Driving around Newburgh last August, New York Magazine writer Simone Kitchens got the sense that some kind of change was going on. Many newcomers, “drawn to the incredibly affordable, stately housing stock and growing creative communities,” were moving in, she said. Might Newburgh have the potential to become the next Hudson, “the onetime working-class town where antique lamps now go for $7000?” 

A zest for blending wild nature’s unruliness with mankind’s desire for domestication is hardly a new experience for the Hudson Valley.

Should American political and economic policies be directed more toward poor places and less toward poor people? The data shows that the kids who don’t move to a better neighborhood make less than their parents and those that do make more.

Kingston is becoming a hothouse for the interplay of past and future. How does a small city justifiably proud of its long and illustrious history negotiate its route to a prosperous future? How should it evolve?

For more than 40 years New York State has been struggling to figure out how to transmit upstate and Canadian power down through the Hudson Valley to New York City. A lot has changed in that long period of time. State energy strategists see the alternatives differently than they used to. But the question of expanding the southward network of transmission lines has not gone away.

Grain production in the Hudson Valley hasn’t been central to local agricultural practice for over a century. That may be changing.

It was about six years ago, maybe more by now, that assemblyperson Kevin Cahill was shown around the Rhinebeck Middle School by district school superintendent Joe Phelan. The school was buzzing with hands-on activity.

‘Eviction,” derived from the Latin word evictus means being subjugated or conquered by judicial means. It’s a harsh word. Eviction from a home is not a happy event. Eviction is no neutral institution, not a simple misunderstanding in a contract between two parties. Especially in poor neighborhoods, eviction is a process that often binds poor and rich people together in mutual dependence and struggle, writes sociologist and field anthropologist Matthew Desmond in his 2016 book Evicted.

Almost everybody, it seems, is, in principle, in favor of “fair share” housing, by which affordable housing choices for disadvantaged and poor people are geographically distributed. On practice,however, jurisdictions find no lack of justification for exclusionary policies.