? What socioeconomic demographic are you targeting for residential tenancy? What data indicates that this demo will be eager for high-end housing directly adjacent to both an interstate highway and active railroad tracks?”

Twenty years ago, my friend Lukas Snelling coined a maxim by which I’ve come to live: “If you say it can’t be done, you’re the problem.” Well, Luke, I’m not saying it can’t be done; I’m saying it won’t be done. And that’s because in the twenty years since you uttered those immortal words, I’ve cyclically borne witness to developers who overpromise just enough to keep baseless hopes alive.

Years after Mr. Blum purchased the Eyesore, this newspaper published the results of cursory Google searches which first brought to light Mr. Blum’s troubled past. So has Albany learned the right lesson when it comes to vetting?

A felony “bid-rigging” charge against the head of Columbia Development was dismissed pursuant to a prosecutorial cooperation agreement in 2018. And barely six weeks ago, a subsidiary of Redburn Development made headlines for allegations of racism and a toxic workplace culture. Even taking as false all of these past allegations, there remain legitimate questions — and if the honor system worked, we wouldn’t need the very public officials who should be asking them.

What happens if funding sources dry up, or a catastrophic structural defect is discovered, or retail lessees don’t materialize? How will Albany ensure that its tens of millions of dollars in public resourcing won’t amount to yet another giveaway if the developer walks?

Time and again have we foolishly taken at face value the representations of the Eyesore’s owners. Instead of praise and accolades, Mr. Buell needs timetables, oversight, and a wary demand that he prove himself every step of the way. As Albany once again kicks the can down the road — this time with $10 million stuffed in it — Albanites deserve assurances of accountability.

And, they deserve a local media apparatus that does its job.

When WAMC reports that Mr. Buell “sets an aggressive timeline for completing the project” and then quotes him saying “it would be really lovely to have everyone on the roof on New Year’s Eve ’24,” it’s seducing a city back to sleep with wildly unrealistic implications. That’s eleven months away. And who’s “everyone”?

When Mr. Churchill rightfully notes that “the context around the old cold-storage warehouse has changed, increasing the building’s value and making its redevelopment much more viable,” he should also emphasize that more modest development — composed of modern accouterments and requiring no reengineering — situated atop the former site of a demolished Central Warehouse is at least a plausible alternative.

When the Times Union editorial board spurs the public to “keep the pressure on, keep things moving forward,” it needs to take a hard look in the mirror and at its own Eyesore coverage over the last 15 years.  Whereas William Randolph Hearst once used his Morning Journal daily newspaper to foment the Spanish-American War, the daily rag his great-grandson inherited is more interested in uncritically publishing cool graffiti photos than in independently verifying any of the stated cost estimates.

And when 2BD turns toward the Central Warehouse the lens of a money-printing enterprise it’s built out of a genuine love for the Capital Region, it needs to remember that there’s still an imperative in advertiser-driven business models to be a dispassionate champion for truth.

Mr. Buell credited 2BD for inspiring the redevelopment of the Huck Finn’s Warehouse complex. He’s been a fixture in 2BD programming for years, and for good reason: He’s passionate about improving his communities, and he wields a résumé filled with accomplishment.

His inspirational exploits — such as buying a drink for every frazzled passenger on a chronically delayed flight home — give even Santa Claus a run for his money, and make for the exact type of content that 2BD has fashioned into a juggernaut entertainment platform.

But it’s our job as Albany residents, journalists, pundits, personalities, and politicians to make Jeff Buell be the hero we seek — not by following him blindly, but by testing his sense of direction.

Because exactly one year to the day before that correlated pair of articles appeared in Albany County’s leading periodicals, the horrific consequence of false narratives, delusion, and a skepticism unvoiced was on full display in our nation’s capital.

The sixth of January is a stark reminder that when superstition is allowed to occupy the space abandoned by rational inquiry, buildings crumble.

This will be my last column about the Eyesore until its centenary in 2027; a half-decade breath will allow for more measured conclusions. But if the Central Warehouse is to outlast us all, I hope it’s because Jeff Buell had the courage to manifest his vision, and that his far-off obituary commends him for the optimism that I lost the strength to muster.

Editor’s note: Jesse Sommer is a lifelong resident of Albany County. 
He welcomes your thoughts at jesse@altamontenterprise.com.

On Sept. 23, 2021, the Honorable Andrew Joyce — Chairman of the Albany County Legislature — took to Facebook with a particularly galling sentiment. “Many of us see the Central Warehouse property as an eyesore,” he wrote, his finger momentarily on the pulse of his community. But then, he just couldn’t help himself.

“What I see are opportunities,” he said, ticking away an outlandish series of proposed uses that will never come to fruition. “This site is ready for development right now.”

So it was that, on Sept. 23, 2021, Chairman Joyce succumbed to the tired and dissonant siren song that has seduced three generations of Albany developers, journalists, and politicians into pummeling common sense to a bloody pulp against the Eyesore’s colossal cement walls. And this perpetual Groundhog Day paralysis will persist like long-haul COVID until what must be done is done:

Knock it down.

