Back in the heyday of Tammany Hall in New York City, there was a politician by the name of George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) who had a particularly forward-thinking way of describing the differences between forms of corruption in political organizations:

1) Dishonest Graft—bribery and other illegal activities; and
2) Honest Graft—political patronage, nepotism, and the use of political influence for personal advantage.

To justify what he called “Honest Graft,” Plunkitt once said the following:

“I could get nothin’ at a bargain but a big piece of swamp, but I took it fast enough and held on to it. What turned out was just what I counted on. They couldn’t make the park complete without Plunkitt’s swamp, and they had to pay a good price for it. Anything dishonest in that?”

Plunkitt’s example here is a classic case of insider information. Being part of the local government, he had privileged knowledge about the creation of future parks, so by advantageously purchasing land in the path of these projects, he was able to increase his own profit margins while allowing the community to benefit from the park—a “win-win” in our present-day parlance.

And yet, there are real material costs to the community from this way of thinking—parks can be placed in areas that are advantageous to those with insider knowledge, development costs can increase, and insiders can benefit from conflicts of interest.

I have recently been informed by a member of the local press that at least one member of the Greene County Legislature wants the Greene County Democratic Committee to denounce my August 3rd article, “Pulling the Strings,” due to its anti-conflicts of interest stance. In fact, here is the statement that I was sent:

According to the local member of the press, it was read aloud at the monthly Democratic County Committee meeting. It was also suggested that copies of my article were distributed—which, by the way, thank you; more readers are always welcome additions.

The question we should ask ourselves at this time is: What exactly is this member of the Greene County Legislature asking the Greene County Committee to publicly denounce?

Is this member asking them to denounce the fact that large-money interests have infiltrated our community? No.

Is this member asking the committee to denounce the corrosive influence of large-money donations? (I’ve already written that article, too, and named names.)

Is this member asking the committee to denounce the corrosive influences that occur in local politics when political patronage becomes commonplace?

The answer to these questions—and any corollary question—is no.

That is the problem I see facing our Mountain Top—we’ve been captured!

Any time you have large monied interests in a community and close proximity between those interests and the local political sphere, you create conflicts of interest that ultimately will cost the community. The only way to ensure that these types of conflicts of interest do not adversely affect our community is to create a political culture on our Mountain Top that says no to these types of special-interest influences. Otherwise, we run the risk of finding that our local government is no longer serving the interests of the average middle- and working-class resident and is instead primarily serving the concerns of those who have greater means to influence the community.

I’ve seen troubling signs of these types of conflicts of interest becoming all too commonplace on our Mountain Top. I see it in my Town of Windham with the above email that was leaked to me, which shows that both our Town’s largest employer, the Windham Mountain Club—and a donor to the Windham Foundation ($100,000 in December 2023)—and our Town Supervisor were guest speakers at the Foundation’s November 2025 fundraiser at the Union Club in NYC. I see this same type of problematic development when I discovered that the Executive Director of the Hunter Foundation and the Town Supervisor of Hunter were, in fact, the same person.

These are the types of conflicts of interest that I feel weaken democracy at the local level and create the levels of apathy we see in our local government at present. I know we’re usually more accustomed to this type of behavior occurring at the higher levels of government, such as when Citigroup began sending emails like the one below to John Podesta to coordinate Cabinet positions with people who would be beneficial to the financial sector:

We are seeing the same type of interconnected behavior demonstrated in both the emails between John Podesta and Citigroup and the fact that Windham’s Town Supervisor was welcomed as a guest speaker at a private foundation’s fundraiser. This should raise more than eyebrows—it should be denounced for what it truly is: “Soft Corruption.” While not strictly illegal, it is certainly unethical to intertwine the interests of the Town you serve as Town Supervisor with those of the largest private foundation in the community.

This is how you create philanthropic capture of a community. You intertwine the interests of the community with these private organizations, and soon you find that your local government is relying more and more on these private interests to create the policies and programs that the local government should be developing with the community stakholders— small businesses, consumers, residents, and employees.

This leads me to my next point—Public Choice Theory. Public Choice theory simple put, sees the government as inefficient and corrupt and thus not up to the task of creating value. One of the reasons small municipality governments are especially susceptible to this type of capture is that most local political figures: a) aren’t that well-versed in their potential options when it comes to developing value in the local economy, and b) are part-time political figures more interested in other things than creating dynamic and effective local government that is a driving force in the local economy. So, they are predisposed to believing the idea that local governments, such as a Village or Town the size of Windham or Tannersville, are unable to do much more than pay for the basics.

The reality is that by using grants and revenue bonds in conjunction with well-crafted investment portfolios based on returns from equity investments in our local economy, little communities can create massive wealth-generating funds that support growth for decades, if not centuries, when managed correctly.

This is why we, as a Mountain Top, need to look no further than our own communities to develop the type of local investment system that will support our communities for countless generations. If both Windham and Hunter had purchased their ski slopes in the 1950s, operated them as Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives, and used them to fund a Community Fund, by today these towns could have had hundreds of millions of dollars in community wealth.

What my article, ultimately, was is a call to arms for our respective communities—to show our residents that we, the members of the Mountain Top, can create positive public value through our local governments and develop strong networks of Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives that include consumers, employees, small business owners, and our municipal and county governments within the system.

I ask you, the reader: Are you ready to denounce a future that promises greater local economic prosperity and transparency in local government simply because I’ve pointed out problematic conflicts of interest?

Ultimately, what this member of the Legislature is asking you to denounce is a level playing field for our communities—a playing field where middle- and working-class residents aren’t pushed out of their homes by the process of gentrification, and where workforce housing doesn’t lock a family into long-term renting.

Instead, as I’ve outlined in my workforce housing project, we can create long-term equity generation, more local jobs, and stronger community growth, while using the project as an anchor for a Community Wealth Fund that allows for further development in the community and the creation of programs to support the arts in our communities, job training, environmental projects, and more.

Our Community has enough working and middle-class members to win over the day. We only need to have the confidence in ourselves to believe we can achieve these things.

I’ve reached out to this member of the Legislature, and I’ve asked for an in person meeting. As of the writing of this article, I didn’t receive a response. I am hopeful we can converse in person and discuss the finer points of creating a stronger and more vibrant Mountain Top one where the playing field for the Middle and Working Classes of our respective communities is fully represented and the forces of gentrification do not dominate.

More than 45 years ago, President Kennedy asked the nation to redefine the relationship between the citizen and the nation. In 2026, I’m asking you, the resident, to redefine the relationship between your local government and yourselves.

I’m asking you now to simply think about what “We Can Do Together as a Community.” I am asking you to envision a community that values all of its stakeholders as being equally important. These stakeholders include employees, consumers, small business owners, local NGOs, and the municipal government. We must build from the bottom up.

This is part of the process I call “Thinking Bigger”—it is about creating new ways to address the systemic issues facing our community, from housing affordability and the cost-of-living crisis in New York State to long-term healthcare for our most vulnerable residents and seniors, as well as the issues facing long-term economic growth. This is the only way to address these issues in our community in an equitable manner for all of our stakeholders.

I am not a politician. I certainly don’t want to be a political figure in the standard sense of the term. For me, the political process is “a means to a greater end,” in that it will allow our community to change its trajectory, which is clearly going to end with gentrification’s worst tendencies—population replacement, the outsourcing of labor, and finally decline and failure when capital interests move on to the next location to gentrify, like a plague of locusts.

I’m not the type of small-town political figure who wants to gain power for personal glory or financial gain. Instead, I would be happier with a decentralized power structure that shifts power from a centralized point in the Town—the Town Board—to the people, with greater use of referendums and much higher levels of general participation. Unfortunately, direct democracy like this is a rare thing in America and certainly not the norm in New York State.

That doesn’t mean this campaign is about “Me”; it’s really about the “We” that makes up Windham. Some may claim my message of “We” seems contradictory when I talk about taking back our town from large-money interests. To which I say—no, it’s not. In fact, it is completely logically consistent if the people you are promoting are not members of the “private equity class,” but instead the middle- and working-class members of all professions who used to flock to this town to better their own lives and build futures for their families. Viewed through this lens, the call to reclaim our community is entirely logically consistent.

My message is one of self-confidence in our community—a message that presents a positive future. And yet, this message has been called divisive and derided for pointing out the very real issues in our community that affect us all.

My message is also one of creating a level playing field in the community we all cherish so much. A playing field where full-time and part-time residents, no matter their origin, can trust that their government is working for them and with them to create a future that benefits the Town and its future residents. A Town government that is not captured by the many entanglements of special interests, nepotism, and political patronage—but instead represents the long-term development of this community to benefit those who wish to live and thrive here for generations.

This is a simple message—it’s just extremely complex to fulfill. Which is probably why I’m attracted to it in the first place—I love complex problems to solve—the more moving pieces and intricate details, the better. This is where my more academic tendencies come out in my proposals. The nature of these problems allows me to develop detailed plans and solutions. So, please bear with me—after all, before I came home to take over the family business, I was on track to be a Professor of Philosophy. So, if you will keep that in mind and allow me some indulgences into the more technical details, I promise it will be worth it.

This election in November isn’t going to be won with money, slick mailers, or an ocean of lawn signs. So, I will not ask you for money when I knock on your door. Instead, I will ask you this simple request: if you read my Substack and believe in the vision that “we” can create together for Windham—a Windham with a vibrant and strong local economy that is also more socially just—then all you have to do is join my Substack for free, spread any article that resonates with you on social media, and talk to your friends and family about them in person. Come to the Rallies I will hold and talk directly to me. I plan on knocking on as many doors as I possibly can in the next 2 months.

I need you to become the unstoppable force of change that has failed to happen in Windham for so long.

So join me in this moment of Change In Our Community…

It is time for the residents of Windham to gain a level playing field in local politics! What many Windham residents—whether natives like myself or simply long-time residents—have been feeling is the increasing pressure of gentrification. The great fear that so many people have is that, as a small town, we simply won’t have the resources to create strong local programs if we alienate certain powerful groups.

