YOU ROLL THE DICE and maybe you land on Mediteranean Avenue or Baltic, where rents are low. But it doesn’t end there. Grab more real estate, squeeze your competitors and with luck and savvy money management you’ll call Boardwalk and Park Place home.

That’s how the game of Monopoly works. In real life, not so much, although recent developments in Hudson have echoed the board game in eerie ways. Despite efforts by county, state and federal government to remedy the shortage of decent rental housing for people with low incomes, private developers–non-profit and for-profit–are taking the lead in addressing the city’s housing problems.

The non-profit Galvan Foundation has 86 buildings in the county; over 60 are occupied and more are in the pipeline. The foundation has embarked on an exercise in social engineering supported by some convincing data. Galvan will place some of its low-income family housing in economically more secure neighborhoods. The data say that the kids who grow up in better surroundings are “more likely to escape poverty.” Read more…

ELECTION AFTERMATH, California wildfires and multiple mass shootings have seized public attention over the last week or so. What might normally interest readers or viewers finds us numb instead. Maybe a survival gene triggers our brains to tell us: Enough, already!

So if you didn’t notice, just before the election the state Board of Regents decided to give itself another year to perform a miracle. They want to convince parents, teachers, and federal and state officials that high stakes standardized testing will make kids smarter, teachers better paid and unrealistic expectations fulfilled. Is that not a miracle?

Regents are appointed by the state legislature and usually try to avoid political fights. Their job is to set education policy for the state. That’s how they framed their decision a week ago Monday when they gave themselves 12 more months to figure out what connection there should be between the performance of classroom teachers and how well students do on standardized math and English exams. Read more…

THE NAMES ON THE 102ND Assembly District ballot lines will look familiar to voters this November. Assemblyman Chris Tague, a Republican in his first, abbreviated, term once again faces Democrat Aiden O’Connor Jr. The two competed earlier this year in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Assemblyman Peter Lopez, a contest Mr. Tague won by 159 votes.

The only towns in Columbia County represented by the 102nd District are Stuyvesant and Stockport. But the district also includes all of Greene and Schoharie counties as well as parts of Albany, Delaware, Otsego and Ulster counties.

Both candidates have roots in the district and records of public service. Mr. Tague, 49, running on the Republican, Conservative, Independence and Reform Party lines, and Mr. O’Connor, 30, running on the Democratic, Working Families and Women’s Equality lines, vow to fight state government corruption and each seems to grasp the limits of what a single member of the Assembly can accomplish. Read more…