This is my fourth installment in what has become an annual chronicle of whatever psychological trauma stymies honest consideration of “the terminal option.” Since last I spouted off in these pages, there’s been a lot of what the untrained observer might confuse with “activity” down at Albany’s old Central Warehouse.

But my fool-me-twenty-times-shame-on-me complex counsels caution; if there really are plans to rehabilitate the Big Ugly Eyesore, they need to be specific — I’m talking budgets, blueprints, receipts — and the community deserves to know what they are. Now.

It was The Altamont Enterprise that prompted last year’s overdue display of intestinal fortitude. As I confirmed in interviews the autumn before, the prevailing wisdom among local officials and columnists was that there existed no lawful process by which to seize the Eyesore from its interloping slumlord.

But just a few short months after this paper published a step-by-step tutorial of the legal mechanism by which the government could conduct a tax sale, Albany County did so. Score one for the Fourth Estate.

And lo, the cavalry cometh, parachuting in to inject a new hope for the Central Warehouse. The white knight with the shiniest armor is a coalition composed of a who’s-who-slew of notables, to include Columbia Development Cos. and Redburn Development Partners — the latter of whom has already made commendable headway on a $65 million plan to redevelop the nearby Warehouse at Huck Finn into a complex consisting of 260 residential apartments, a gym, a pool, a beach volleyball court, gardens, a dog park, and a smaller furniture warehouse, thereby finally fulfilling a prophecy foretold in song for the better part of 40 years: “Huck Finn’s Warehouse, and more!”

But these developers have declined to disclose with any specificity their visions for the Eyesore. One of the potential buyers won’t even disclose his/her/their/hir/zir/eirs identity. And just as I postured to deliver a tongue-lashing indictment of such opacity, current building owner and professional hoarder Evan Blum stepped back into the line of fire, adorning himself in 2021’s hottest fashion statement: victimhood.

“It’s unfortunate that [officials] say they want to work with you but stab you in the back at the same time,” Mr. Blum told Times Union columnist Chris Churchill, omitting that officials tried in vain to work with him throughout the half decade that he paid precisely zero taxes on the building. “I’m not the bad guy,” he said, further omitting that the only aesthetic contribution he’s made to the property since his purchase — and I swear I’m not making this up — is the petulant installation of a porcelain toilet atop the building’s second-floor overhang.

Yup: We’re being trolled. But at least this time the media wasn’t buying it. Even Mr. Churchill — who for fifteen years peddled all manner of farcical garbage as to what could be done with the building — changed his tune, publishing a column that exhaustively detailed Mr. Blum’s abject failures in rehabilitating an array of crumbling edifices over the past quarter century.

I forgive Mr. Churchill’s non-attributive reliance on the exact source material to which I’d linked in my own prior article on Mr. Blum, since it’s entirely possible to replicate my research with the most routine of Google searches. Indeed, the laziest due diligence would’ve revealed what a disaster Mr. Blum would be for the city when he bought the building back in 2017.

Mr. Blum — whose name rhymes with “boom,” as in *cough* the sound dynamite makes — told Mr. Churchill that he wanted to create an arts venue for hundreds of artists, as though oblivious to the vast expanse of graffiti which already leaves nary a square inch of the building’s interior untagged. His wildly impractical 3D-rendered designs were proof positive that he hadn’t the basic grip on reality necessary to manifest a responsible restoration.

But the more salient deficiency in his conceit of what to do inside the building was that it completely ignored the rotting exterior. Read the room, Blum: Albanites are ashamed of the Eyesore because, from the outside, it looks like something Nipper excreted after getting into the Halloween candy. An antiques showroom in the atrium? Whatever. Until your building doesn’t look like dog feces, I really don’t give a buck.

A buck, incidentally, is what Mr. Blum paid for the building. That’s $1 more than what he’s invested in it since, and the reason his bankruptcy filing to thwart the county’s lawful seizure was so maddeningly disingenuous. It would take several dozen million dollars to make a dent in fixing up the Eyesore, but Mr. Blum elected to waste his money (and ours, as taxpayers) by persisting in frivolous litigation.

Mr. Blum’s petition pledged only $318,500 in building upgrades while bizarrely disregarding both the $520,823 he owes in delinquent taxes and a $78,000 penalty resulting from his flagrant code violations. I’ll spare you the suspense: On Dec. 20, 2021, a federal bankruptcy court judge rejected Mr. Blum’s fanciful Chapter 11 petition. Foreclosure can finally proceed to the only logical Step 2:

Knock it down.

Demolishing the Central Warehouse would be a massive undertaking, but it’s a course of action at least as realistic as the blithering nonsense that’s been bandied about since the Reagan Administration.

Yet, rather than commission a study on the economics, environmental impact, and logistics of leveling Albany’s Eyesore, municipal officials remain slaves to the cult of blind optimism, hysterically chanting incoherent babble like “wall mural!” and “mixed-use!” and “food market!” and “rooftop bar!”

For decades have they impotently genuflected before an endless parade of successive developers while concurrently entertaining far grander ambitions like razing Interstate 787. (Time was that local planners would test out the C-4 supply on decrepit abandoned buildings within city limits before taking on the federal interstate highway system. Sigh.)