But is that really true? Not really.

The fact is that if we stand up to the forces of gentrification in their many forms, we will not consign our community to a dismal future. In fact, we can create a more vibrant and sustainable one.

The reality remains that Windham has many avenues available to secure funding from state and federal sources. We do not have to accept the idea that our community’s future depends upon appeasing a handful of wealthy private interests, corporations, or foundations. We have resources of our own, and we have the ability to pursue outside funding while maintaining local control over the direction of our community’s future.

What people seem to misunderstand about my vision is that it is about creating systemic change, not merely tinkering around the edges of a broken system. If we, as residents of Windham, truly wish to create a level playing field, then we must accept the fact that merely tinkering around the edges will not fix the core issues facing our community:

• A Declining and Aging Population

• A Highly Leaky Local Economy

• Low Levels of Local Economic Development

• An Economy Overly Dependent on Tourism

These are not problems that we simply have to accept as inevitable. These are all things we can change.

We can change these things, but it all starts with a radical shift in the way our community deals with outside monied interests. We must have a Town Supervisor who is willing to change the paradigm under which our community currently operates. We must ask ourselves as a community: Are we getting the best bang for our buck when doing business with outside interests?

This does not signal an unwillingness to work with any group; it simply signals a demand for a more equitable relationship in these dealings. The fact is that you can only negotiate effectively from a position of strength—and that means being willing to say “NO.”

This is a simplified version of the strategy’s basic premise. Stanford Business Professor Neale aptly explains the importance of understanding your alternatives before entering a negotiation:

“She advises to never begin a negotiation without understanding what your alternatives are or what happens to you in the case of an impasse. ‘If I have a really good alternative, then you’re going to have to pay a premium for me to stay and play in this interaction. Otherwise, I can just walk.’”

(Stanford Graduate School of Business)

If we, as a community, wish to see ourselves grow, then we have to stop seeing ourselves as merely tinkering around the edges of the system and instead recognize ourselves as participants in the value-creation system itself. And we must negotiate with the idea of building collective value in the community as our primary goal from the perspective of the town.

We must accept that Windham is a complex network of relationships that creates value through multiple stakeholders—consumers, employees, residents, local businesses, and the Town itself—all of whom contribute to the overall creation of value within our community.

And at the center of gravity of this system must be our Town—the provider of infrastructure, a facilitator of grants, and an active participant in creating and fostering innovation within our local markets. We can accomplish this through flexible networks of multi-stakeholder cooperatives that allow the different groups contributing to our community’s prosperity to share more equitably in the value they collectively create.

As Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London says in a recent interview with The Guardian:

“If there’s no purpose or direction, then what the hell are we doing? And who sets that purpose? It has to be co-created through real participation, not tokenistic,” she says. “[We need] an objective-oriented economy, where how we all relate to each other matters as much as what we’re doing.”

(The Guardian)

This is exactly the problem we are facing at the municipal level as well. Our community must have a new direction and a new purpose—one that is objective-oriented—and that objective must be the equitable growth of all members of our community in Windham.

Economic growth alone is not enough. We must ask: Growth for what purpose, and growth for whom? If the answer is not the long-term prosperity, sustainability, and well-being of the people who actually make up our community, then we have failed to establish the proper direction in the first place.

The growth we need to create must be focused on the long-term development of local markets, not short-term, flashy fixes. As Herbert A. Simon, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, stated in his 2000 John Gaus Lecture about value creation:

“If we are very generous with ourselves, I suppose we might claim that we “earned” as much as one fifth of it. The rest is the patrimony associated with being a member of an enormously productive social system, which has accumulated a vast store of physical capital, and an even larger store of intellectual capital—including knowledge, skills, and organizational know-how held by all of us—so that interaction with our equally talented fellow citizens rubs off on us both much of this knowledge and this generous allotment of unearned income.” (ASPA Net Journals)

As can be seen here, Simon understood that, ultimately, in any organization—no matter its size, from a small company with a single employee-owner to a vast multinational corporation—the reality of value creation is a collective process that is shared and built upon through the culture of the broader community as well.

The ability to share information, talents, knowledge, and resources creates flexible networks, like those found among the cooperatives of Emilia-Romagna in Italy. These are the types of networks that communities like Windham must develop if they truly want to maximize long-term economic growth through collective value creation.

And critically, that collective process must include Public Value. The Town itself is not merely an observer standing outside the local economy; it is one of the stakeholders helping to create the conditions, infrastructure, institutions, and relationships upon which private and collective economic activity depends.

This is why I welcome the hatred of the “Economic Royalists”—those who wish to control our community’s growth in what Bernie Sanders would describe as an “oligarchic manner.”

Some will claim that this type of message cannot resonate in our county or within a traditionally conservative community. Yet, the reality is that a message centered on challenging concentrated economic and political power was, in fact, extremely popular in 2016:

And now that we face the crushing pressures of a skyrocketing cost of living in our community, it is time to have a local government that doesn’t simply want to put a Band-Aid on the problem, but one that is willing to fundamentally redefine how we think about the problem itself.

We need a local government willing to challenge the assumptions that created these conditions in the first place and develop a new framework for long-term growth—one that builds local wealth, strengthens local businesses, expands opportunities for working families, and ensures that the value created in Windham benefits the people who actually make up our community.

And that is going to take a paradigm shift in our vision of what local government can do—and what it should do. It will also take an electorate willing to “THINK BIG.”

While it might feel safe and secure to outsource our equity and public capacity to third parties, as the logic associated with Public Choice Theory would encourage us to do, that approach will not create the “purpose or direction” that Mazzucato argues is essential.

Instead, we need a local government capable of establishing a purpose and direction that truly embodies the interests of all those who participate in the collective creation of value within our community—residents, workers, consumers, local businesses, and the Town itself.

Who is ready to take back the reins of our community and once again become the people who steer the course of Windham’s future?

In a bit of serendipitous luck, today the Planning Board uploaded the WINDHAM MOUNTAIN REDEVELOPMENT PROJECT DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT, signed by none other than Town Supervisor Thomas F. Hoyt. The agreement clearly shows that the Windham Town Board—not the Planning Board—is the final arbiter of matters concerning the Windham Mountain Club’s (WMC) Master Plan.

This document shows the following to be true:

This is found in the miscellaneous section of the document on page 9. As you can see, this document outlines the current agreement as of June 24th, 2025, as having the following scope:

In which you will see the parties truly involved in this agreement are, in fact, not the Town Planning Board but in fact the Town of Windham itself:

As defined in our new Zoning Law, adopted in June 2026. Again, this was adopted unanimously by our Town Board. You will find in the next series of screenshots that the Town Board is, in fact, the primary negotiator between the Town and the WMC when it comes to the development of the Master Plan.

These images from Section 6-8, covering pages 44–46 of the Zoning Law, show conclusively that oversight of the Master Plan is within the purview of the Town Board. Furthermore, the agreement of June 24, 2025, doesn’t include any mention of a hotel or even any short-term rental use of the properties. It wasn’t until the March 19, 2026 memo, shown in the screenshot below, that any mention of the hotel was made:

I think it is fair to assume that the June 2025 agreement has been substantially changed, don’t you? And since it was changed, Section 9.2, “Miscellaneous,” of the June 2025 agreement requires that any amendment be made in writing and agreed to by all parties. This means that the Town of Windham’s Town Board had to sign, accept, and approve any amendment to this agreement.

I’ve submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for this document—or documents—and any related records. I will make them publicly available as soon as I receive them.

Obviously, we have to ask ourselves why the Town Board is trying to distance itself from this political hot potato. It seems rather self-evident that our Town Board didn’t expect the development of 26 hotel rooms to rankle Windham’s hoteliers this much. And yet, that is exactly what has happened. Now, the Town Board is trying to pass the buck to the Planning Board and distance itself from the fact that it is, in fact, at the center of this development.

And During An Election Cycle Too Boot…

What this shows me is that the Town Board, and most likely our esteemed Town Supervisor, believed that this could be pushed through with relatively few complaints and that they could sail on to another victory at the polls before the general public could feel any real issues. Yet, that’s clearly not the case.

Even more interesting is the fact that the WMC has retained special counsel to ensure that this project goes through without a hitch—no doubt because they don’t want to find themselves in a situation like Round Top, where a development has been halted by a small group of citizens—to whom I’ve offered my research abilities on numerous occasions.

I ask: where is the Town of Windham’s Special Counsel? Having special counsel paid for by the WMC doesn’t ensure the complex process benefits Windham’s residents or local businesses; it ensures it benefits the WMC since they are the client, not the Town.

The fact that they claim they cannot stop competition is only partly true—the local board can, in fact, stop competition by simply declaring the use to be not in the community’s best interests, as stated in the following provision of the new Zoning Law:

As you can see in Section B, Article II, the Town Board has the power to reject changes to the Master Plan that are deemed unable to fulfill a community or regional need. If the Town Board simply amended this language to read “community” only, and then required any type of mountainside lodging development to be linked to an actual increase in ski passes available to the general public before it could even be considered, it would fundamentally change this issue.

Interestingly, the Overlook. News reports the following conflicts of interest present in their July 24th article :

Yet, they don’t push this line of inquiry any further to try to figure out how far these connections exist with the WMC? This is not a trivial fact nor is it a trivial fact that Michael Troccoli was, in fact, part of the Zoning Commission:

As you can see, Michael Troccoli was part of the commission that was going to create the rules regulating land use for the WMC—clearly, having a vested interest, such as being an employee or club member, should have been, at a bare minimum, disclosed somewhere in the report. It was not.

A better solution would have been simply not to have someone on the commission with direct ties to the largest corporation in the Town. The optics of such a decision scream “Soft Corruption,” and certainly the interests of club members and the club itself intersect in ways that could allow someone to ensure that regulations benefit themselves and their club at the expense of the rest of the community.

So, recusing these members from any single decision doesn’t really remove the conflict of interest at this point. The very playing field created by the Zoning Law may benefit the WMC far more than it benefits the rest of our community, as will be shown in the gallery below of the Schedule of Use Regulations adopted in June 2026:

As you will see in these screen captures of the Zoning Law’s final draft, the Planned Resort District has many uses permitted by right that our own Main Street requires a special permit for—such as private schools, day care, equipment rentals, non-permanent farmers’ markets, and more. This is very preferential treatment, to say the least, and ensures that the WMC can develop into an even more exclusive and insulated enclave within our community than it is at present, further depressing our local economy.

So, the question becomes: Who is willing to stand up to these forces of gentrification in our community? Who is willing to take on the monied interests in our community that seek to fundamentally transform Windham into a playground for their own wants through an Aspenification-type development?

And the only thing that will change this trajectory is leadership willing to change the paradigm—and that means being willing to say, “No, we can do better this way…” Currently, we do not have that type of leadership, and that is why we have this type of problem in the first place.

In this week’s Windham Weekly, you will read the article on the front page called “No Rest for the Hotel Issue in Windham” by Michael Ryan, our intrepid local reporter. I must admit that I feel it is incumbent upon me, as a political candidate, to push issues like this to the forefront of the public’s mind.

The facts are simple: Windham is feeling the squeeze of gentrification—a process that our Town Board is not, as they say, powerless to deal with. And here is why that is not the case.

As you can clearly see, the law states that the Town Board shall review any proposed modifications to the Master Plan—not the Town Planning Board!

Now, this is exactly the type of subterfuge that Mr. Hoyt likes to engage in when he is attempting to distract from the fact that the power to negotiate changes to the Master Plan lies in the hands of the Town Board—of which he is essentially the executive member.

And clearly, this new 26-room Boutique Hotel is a distinct modification from the plan that was agreed upon when the 60-room hotel was dropped from the plan in favor of creating an enclave of high-value homes and condominiums. Now, the plan is altering the agreed-upon requirements of the June 24, 2025 agreement, which states that the following project was agreed to:

This agreement, signed by none other than Mr. Thomas F. Hoyt himself, states that 66 residential units will be constructed, not a hotel of any size. As can be seen in this screenshot of the document’s signature page:

So, clearly, Mr. Hoyt is attempting to distract people from the fact that he was part of the agreement in the first place. And now that the Windham Mountain Club wants to modify the Master Plan from the June 2025 agreement, Windham should reopen negotiations with them.

That means if you want a hotel to help with your recruitment of private club guests, then we want two things in return: cheaper full-season passes for those who own a primary or secondary residence in the community—say, $699 per person—and a return to 7,000 or 8,000 guests as the bare minimum. These are just some of the ideas off the top of my head— we might also want cheaper passes for low-income families in the range of $299 or less as well.

This is why we, as a community, need a Town Supervisor who is willing to take on the hatred of the Economic Royalists in our community, no matter their source—corporate interests or private foundations. We need someone willing to shift the balance of power in favor of the average resident of Windham.

This is why we, as a community, must have an important debate about how our local government is going to interact with these large entities. And that debate must be led by someone who does not want to be captured by them.

Instead, we need a strong oppositional leader in the role of Town Supervisor—the type of leader who is willing to stand up to these forces of gentrification and say one simple word: “No.”

That simple, one-word response can change the entire nature of the relationship between the average residents of our community and those who wish to substantially alter Windham’s character to suit their vision of creating an exclusive enclave for the extremely wealthy of New York City.

Once we accept the fact that, yes, we can say “No,” then when we do say “Yes,” it means that we have negotiated a deal that is equitable for our entire community.

At present, however, we have a Town Board whose leadership is unwilling to do this.

The fact is that our Town Board is all too willing to sacrifice the interests of the community to appease the gentrification faction in Windham. Until we have leadership on the Town Board that is ready to take on this fight, the average resident of Windham will continue to bear the burden of this unequal development.

Instead, I propose that we, as residents of Windham, stand up to these forces of gentrification and declare that Windham is changing—but this time, it is going to change in a direction that benefits the people who actually live here.

It is going to become a town where the middle and working classes can once again thrive. A town where homeownership isn’t beyond the reach of local residents and where our seniors can easily access activities, services, and medical care. A town where families can afford to put down roots and build their futures.

These are not things that can be accomplished overnight. But the process begins with something very simple: standing up to those who would push us out of our own homes by making our town too expensive for ordinary people to live in.

As the Democratic candidate for Town of Windham Supervisor in this election, I feel it is important that I make my views clear to the voting public concerning the Windham Mountain Club’s planned further expansion into Windham’s hospitality market.

It is time for Windham’s Town Board to have a voice that is willing to stand up to the forces of gentrification that are attempting to homogenize our community and transform it into a superficial brand for only the most elite—all while extracting its surplus value and ultimately leaving behind a rotting carcass once the process of speculative capitalism has run its course.

The Windham Mountain Club is already presenting this Boutique Hotel as a fait accompli, with a projected completion date of 2028. This brazen act appears to disregard the entire approval process and suggests that the private equity driving WMC’s decision-making views Windham’s Planning Board as little more than its own personal approval board—one that will rubber-stamp whatever project is placed before it and then present that project to the community as being in the community’s best interest.

This is certainly unsettling, to say the least, for members of our community who already operate within an overcrowded hospitality market—one that is also contending with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 fewer daily visitors during peak skiing periods each winter.

The only solution to this problem is to change the makeup of our Town Board—to put individuals in place, such as myself, who aren’t afraid to welcome the “hate” of the class of people Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously referred to as the “Economic Royalists.” This is the class of people who use money and business influence to lock out their competition through monopolistic business strategies and influence the political system in their favor. These same forces can subvert the normal democratic processes outlined in our founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and do operate at the local municipal level as well.

If our community is going to thrive in the 21st century, we must accept that Windham needs different leadership—leadership that recognizes resources like our ski slope as sources of collective value generation within our community.

Our community is made up of many stakeholders—consumers, employees, residents, local businesses, and the Town itself—all of whom contribute to the creation of that overall value. In this sense, value is not created by any single private entity operating in isolation; it is created collectively through the relationships, resources, labor, infrastructure, and economic activity of the community as a whole. This is how I define Public Value Generation.

This stands in sharp contrast to our present Town Board, which has no clearly defined concept of Public Value Generation—a Town Board that refuses to stand up to the forces of gentrification in our community and support the development of a strong, sustainable local economy.

We need to ask ourselves a very simple question: Is our current administration giving us—the average residents of Windham—the “Best Bang for Our Buck”? Are we actually getting everything we deserve from the development taking place in our community?

Statements like this, I understand, threaten the status quo of development in Windham. I understand that those who see themselves as being in the middle of the road might find these statements difficult to reconcile with their own self-identification as “moderates.” I understand that. But the question of what is moderate and what is radical is largely a matter of perspective. In 1776, the concept of self-rule through democratic government by non-elites was considered radical, yet today, we in the democratic West would consider that the bare minimum required for democracy to exist.

So, I ask you now: Is it really radical to ask your own Town Board to represent you—the full-time residents of this community—in a manner that ensures the continuation of your community? Is it radical to want to see our community grow and become economically viable for all residents? Is it radical to wish to see our Main Street thrive? Is it radical to want to reduce the impacts of income inequality and rampant gentrification that are currently reshaping our community?

If you believe these goals to be moderate—perhaps you’re a radical, too.

And if you don’t, perhaps you have to ask yourself: Why aren’t you?

I was recently talking to a member of the community in Windham who was very concerned that I wasn’t won over by the RUPCO workforce housing project being built in Tannersville, NY. Now, it’s not that I’m completely against the project. That would be an inaccurate characterization because I am happy that Tannersville is addressing the problem. A more accurate characterization would be to say that I’m very aware of the limitations of the current process used to create workforce housing in communities like ours. And after a great deal of research on my part, I see some relatively straightforward ways to create a better model—a process that will allow growth in our community while avoiding some of these pitfalls.

In the world of subsidized housing, there is a phenomenon called the “Fiscal Cliff.” The fiscal cliff occurs when a person’s eligibility for state or federal assistance suddenly decreases or disappears completely after that person’s income increases. This can create situations in which people have an incentive to remain at a lower income because even a modest wage increase may not compensate for the sudden loss of housing assistance—especially when they still cannot afford the prevailing market rents in their community.

Take, for example, a tenant at 70% AMI in the City of Beacon, paying approximately $1,800 per month in a set-aside unit within a market-rate development. If that person receives a modest raise, causing their income to surpass the 70% threshold, their rent would increase to market rate—$3,000 per month in this instance. The raise they received is unlikely to cover this $14,000 annual increase in housing costs. In the City of Beacon, policy grants a one-year grace period for a tenant in ]this situation if they wish to move. Regardless of this grace period, the ultimate result of the income cliff is a situation in which a person’s economic mobility and housing stability are at odds. Residents are forced into impossible tradeoffs: take the raise and risk the need to move, or stay local, maintain community ties, and keep the affordable unit? (Patterns for Progress)

This is one of the potential drawbacks of using the LIHTC program. It can be mitigated to some extent in LIHTC-funded projects by establishing an average income target for tenants within a building—perhaps, for example, 90% of the Area Median Income, or potentially higher depending on the program’s requirements. But again, when household incomes substantially exceed the targeted AMI levels, the underlying problem of the Fiscal Cliff can eventually emerge for some tenants. I noted this issue in an article I wrote last year about the Tannersville project.

The solution, in my view, is to use different funding mechanisms. Instead of relying primarily on federal tax credits such as LIHTC, a municipality seeking to build workforce housing could explore directly issued municipal revenue bonds. Under such a model, the community could exercise considerably greater control over how affordability requirements are structured, rather than having the entire housing model dictated by the eligibility requirements attached to an outside subsidy program.