But if government has enabled the private sector’s neglect, it’s only fair that voters take brief stock of our own culpability. Because the Central Warehouse has served as the backdrop to nearly a century of incestuous nepotism, as if deliberately constructed to accentuate Albany’s Stockholm-style commitment to family dynasties and interminable political tenures.

It was there during the ascent of Congresswoman-cum-Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, whose grandmother was a de facto leader in a Democratic political machine that just last year celebrated a century of uninterrupted viselike dominion over Albany politics — a feat unrivaled in any other self-respecting American city.

It was an eyesore during the 41-year administration of Erastus Corning II, throughout each of Gerald Jennings’s five mayoral terms, and over the course of the two terms to which Mayor Kathy Sheehan pledged to limit herself, plus the bonus one.

It was there for both Governors Cuomo, as back-to-back Frank Commissos plodded through local government, and during the administration of an earlier Honorable Joyce for whom the Albany County Office Building is named.

Dedicating buildings is easier than detonating them. That’s why — no matter what you may read to the contrary — the “Big Ugly” will still be just as Big and just as Ugly in 2025 when Albany Common Council President Corey Ellis mounts his third-time’s-the-charm campaign for mayor. Unless, of course, we:

Knock it down.

With “Blum’s Blight” on the verge of a 10th title transfer in two decades, sanguinity abounds. The most recent entrant into the cottage industry of rehashing wearied delusions about the Eyesore’s potential is Albany’s upstart new media company Two Buttons Deep. Last November, 2BD’s co-founding gonzo journalist trespassed about the (negligently unsecured) Central Warehouse and puked all over the internet a toxic sludge of unoriginal fantasy. But even blog reporters who go by the name “Cap’n Jack” have enough journalistic integrity to concede in a Dec. 10 podcast that the building is “too far gone” to be salvaged.

Ladies and gentlemen, on my knees will I thank the Almighty if someone shoves my pessimism directly back in my face, just as I’ll gladly buy the entire city its first round of whiskey in that elegant rooftop bar atop a former eyesore. But whom are we kidding?

By square footage, this is the largest warehouse in all of Albany County — a hulking tumor murder-sucking the commercial potential out of what can’t straight-facedly be called a neighborhood. The lack of self-awareness our municipal leadership displays in again kicking this can down the road while expecting a different outcome is the definition of (govern)mental illness.

How do we know that razing the building is too expensive, too dangerous, or too whatever-you’re-about-to-tweet-like-you’re-the-first-person-to-think-it? The only thing we know is that, for the past four decades, not a single developer has undertaken his promised remodeling, renovation, or reconstruction. And not a single elected representative has been held accountable therefor.

Until we have a projected cost of demolition and a sense of how the resultant debris would be removed, we have nothing against which to contrast any “plans.” We need a tangible sense of the contingencies — an explication of how and when we’ll execute the terminal option if new hopes never blum (I mean bloom). After all, the Empire State Plaza wasn’t rehabbed into existence; first there were bulldozers and a mayor’s tyrannical zeal to use them.

I therefore call on the Albany Common Council, the Albany County Legislature, State Assemblyman John T. McDonald III, State Senator Neil D. Breslin, Mayor Katherine M. Sheehan, and County Executive Daniel P. McCoy to jointly facilitate the financing and publication of a strategic evaluation of the costs, challenges, and efficacies of wholesale demolition.

I call on the New York State Department of State, the Capitalize Albany Corporation, and National Grid to pledge as much financial support towards the objective of leveling the Central Warehouse as they invested in redeveloping 11 Clinton Street.

I call on municipal managers at the city, county, and state levels to assemble a “Plan Omega” backstop to assure Albanites that, if inaction yet awaits us five years in the future, there exist preparations for demolition fireworks so astounding that Price Chopper tries to sponsor them.

And if those bidding would-be developers oppose demolition, then I call on them to immediately release their projected plans for public review and comment. In this, their silence will sound like a scream.

On Dec. 20, 2021, Chairman Joyce was at it again, performatively on-site at the Eyesore to declare to ABC-affiliate WTEN that “I don’t see … an old broken down warehouse. I see it for what it can be.” His comments come as Mr. Blum’s stage-left exit from this sordid half-century saga is imminent, rendering the moniker “Blum’s Blight” no longer apropos. So perhaps the Big Ugly Eyesore is due for rededication.

To ensure that the chairman personally dedicates himself to manifesting a skyline about which Albanites can be proud — to incentivize him to make as his top priority the refurbishment of an eyesore about which he so frequently opines — I propose that the Central Warehouse henceforth be known as “The Joyce.”

Branding like that will no doubt help spur municipal action, resulting either in a testament to visionary leadership, or in additional incentive to — say it with me — knock it down.

Prove me wrong, chattering classes. Extract from this noxious behemoth the splendor you foretell on social media, and lay rightful claim to the Key to the City! Until then, I’ll be standing by with the T-handle and blasting caps. Because we’ll need more than hope and Instagram posts to rid our city of its festering disgrace. See you next January.

Knock it down.

Jesse Sommer is a lifelong resident of Albany County. He welcomes your thoughts at .