The broader point is that workforce housing should not merely make housing affordable today; it should be structured so that increasing your income tomorrow does not become a financial penalty.

This was one of the important by-products of my second article on workforce housing, which I wrote a few weeks ago. Not only should the community participate in the equity-generation process through collective value creation, but tenants must also have the ability to create equity for themselves. They must not become a permanent class of renters; they must also have the opportunity to build generational wealth for themselves and their families.

Exploring the issue of equity ownership for low- to middle-income families must also be a priority for the community. To remove the stigma of poverty from workforce housing and ensure that the threat of the Fiscal Cliff is avoided, homeownership must be part of the plan as well.

Homeownership does not have to take the traditional single-family detached form that the zoning advocates of the 19th and early 20th centuries projected onto the housing consumer. Owning your apartment, a condominium, or even a duplex, triplex, or quadplex are all viable forms of homeownership that must be accepted within our communities.

In that article, I postulated the hypothetical community “Can-Do-Ville” to illustrate the concept of creating collective equity through a workforce housing project. I was attempting to demonstrate three important benefits available to a community that embraces “Public Value Creation.”

First, the community benefits from the fact that housing rents—and proceeds from housing sales—are generated locally and ultimately reinvested into projects within the community.

Second, the community benefits from creating a model with multiple revenue streams. In that example, I showed how revenue generated from apartment sales and rents could be used to build a larger Community Wealth Fund, creating an ongoing source of capital for future community investments.

Third—and this is the primary focus of this article—the model recognizes that generational wealth creation should not be reserved for those who can already afford traditional homeownership. By creating opportunities for residents to build real equity, the community enriches not only the present generation but future generations of community members as well.

The goal, therefore, should not simply be to create affordable places for people to live. It should be to create a pathway through which working families can move from affordability to ownership, equity, and ultimately generational wealth.

I’ve therefore modeled the third benefit of this approach in greater detail. Let’s assume the following:

• Housing is sold under a contractual agreement that limits the maximum profit upon resale to 15%, helping to maintain long-term affordability when units are privately resold. Housing repurchased by the multi-stakeholder cooperative must remain rental housing until at least 75% of the cooperative’s acquisition costs have been recovered.

• Housing sold by individual owners is sold through the cooperative with a 0% transaction fee.

• Homes purchased and later resold by individual buyers may be sold at any point during the mortgage period, subject to the affordability and resale requirements established by the cooperative.

• Housing taxes were estimated using the 2025 tax rate of 2.712837%, assuming a 100% equalization rate. In New York State, that figure could potentially vary from year to year because the equalization rate is used to account for differences between locally assessed property values and market values across taxing jurisdictions. This allows property tax burdens to be calculated more consistently even when communities assess properties differently.

As you can see, the model shows that even with a modest home sale price of $225,000—roughly 15% greater than the original purchase price of $195,000, which I estimated as the maximum resale price in the original article—the family can still achieve significant growth in its potential wealth while maintaining the affordability of the housing itself.

Under this model, if the family uses 60% of the proceeds from the sale toward its next home, it could afford, in today’s dollars, a home with a selling price of $311,638. That represents roughly $116,000 more in purchasing power than the $195,000 apartment the family originally purchased at the beginning of the model.

Even if the family uses only 10% of the selling price toward its next home, the model shows that it could purchase a home priced at approximately $219,014. That represents an improvement of roughly $24,000 in purchasing power compared with the value of the family’s original home.

The important point is that even with restrictions designed to preserve long-term affordability, homeownership still provides the family with an opportunity to build equity and increase its purchasing power in a relatively short period of time. Affordability and individual wealth creation do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Depending on the costs of utilities and property taxes, the model continues to show long-term growth in household purchasing power, even with relatively modest increases in resale prices. This can be seen in the next round of sales as the property moves between the second and third homeowners.

In other words, the model does not depend on dramatic increases in housing prices to generate equity. Even under controlled appreciation designed to preserve affordability, each successive homeowner has the opportunity to build equity, increase purchasing power, and move further up the housing ladder.

As can be seen in the table below:

The drawback, obviously, is that as housing prices continue to rise, affordability for members of the community making 10%–40% down payments declines significantly. This means that homeownership could lock these members of the community into potentially longer periods at this level of housing than the first round of buyers, who purchased their homes at prices significantly below the prevailing market value of housing in the community.

This is where purchases by the Cooperative become an important part of the model. By periodically repurchasing homes, the Cooperative can help stabilize prices and, within a relatively short period of time, return those homes to the market at below-market prices without jeopardizing the long-term affordability of the overall project.

In this way, the Cooperative acts as a stabilizing force—balancing the ability of individual homeowners to build equity and generational wealth with the community’s equally important goal of maintaining a permanent supply of affordable housing.

This is a vital difference between my model and the standard model of workforce housing, where growth is designed around the continual creation of more housing without enough consideration for the fundamental question of how we help people move up the income-mobility ladder.

In my model, we address all three of the primary problems that housing, when treated primarily as a commodity rather than a public good, creates in our economy.

First, we address the equitable distribution of collectively created value, ensuring that the community itself maintains an equity stake in the value it helps to generate.

Second, we address the problem of funding by utilizing the Town and its ability to issue revenue bonds. This keeps the community in greater control of the project and allows it to establish its own requirements for qualifying for homeownership rather than relying entirely on requirements imposed by outside funding programs.

Third, and finally, we address the problem of generational wealth creation that continues to plague low- and middle-income families during a period of heightened wealth inequality. Instead of creating a permanent class of subsidized renters, the model creates pathways toward ownership, equity, and greater economic mobility.

So, under my model, we design the system specifically to avoid the Fiscal Cliff, while building housing at a pace intended to maintain high occupancy without unnecessarily flooding the market. This is how we make Workforce Housing an asset not only to our community, but to the very people who live in it.

No longer are residents effectively shackled to lower-paying jobs out of fear that earning more will cost them their affordable housing. Instead, they are given the opportunity to earn more, build equity, accumulate wealth, and move up the economic ladder—opening that affordable home to the next family ready to begin the same process.

If one takes a look at the Windham Mountain Club’s website, they will already see the “Boutique Hotel” presented almost as a fait accompli, with a 2028 opening date already being stated.

It’s this kind of bold, in-your-face disregard for the concerns of the community as a whole that has continually alienated the Windham Mountain Club and its policies of exclusivity from the greater community. It also demonstrates that the Windham Mountain Club appears confident that nothing will stop its plans for expansion, with ever more exclusive amenities further isolating the Club from the general public and the community in which it operates.

Actions like this are why the anger in Windham is palpable over the developments surrounding the Windham Mountain Club (WMC). In fact, it’s not difficult to understand why that anger is coming to a head. As the cost of living rises under tariffs and the ongoing crisis in the Middle East drives up the cost of everything from fertilizer to gasoline, the average American and small business owners—even those with relatively deep pockets—are feeling the economic squeeze. We are seeing class warfare at its finest, every bit as real as the class warfare that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Windham is feeling the pains of gentrification in a way that many residents can now see and experience directly. It’s no longer an abstract concept that Windham is changing. While some people will blame COVID or any number of other catalysts for the developments occurring today, the simple fact is that Windham has been on this trajectory for more than 50 years.

Over the last fifty years, Windham has shifted from a primarily resident-homeowner community to a predominantly second-homeowner community, in large part because economic development for full-time residents has remained weak. The changes we are witnessing today did not suddenly appear overnight—they are the culmination of a much longer transformation in the economic structure of our community.

As I’ve been advocating for more than two years now, the only real solution to stave off the worst effects of gentrification in our community is to rebuild a strong local economy—one that supports artisan manufacturing, retail, hospitality, and professional services. This is the only way to develop a truly viable Main Street.

Our community in the 1970s had a department store called Miller’s Department Store; today, that building houses the Tap Room, with condos on the upper floors. Where the Local is today was once a bank. Where the Windhm Diner is today was once a car dealership. The pharmacy was Lilly’s, and the Tip was the grocery store in town.

The reason we could support such a diverse collection of businesses wasn’t that our population was dramatically larger than it is today. In fact, in 1970, Windham’s population was only 1,190 residents.

The reason was much simpler: our community spent more of its money locally.

However, over the decades since the 1970s, we’ve seen a decline in local spending. We’ve watched the community steadily shift its focus away from building viable local businesses that sell goods and services to local residents and toward an economy increasingly dependent on the “tourist dollar.”

Now we’re seeing the inevitable outcome of that model. As income inequality has grown in the US, the focus of those tourist dollars has shifted away from the plumbers, police officers, teachers, and other middle-income professionals who once made up a significant portion of the tourism market and toward high-income C-suite executives and other wealthy visitors.

The problem is that when a community builds its economy primarily around attracting increasingly wealthy tourists rather than strengthening the purchasing power of its own residents, the businesses that survive will inevitably begin adapting themselves to the people with the most money to spend— thus changing the tenor and character of the community.

From the pressures following 9/11, which helped drive an early-2000s building boom, to the more recent COVID-era boom, the pattern of gentrification has continued to push our community further away from its middle- and working-class roots and toward a more exclusive and elite clientele.

Even during the ski-housing boom of the 1970s, the buyers weren’t necessarily multimillionaires. They were cops, plumbers, teachers, and other middle-class professionals. Windham was an affordable destination for people who were doing well and living the American Dream, whether they were a plumber, a teacher, or another working professional.

That distinction matters. Windham was a destination, but it wasn’t necessarily an exclusive destination.

What we are seeing now is the exact opposite. If we wish to maintain our community’s character, it will take a different approach to development in Windham. It will also require a vastly different approach from our local leadership on the Town Board.

It will take leadership that is not only “Pro-Windham” but also willing to say “No” to the forces of gentrification when they threaten the long-term interests of our local economy and full-time residents.

It is only when this dynamic of appeasement on the part of our Town Board comes to an end that Windham’s full-time residents will begin to receive their fair share of the development pie in a more equitable fashion.

Of course, there are certain members of our community who have embraced the gentrification process and have profited greatly from it. A Town Board that shifts the focus away from developers interested in short-term rentals and private-equity-backed development projects certainly will not be their ally—but that would ultimately be a positive development for our community.

Instead of building an economy around the short-term gains produced by successive building booms, a community focused on long-term, sustainable growth has very different priorities. The goal should not simply be to ask how much development we can attract today, but what kind of development will create lasting value for the people who actually live, work, raise families, and build their futures here.

What we need now are not weak responses from our Town Board, but strong responses that declare a red line in the gentrification process that must not be crossed. Responses that demonstrate that Windham is a community for full-time residents—not a brand to be sold.

And the only way to achieve that is to be willing to embrace the “hatred” of those who wish to transform Windham into a slick advertising campaign and create a superficial brand that mirrors so many other modern ski towns in America currently threatened by the gentrification process. That process ultimately leads to the homogenization of communities—communities that lose their identities and instead become cookie-cutter, mass-produced entities in a private-equity portfolio filled with interchangeable buildings, amenities, and boutique stores.

We must make it clear that we welcome new families and new people into our fold, but we do not welcome corporations that would isolate and alienate us, as a community, from our own resources. We welcome those who wish to build a future here—a future that includes the potential for generations of growth and development within our community.

This we welcome with open arms and open hearts, because these are kindred spirits who wish to create a community that will thrive for generations—not simply a community that becomes the next project used to mop up capital in the economy, only to be abandoned once every last bit of surplus value has been extracted.

Statements like this, I understand, threaten the status quo of development in Windham. I understand that those who see themselves as being in the middle of the road might find these statements difficult to reconcile with their own self-identification as “moderates.” I understand that. But the question of what is moderate and what is radical is largely a matter of perspective. In 1776, the concept of self-rule through democratic government by non-elites was considered radical, yet today, we in the democratic West would consider that the bare minimum required for democracy to exist.

So, I ask you now: Is it really radical to ask your own Town Board to represent you—the full-time residents of this community—in a manner that ensures the continuation of your community? Is it radical to want to see our community grow and become economically viable for all residents? Is it radical to wish to see our Main Street thrive? Is it radical to want to reduce the impacts of income inequality and rampant gentrification that are currently reshaping our community?

If you believe these goals to be moderate—perhaps you’re a radical, too.

And if you don’t, perhaps you have to ask yourself: Why aren’t you?

The Windham Mountain Club has probably bungled just about every possible rollout when it comes to its plans for creating a more exclusive enclave on the Mountain Top. In fact, one could say that the Windham Mountain Club (WMC) is suffering more acutely from its own failure to package its rebranding in a palatable manner than the Volkswagen Beetle suffered from its Nazi genesis when attempting to gain a foothold in the American car market during the 1950s.

And with no Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) in sight to transform its bad press into positive advertising copy—with a sarcastic wink and a nod that could turn public discontent into positive growth—it would seem that the WMC instead prefers to continue alienating and dividing the community further with each new development surrounding its proposed 26-room hotel.

In a new article from The Overlook News, we can see that, once again, the Town Planning Board has sided with the WMC instead of listening to the concerns of disgruntled community members who will be most directly affected by these changes to the Master Plan.

Of course, the problem is that a Master Plan is not a document designed to act like a straitjacket that shackles growth and impedes the WMC’s ability to grow and expand. Instead, Master Plans are designed to do the exact opposite: they are intended to streamline the regulatory process governing land use, leading to reduced development costs and faster outcomes.

In Windham’s case, our newly adopted Zoning Law further carves out the WMC’s ability to grow and adapt to changing circumstances in business development by essentially allowing the Master Plan to function as the zoning policy for this particular area of our community. As can be seen in the image of our current Zoning Law below:

And, honestly, we wouldn’t want the Planning Board to overreach its authority by becoming the arbiter of local economic policy in our community. So, this fight against the WMC at the Planning Board is misdirected, to say the least.

The arbiters of local economic policy in our community are the members of the Town Board. The fight over the economic direction of our community is not ultimately with the Zoning Board or the Planning Board, but with the Town Board—the very board that has the power to change the rules!

If we, as a community, are going to change the balance of power in our community to more equally represent our local businesses, then we are going to have to change the playing field.

If you want to win this battle, the answer is to use the leverage that the Town has to alter the Zoning Law. By removing the blanket accessory uses found in Sections A, D, and F, along with reducing the number of permitted-by-right uses for the land under the Zoning Law, the Town could shift some of that power back into its own hands.

By placing specific limitations on the ability to create lodging—for example, regulations requiring a minimum of 8,000 ticketed skiers per day before on-site lodging could even be considered—the Town could go a long way toward changing the balance of power and addressing the concerns of local hotel owners about the viability and impact of a slopeside hotel.

The point is that if the existing rules create an economic playing field that disadvantages locally owned lodging businesses, then the answer isn’t to demand that the Planning Board reinterpret the rules. The answer is for the Town Board to change the rules.

Again, however, this is going to take a shift in the balance of power—one that our present Town Board appears unwilling to make. Of course, this would almost certainly invite a legal challenge from the WMC. But the Town has the authority to regulate land use in ways intended to protect the quality and character of the community, provided those regulations are lawfully crafted and supported.

The Town Board could craft an amendment requiring Resort Land Uses seeking to develop lodging to demonstrate that existing local hotel and short-term rental (STR) capacity is inadequate to meet the documented needs of the estimated number of guests coming into the community.

By linking the ability to create additional lodging to an actual, documented need for lodging capacity, the Town would fundamentally change the equation. Under such a policy, additional slopeside lodging would become considerably more difficult to justify unless the resort could first demonstrate sufficient growth in visitation—potentially requiring a substantial increase in the number of daily ticketed skiers before additional lodging could be warranted.

In other words, if the Town wants greater leverage over the future development of the resort, the Town Board has to be willing to rewrite the rules governing that development.

The question becomes: Does the Town of Windham have the will to put a clamp on the Club’s development after it has donated $100,000 to the Windham Foundation or $30,000 to the Windham and Hensonville Fire Departments?

This is how corporate donations can be used to build influence over development decisions in a community like Windham. These are the types of pressures that large corporations and foundations can place on local governments because they know that many small-town governments are run by part-time officials who may feel that they lack the resources or capacity to undertake major projects themselves.

All of this is reinforced by the concepts associated with Public Choice Theory—the idea that governments are often inefficient and unable to develop value in local economies as effectively as private actors. From this perspective, it seems only sensible to leave long-term development and planning increasingly in the hands of the private sector. Subsequently, however, small-town governments can become increasingly dependent on corporations and foundations for resources that would otherwise have to be provided publicly.

And once that dependency develops, the question becomes whether relatively small corporate and philanthropic contributions can translate into disproportionate influence over the long-term direction of the community.

If local businesses want to create a more equal playing field against the WMC and its efforts to create an exclusive club within the Town of Windham, then the Town Board will have to fundamentally alter the way it interacts with the WMC. That will mean taking harder stances that put the welfare of the community ahead of the welfare of the Club. At present, we are not seeing that type of action from our Town Board. And it seems very unlikely that Windham’s Republican Party will stand up and fight these trends in the gentrification of our community.

Because, simply put, we currently have no one on our Town Board willing to draw a sharp distinction between the welfare of our community and its local enterprises and the extractive forces of gentrification that have taken hold here. No one is willing to do what FDR did in his 1936 “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech: spell out that distinction clearly and even welcome the “hate” of the “economic royalists,” as he termed them, with statements like this:

“There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer.” (Politico)

Without leadership like this—and without the political will to create a new balance of power within our community—the WMC and its interests will continue to go largely unchecked until they have wrung every last dollar they can from our local economy and eventually move on.

The Question is: Does Windham Have The Will Change This Power Dynamic?

I was pretty pleased with my idea for the “Real Genius Program” until it dawned on me this morning that we could do more—much more—for the children of Windham, using the same funding source to invest in their development. It occurred to me that we could extend the program into our local Community Center with an additional grant of roughly $45,000 per year to fund after-school and summer programs that help tutor children who need extra assistance while enriching those children who want to challenge themselves.

However, for this to be a truly successful program, it must be completely free to all school-aged children participating in the program. Otherwise, it will never work. We should make sure that every child in Windham who would like the opportunity to learn something interesting, get help in school, or simply be creative is able to do so without any cost to their parents. We don’t want any child in our community left behind because of financial hardship or other circumstances.

I envision a program where students of all ages can use our Community Center during the summer or throughout the school year as a place to explore STEM initiatives, learn how to paint or draw, or perhaps even participate in drama and theater. Book clubs and foreign-language lessons are also possibilities that could be funded in our community through this program.

We must make learning an experience that children enjoy and one that enriches their lives.

This is a worthy program for a community such as ours to invest in using revenue from the Mortgage Tax. This is the type of program our community needs to ensure that all children have access to enrichment and tutoring opportunities, regardless of their families’ financial circumstances. By making these opportunities available to everyone, we can help ensure that the next generation of community members has the best possible opportunities for success later in life.

The question we must ask ourselves as residents of Windham isn’t, “Can we afford to do this?” but rather, “Can we afford not to do this?” I believe the answer is a resounding NO… We must make education a lifelong activity.

Today, I stumbled upon an article from CBS highlighting the rising cost of school supplies, and that means many families in communities like Windham who are living on fixed or low incomes may struggle with these additional expenses.

Obviously, Windham’s children are our future, and if we wish to create a more equitable future for our community, we must develop a support program that helps these vulnerable members of our community excel in school. According to the article, the projected cost of supplying the average student with school supplies will be approximately $146.45 nationwide.

I am proposing a program that would make up to $600 per family available to help cover the cost of necessary school supplies for their children. This could include items such as paper, notebooks, pens, binders, folders, pencils, and other essential classroom supplies.

The goal is simple: the cost of basic school supplies should never become an obstacle to a child’s ability to learn and succeed in Windham.

For those who are worried about how we would fund this program, there should be little concern. Windham currently has roughly $181,000 sitting in our Mortgage Tax Aid Fund, which can be used for discretionary spending policies. I suggest that we make $45,000 of these funds available to the community to create a program I call “Windham’s Real Geniuses.”

The program would distribute up to $600 per family to as many as 75 families in our community who require assistance getting their children prepared for the 2027–2028 school year.

This represents a relatively small use of a fund that Windham receives because we are fortunate enough to have elevated property values within our county. It is time to make some of these funds available to the members of our community who need the most assistance.

After all, aren’t our children our future?

CD Lane Park: August 15th 10 to 11:30 AM
I will be the guest of the Mountain Top Issues Coalition

I’ve always been cautious of “philanthropy,” not because I distrust the idea of helping people in need, but because of how easily philanthropy can be captured by either corporations or specific groups of donors. That’s always been the critical failure of relying on philanthropy as a means of creating systemic change in a community. It is often described as the paradox of “proximity to the money vs. proximity to the problem.”

This problem shows up in several ways in philanthropy. First, since well-funded philanthropic organizations with connections to the right resources can leverage those resources, these organizations grow faster, have stronger financial positions, and ultimately appear, on the surface, to be doing more work on problems than may actually be the case. The second issue is that, because these groups often spend more of their resources on managing the organization, far less reaches the people who need it most. Finally, greater reporting requirements, more restrictions on funds, and less direct funding mean that fewer resources are ultimately transferred to the groups with the greatest trust and knowledge within their communities.

But even beyond that, philanthropy can become captured by the donor class, which can steer initiatives and ultimately the goals of foundations and nonprofits in directions that might not always prove effective.

In the end, philanthropy will never be a substitute for proper planning and well-crafted local public policy. While philanthropy might help smooth out some of the rough edges in a community, it will never produce the type of systemic change that strong public policy can create. And that’s why, as a community, we have to make sure that philanthropy isn’t allowed to become a substitute for the proper planning and strong public policy that will actually create the systemic changes our community requires to sustain itself for decades.

This is also why we must ensure that when we spend our “public funds” on philanthropic endeavors, the community as a whole receives a meaningful benefit from that spending.

We have seen far too often communities invest public money in public-private partnerships that fail to produce results that truly reach those who need the help most. An interesting article published by Forbes in April 2026 outlines how philanthropic endeavors during crises can fall short of their goals, often because funds become captured by the managerial structures that administer these philanthropic foundations.

What is required in our community is a process that ensures our community gets the most “Bang for Our Buck”—it’s really that simple. For example, the Overlook News has reported that Sugar Maples, part of the Catskill Mountain Foundation’s cultural philanthropy, is seeking assistance from the Town of Windham for additional student housing.

The question that any good venture capitalist (VC) would ask Sugar Maples is: Well, are you willing to give me a 10 percent share of the organization’s equity that we can sell at the time of an IPO after I’ve invested my seed funding?

That’s the type of thinking we, as a community, have to apply to the precious public funds we’re spending on projects throughout the community. We have to look at the return on investment, because everything comes with an opportunity cost. The money we spend supporting Sugar Maples cannot also be spent on some other project, so we must ensure that this expenditure yields real, tangible results for our community.

Then we have a cadre of well-branded intermediary organizations and consulting firms that sit between funders and communities. Their leaders have mastered foundation-speak: "capacity building," "technical assistance," "systems change." They know what will get funded (innovation, sustainability, scale) and what will be looked over (redistribution, solidarity, power-building). Entire organizations whose purpose is to exist between money and need, extracting philanthropic capital at every stage. (Forbes)

Now, I’m not saying that the Catskill Mountain Foundation suffers from exactly the problems described above, but rather that we have a similar problem in our community: public funds being filtered through a layer of extractive capital called “philanthropy.” The extraction process still exists, and that is fundamentally the problem we are facing in our community. To promote or even accelerate this process is, in my opinion, reckless at best and deleterious at worst. And yet, that’s exactly what appears to be occurring.

The reality is that no community can afford to give away its resources without getting something meaningful in return—something that helps its residents grow and prosper.

That’s what a community like Windham, or even New York City, must do when dealing with any investment of public resources in the community: ask the question, What is the return on this investment? Will it provide programs for our children during the summer? Will it help our seniors? Will it create jobs? These are the questions we should be asking whenever public resources are being invested.

Some may think this is an alienating way of addressing the issue. I disagree. This approach isn’t saying that we won’t work with other members of the community. On the contrary, it’s saying that we want parity in the relationships between the Town and the nonprofits and foundations operating within our community.

It’s saying that we are equals in this partnership, and that we hope to work with everyone—including nonprofits and foundations—to maximize the return to the community as mutually beneficial stakeholders in our community’s future.

Now, that represents a different power dynamic from the one some nonprofits may be accustomed to when dealing with small communities like ours. But this is the hard line that we, as a community, must take to ensure that our finite resources are not squandered helping the few while the many are neglected.

This is not an attack on the arts—I like the arts and believe they should be supported with public funds. However, that support has to make the arts open and freely accessible to the public. Art, when funded through public grants, must become a public good, accessible to the broader public in a meaningful way.

Art is a resource that helps build our community, and if we recognize it as such, then we must treat it like a natural resource of our community—ensuring that it is not monopolized but instead distributed equitably among the stakeholders of the community who are willing to support it with public funds.

If the public is going to help fund the arts, then the public should meaningfully share in the benefits those investments create.

And that public is made up of the members of our community. If we support the Sugar Maples project, then our children, our adults, our seniors, and our residents should all have the opportunity to access the arts—with reduced costs or even free admission to lessons, special programs, cultural events, and other benefits that ensure our residents are able to participate in the arts themselves.

The goal should be to ensure that we, as a community, benefit fully from these public investments. If our community is helping to fund the arts, then our community should also have meaningful access to the cultural opportunities that those investments help create.

In 1974, the State of Wyoming saw an opportunity to change the nature of the state’s equity share in the vast fortunes private companies were making from its mineral wealth by creating the Wyoming Permanent Mineral Trust Fund—funded through a small tax of 1.5% on all “coal, petroleum, natural gas, oil shale, and such other minerals.” By 2025, the fund was valued at approximately $12 billion.

Likewise, in 1976, the State of Alaska, understanding that the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the oil reserves in the northernmost parts of Alaska would eventually run dry, created the Alaska Permanent Fund. The Alaska Permanent Fund was established using revenue generated from the state’s oil wealth. The fund started in 1977 with a mere $743,000, and by 2015, it was valued at approximately $53.7 billion.

North Dakota created its Legacy Fund in 2010 through a ballot initiative designed to secure the future of North Dakotans after the end of the oil boom. In this respect, the fund follows the same basic model of collective value generation: capturing a portion of the wealth created from a finite natural resource and investing it to support future growth after that resource has been depleted. As of 2026, the fund had approximately $14.5 billion in assets and is projected to reach between $260 billion and $450 billion in value by 2060.

The most impressive aspect of all of these funds is not simply that they were created, but who was in power when these collective-value-generating funds were established—REPUBLICANS! Yes, every one of these programs was initiated while a Republican governor was in office. These are not ideas that are inherently socialist in nature. In fact, they are nothing more than what any venture capitalist would demand from a startup company in exchange for his or her investment: an equity share in the company.

Many of you may be skeptical that a town the size of Windham could produce a Community Fund capable of generating results like those described above. The answer is that equity shares do not need to be tied to commodities. They merely need to produce a return on investment. Any cooperative, multi-stakeholder enterprise could create the basis for the equity share necessary to begin building a community fund like these. The more profit these investments generate early on, the better it would be for the development of the fund and the faster it could grow.

However, a large number of small businesses contributing smaller amounts of profit to the fund could work just as well. For example, 1,500 small businesses contributing $15,000 per year would generate the same $22.5 million in annual contributions as one large company or industry contributing $22.5 million per year. The way in which a community meets its equity needs can be achieved through different methods depending on the resources available within that community.

The problem that Windham faces is not whether we can produce equity, but whether we have the will to demand that the equity generated collectively within our community is realized for the benefit of our local residents. That is our issue. We could create a Community Equity Fund based on workforce housing and tourism if we desired to do so.

However, the question facing Windham is: Do we have the vision to do it? Or will we become a “Cannot-Do-Ville” instead of the “Can-Do-Ville” that we need to be to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for our community? Perhaps this is the legacy we should aspire to create for our community and for future generations.

That’s why I’ll be at CD Lane Park this Saturday—to openly discuss how we can achieve these things and more with anyone willing to join the conversation.

After listening to a few complaints about my last article being too academic in nature, I agree that my default writing style tends to engage in academic-style discourse. So, I’ve decided to edit and reduce my previous article to a more manageable and interesting length for a more general audience. Ultimately, neoliberal economic theory has created a policy framework that places the private sector ahead of the public sector.

The important point to understand about Neoliberalism is that, following the post-WWII period, the economic philosophy that developed can best be described by this quote from the paper “Beyond outsourcing: Re-embedding the state in public value production” by Rosie Collington and Mariana Mazzucato (2023):

Developed by a heterogeneous group of economists in the postwar decades, neoliberalism can be understood as an economic philosophy premised on the belief that profit-seeking firms are both the most efficient allocators of resources—and hence producers of goods and services—and, consequently,constitute the site where value is most effectively defined and produced for society (Chang, 1993, 2002a; Mueller, 2003; Palley, 2005). In other words, it represents “a fundamental preference for the market over the state as a means of resolving problems and human ends” (Crouch, 2011: 7). (Sage Publications)

These attitudes are firmly rooted in the political philosophy of communities like Windham and Tannersville, New York. Our communities face a crisis of faith in our own abilities, and this is due in no small part to the fact that so many members of our local political class firmly believe that small-town government is powerless to make meaningful changes.

I am, however, going to explain and show you how Windham and Tannersville can change their perspective and transform themselves from pawns of outside interests into the masters of their own destinies. In doing so, they can become “Can-Do-Villes,” where sustainable growth is not only possible but the norm.

Let’s examine the current housing project in Tannersville, New York, and see how a shift from Neoliberalism toward a pro-Local Equity Government model could fundamentally change the future of Tannersville.

The clearest example is the RUPCO, Inc. workforce housing project, which represents $2.5 million in grant funding being shifted to a nonprofit corporation. Now, some might believe that I think nonprofits are the problem. They are not. Nor do I believe that governments cannot work through public-private partnerships. Neither of those claims would be true, as I advocate a radically different type of partnership between local government and the private sector (i.e., renters and potential homeowners) through the creation of a multi-stakeholder housing cooperative. In that model, homeowners, renters, and the local government each share an equal stake in the equitable governance of the project. By contrast, RUPCO, Inc. is the sole owner of the equity in the current project. Once it has paid off its bank loan, RUPCO owns the housing, lock, stock, and barrel, as the saying goes, and will administer it using its own employees.

All of the rental income generated over the lifetime of the housing units will flow to RUPCO, paying salaries and helping to finance whatever project the organization undertakes next. What it will not do is create long-term economic growth in the community of Tannersville. Tannersville will not see an increase in middle-class jobs from a housing development corporation. Nor will it require the expansion of local government capacity to oversee future housing developments and create additional growth on the Mountain Top. Instead, many of the gains that could have been realized through well-paying local jobs for architects, engineers, and office staff will instead be concentrated in Kingston, New York, not Tannersville. What Tannersville will receive from the project are two jobs ( 1-full time and 1 part-time) within the housing development itself rather than a locally staffed office of skilled professionals whose work would contribute to the long-term well-being of the community.

The problem here is that the community lacks the equitable stake it deserves in the collective process of value generation that government is helping to create. Any good venture capitalist (VC), or investor of any type, would ask the question: What is the return on the investment? In the case of the housing project that Tannersville is undertaking, the question is whether the 60 induced jobs are truly enough for the community. What happens if those jobs turn out to be lower-paying service or retail positions? It turns out that the quality of employment matters just as much as the quantity.

The answers we’re getting suggest that the Village of Tannersville is not receiving the maximum return on its investment. In fact, the Village will have to wait a significant period of time before realizing the full tax benefits because it is using a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program to reduce the tax burden and increase the return on RUPCO’s investment. Typically, these programs last 20 to 25 years, reducing payments that would otherwise go toward county, school, and town property taxes. So the question becomes: What sort of equity stake should Tannersville have received in this program?

The answer is simply an equity stake that provides strong local employment across a broad range of occupations—from white-collar to blue-collar jobs—a meaningful share in the profits generated from day one, and the ability to ensure that the program grows alongside the needs of the community. The only way to guarantee these conditions is to create a different model for how public-private partnerships operate in the first place. Perhaps the solution is to create a model in which housing is treated not as a commodity but as a public good.

Making Value in a Public Good

Let’s assume that instead of hiring RUPCO, Inc. to manage and build the housing project, Tannersville—or any other community—decided to establish its own community-owned housing cooperative authority to develop long-term workforce housing. Let’s also assume that our hypothetical town, which I will call “Can-Do-Ville,” embraces the challenge of owning and operating its own workforce housing development.

The town has a Main Street with four blighted and vacant buildings sitting on 1.2-acre lots that it already owns through tax foreclosures. Instead of auctioning the properties to recover the unpaid taxes, the town decides to construct four mixed-use buildings, each containing 25 apartments and 10 commercial units on the ground floor. Each apartment is a two-bedroom, 1,080-square-foot unit designed to house a family of two to four people, based on a household income assumption of $83,440 per year for a two-income family in Greene County, according to the statistical data provided by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress.

To ensure long-term affordability, housing costs must not exceed 30% of a household’s gross income. In fact, as you will see in the tables below, both the rental and homeownership models provide substantially lower housing costs for families.

Housing Costs for Renters:

This shows that a renter earning 100% of the Greene County, New York, Area Median Income (AMI), as reported by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, would be paying approximately $811 per month less for housing than the traditional recommendation of spending 30% of one’s income on housing. That translates into $811 in additional disposable income each month at the fingertips of families with children. It means more opportunities to invest in their own futures through stocks, bonds, and other securities, while also increasing discretionary spending on local activities such as entertainment, dining, and gifts. In short, it means more money available to support the community’s long-term growth.

Now, let’s look at those who decide they want to purchase a home instead of renting—they wish to build a little equity of their own.

Now, with a modest 6% down payment and a purchase price of only $195,000 for a 1,080-square-foot apartment—equivalent to roughly $180.56 per square foot—we have an affordable home that provides families with an equity stake in their future. At current mortgage rates of 6.41%, the monthly mortgage payment would be only $1,147.75, representing less than 17% of the household’s monthly income. This results in a lower monthly housing cost than the rental model. As part of the cooperative, homeowners would also pay a modest annual fee of $1,200 (or $100 per month) in cooperative dues. These fees would help cover expenses such as the salary of the building supervisor, property management, maintenance, and other shared operating costs.

The Cost of Construction:

Utilizing estimates from the building industry, I arrived at a total construction cost of $6.325 million per building. We did not factor in land acquisition costs because the Town of Can-Do-Ville already owns the properties in question. While this scenario is possible, it is not always typical. However, because we want this hypothetical model to be analogous to the real-world example of Tannersville, which received land from the county at a very low cost (and possibly at no cost), we will assume that our hypothetical community is in a similar position.

This project comes very close to the $30.211 million that RUPCO is projecting for its construction project of 60 housing units spread across three three-story buildings. I have added a fourth story to each building to incorporate commercial space, thereby maximizing the total economic output of each structure. I have also reduced the costs of design and permitting by utilizing in-house designs prepared by employees of the Town of Can-Do-Ville rather than hiring outside firms, thereby keeping more money within the local community.

Furthermore, by relying on the town’s own staff, we reduce permitting costs and minimize delays in the development process. We also create the opportunity to use additional grant funding to study both the economic and environmental impacts of development—funds that would otherwise be spent on outside consultants. In this model, those functions are consolidated within the operating capacity of the local government, allowing grant funding to support research into broader issues that affect the entire community rather than being limited to a single development project.

How the equity builds:

The housing model we’ve created contains two separate revenue sources: (1) the sale of 60 apartments to private owners, and (2) the retention of 40 housing units and 40 commercial units by the Housing Cooperative Authority, which would remain community-owned and serve as a permanent rental revenue stream. Over time, the community could also repurchase housing units from private owners to increase its stock of rental housing or stabilize the housing market as needed, ensuring that prices for these units remain relatively stable.

By giving community members the opportunity to own their own apartments, however, we also help foster long-term generational wealth while simultaneously creating the financial resources needed to continually expand the program.

In the model shown above, I used three different assumptions:

1. Thirty-Year Housing Fund Growth: All proceeds from apartment sales are immediately invested in safe interest-bearing securities earning 3.5% annually—roughly the long-term average return for certificates of deposit (CDs) or U.S. Treasury securities—to maximize the long-term growth of the Housing Fund.

2. 50/50 Hybrid Model: Fifty percent of all revenue generated from apartment sales is used to offset the initial construction costs, while the remaining 50%is invested in safe securities earning 3.5% annual interest.

3. Accelerated Payoff Model: The most aggressive approach, in which the initial construction costs are paid off over a relatively short nine-year period. Once the construction debt has been retired, all subsequent revenue is directed toward building the Housing Fund.

While each strategy has its strengths and weaknesses, they illustrate a much more important point in this broader argument: communities that outsource the development of resources such as workforce housing are not merely offloading the perceived costs of management. They are also offloading the long-term equity gains that communities like Tannersville and Windham cannot afford to lose if they hope to achieve sustainable long-term development.

Under the conventional model of community growth, Can-Do-Ville, with a property tax rate of $2.85 per $1,000 of assessed value ($4.5million), would receive $12,825 per year per building in property taxes if the buildings were owned by outside corporations. Across four buildings, that amounts to only $51,300 in annual property tax revenue.

Now compare that with the rental income generated from 40 housing units and 40 commercial units, which totals approximately $1.512 million per year in potential revenue. Because this is a cooperative model, once the initial construction costs have been repaid, both homeowners and renters could actually begin receiving annual returns on their equity through the cooperative. Imagine paying your monthly housing costs and then receiving a $250 annual dividend simply for being a member of the cooperative.

Cooperative dues could also be structured to replace the tax revenue that would otherwise be collected for school taxes while giving every homeowner within the cooperative the ability to vote in the school district just as if they owned a detached single-family home. Renters’ cooperative fees would function much like a traditional landlord-tenant arrangement, with each renter paying his or her proportional share of the school tax obligation.

If we assume that the school tax rate is $4.50 per $1,000 of assessed value, and that each building is assessed at $4.5 million, the annual school tax would total $20,250 per building. Spread across 35 residential units, that amounts to approximately $578.57 per unit per year. Not a bad arrangement: the school district loses absolutely nothing, while the community gains students, families, and workers—all while simultaneously building a revolving fund capable of producing additional affordable housing whenever it is needed.

In fact, as the modeling demonstrates, this fund has the potential to generate long-term growth extending well beyond housing alone. With the ability to generate millions of dollars in additional capital over time, the fund could finance new housing, create jobs, support infrastructure improvements, protect the environment, and invest in countless other long-term community development projects.

So as communities like Tannersville and Windham say no to thinking big and accepting the myth that Governments especially local governments are too small and too inefficient to create strong long-term growth we socialize the risks— those being the loss of grant funds, the loss of tax dollars through PILOT programs to private companies who use these increases for their own gains with little regard to the community’s greater needs or the fact that value is a collective creation that embodies all stakeholders equally why should only a very few members of the community truly benefit fromt these developments.

Whereas the model I propose builds a community by engaging with all the stakeholders and ensures the ability to risk big and build big when successes are created while limiting the impacts of failures.

While this model is simplified and only for illustrative purposes, it shows the power of bigger thinking and taking a bolder position for what Local Government can and should be trying to achieve.

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Over the last 50-plus years, a popular theory in modern governance and economics has taken hold known as Public Choice Theory, developed in the late 1970s by James M. Buchanan, an economist and professor at George Mason University. George Mason University is known for its strong libertarian positions on government and economics, with connections to Koch Industries through Richard Fink, an academic and former board member of the Charles Koch Foundation, among other right-wing libertarian think tanks. Richard Fink founded the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in 1980, further expanding the influence of Austrian economic theory.

The Mercatus Center focuses on Austrian economics as filtered through the intellectual tradition of the University of Chicago, particularly the work of F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. This tradition influenced Nobel Prize-winning economists such as Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, and Larry Sjaastad, who would later help educate the so-called “Chicago Boys,” the Chilean free-market economists who provided much of the intellectual foundation for the market reforms implemented during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990).

In this revolutionary period of economic upheaval during the late 1960s and early 1970s, James M. Buchanan entered the fray. Buchanan, who was every bit the acolyte of F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises as his better-known and more publicly influential counterpart, Milton Friedman, began developing the theory of “Public Choice.” In its most succinct formulation, the theory essentially argues two things: (1) governments are inefficient and ineffective at creating value in the free market, and (2) governments do more harm than good because they are not only inefficient and ineffective, but they also respond to the whims of voters rather than the market.

Ultimately, these ideas led to the type of rhetoric embodied by Milton Friedman, who once said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” Or, as President Ronald Reagan often remarked during his campaigns, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.’”

These attitudes, cultivated by a deeply rooted belief that value creation is the exclusive domain of the entrepreneurial class, are nothing new. Their earliest and strongest formulations can be traced back to David Ricardo (1772–1823), the English businessman, economist, and later politician. Ricardo viewed labor as the source of value, but he also regarded the capitalist class as occupying the highest position within the productive process. In his great treatise, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), he outlines the central role that capitalists play within his labor theory of value.

This attitude—that business is exclusively the domain of the private sector—creates a paradox in free-market thinking that both Karl Marx (Das Kapital, Vols. I–III) and later the Hungarian lawyer and economic historian Karl Polanyi(1886–1964) pointed out in his highly influential book, The Great Transformation (1944). Governments are not merely passive arbiters of free markets, designed only to resolve juridical disputes or ensure that the basic infrastructure exists to promote the free market. Rather, they actively create and shape the free market itself. They are active forces in determining how markets develop and create value by establishing the very conditions in which markets come into existence.

Of course, Polanyi’s work has many fierce detractors for a variety of reasons and from across the ideological spectrum. Ultimately, however, the enduring value of his work lies in recognizing that markets are not simply a part of nature; they are, in fact, emergent properties of broader social conditions, in which the influence of local government is critical in establishing the conditions that allow markets to develop.

However, modern neoclassical value theory is based on a fundamental shift in focus. Instead of relying on the labor theory of value, which underpinned the classical models of Ricardo, Smith (The Wealth of Nations), and Marx, it instead focuses on the price of the commodity itself as the source of value—a subjective measure developed to create an all-encompassing concept of value in economics.

Ultimately, this subjective approach, which places value in the price of a commodity (whether a product or a service), represents a departure from the quantifiable and concrete concept of labor as the basis of value. Instead, it returns value to a subjective framework based on the preferences and perceptions of those participating in the market. In this view, the nature of value is seen as lying outside the scope of government and even outside the labor that produces the commodity itself. Value becomes a subjective feature of market pressures rather than something determined by the productive forces that create the market.

In this sense, we have returned to the pre-classical notions of value first formulated during the mid-seventeenth century, at the height of the mercantilist period, when the determination of value was viewed largely as a matter of convention by those who possessed the authority to define it. Within the mercantilist system, the ultimate source of value was believed to reside in the stock of intrinsically valuable precious metals, which in turn determined the prices of all things, including the labor of miners unearthing these treasures and the wealth of Europe’s treasuries minting these vast fortunes.

In this respect, our modern conception of value represents a return to this pre-modern understanding of value, as Mariana Mazzucato argues in her excellent work, The Value of Everything.

And like these Mercantilists our modern Public Choice theorists are simply drawing abratirary boundaries around value generators and value extractors (economic rents). A theory like Public Choice Theory with its necesary felty to the Enterpenuerial Class means that it cannot accept the fact that Governments play a fundamental part in the creation of markets and molding the forces that create their more emergent properties from their directly related properties. Instead of being just neutral arbiters of a market that Governments respresent in Public Choice Theory better leaving Communities to outsource the business operations to the private sector.

The concept that governments are unable to operate effectively or efficiently is more myth than reality. During World War II, for example, the United States effectively operated under a government-controlled economy. The government set production quotas for everything from guns to butter (I know this is the classic example used in economics texts, but it seemed to fit perfectly in this case). In the case of the recent Downtown Revitalization Initiative in Tannersville, we can see how the process of socializing the risks while privatizing the gains is in full swing.

One of the clearest examples is the RUPCO, Inc. workforce housing project, which represents $2.5 million in grant funding being shifted to a nonprofit corporation. Now, some might believe that I think nonprofits are the problem. They are not. Nor do I believe that governments cannot work through public-private partnerships. Neither of those claims would be true, as I advocate a radically different type of partnership between local government and the private sector (i.e., renters and potential homeowners) through the creation of a multi-stakeholder housing cooperative. In that model, homeowners, renters, and the local government each share an equal stake in the equitable governance of the project. By contrast, RUPCO, Inc. is the sole owner of the equity in the current project. Once it has paid off its bank loan, RUPCO owns the housing, lock, stock, and barrel, as the saying goes, and will administer it using its own employees.

All of the rental income generated over the lifetime of the housing units will flow to RUPCO, paying salaries and helping to finance whatever project the organization undertakes next. What it will not do is create long-term economic growth in the community of Tannersville. Tannersville will not see an increase in middle-class jobs from a housing development corporation. Nor will it require the expansion of local government capacity to oversee future housing developments and create additional growth on the Mountain Top. Instead, many of the gains that could have been realized through well-paying local jobs for architects, engineers, and office staff will instead be concentrated in Kingston, New York, not Tannersville. What Tannersville will receive from the project are two jobs ( 1-full time and 1 part-time) within the housing development itself rather than a locally staffed office of skilled professionals whose work would contribute to the long-term well-being of the community.

The problem here is that the community lacks the equitable stake it deserves in the collective process of value generation that government is helping to create. Any good venture capitalist (VC), or investor of any type, would ask the question: What is the return on the investment? In the case of the housing project that Tannersville is undertaking, the question is whether the 60 induced jobs are truly enough for the community. What happens if those jobs turn out to be lower-paying service or retail positions? It turns out that the quality of employment matters just as much as the quantity.

The answers we’re getting suggest that the Village of Tannersville is not receiving the maximum return on its investment. In fact, the Village will have to wait a significant period of time before realizing the full tax benefits because it is using a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program to reduce the tax burden and increase the return on RUPCO’s investment. Typically, these programs last 20 to 25 years, reducing payments that would otherwise go toward county, school, and town property taxes. So the question becomes: What sort of equity stake should Tannersville have received in this program?

The answer is simply an equity stake that provides strong local employment across a broad range of occupations—from white-collar to blue-collar jobs—a meaningful share in the profits generated from day one, and the ability to ensure that the program grows alongside the needs of the community. The only way to guarantee these conditions is to create a different model for how public-private partnerships operate in the first place. Perhaps the solution is to create a model in which housing is treated not as a commodity but as a public good.

Making Value in a Public Good

Let’s assume that instead of hiring RUPCO, Inc. to manage and build the housing project, Tannersville—or any other community—decided to establish its own community-owned housing cooperative authority to develop long-term workforce housing. Let’s also assume that our hypothetical town, which I will call “Can-Do-Ville,” embraces the challenge of owning and operating its own workforce housing development.

The town has a Main Street with four blighted and vacant buildings sitting on 1.2-acre lots that it already owns through tax foreclosures. Instead of auctioning the properties to recover the unpaid taxes, the town decides to construct four mixed-use buildings, each containing 25 apartments and 10 commercial units on the ground floor. Each apartment is a two-bedroom, 1,080-square-foot unit designed to house a family of two to four people, based on a household income assumption of $83,440 per year for a two-income family in Greene County, according to the statistical data provided by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress.

To ensure long-term affordability, housing costs must not exceed 30% of a household’s gross income. In fact, as you will see in the table below, both the rental and homeownership models provide substantially lower housing costs for families.

Housing Costs for Renters:

This shows that a renter earning 100% of the Greene County, New York, Area Median Income (AMI), as reported by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress, would be paying approximately $811 per month less for housing than the traditional recommendation of spending 30% of one’s income on housing. That translates into $811 in additional disposable income each month at the fingertips of families with children. It means more opportunities to invest in their own futures through stocks, bonds, and other securities, while also increasing discretionary spending on local activities such as entertainment, dining, and gifts. In short, it means more money available to support the community’s long-term growth.

Now, let’s look at those who decide they want to purchase a home instead of renting—they wish to build a little equity of their own.

Now, with a modest 6% down payment and a purchase price of only $195,000 for a 1,080-square-foot apartment—equivalent to roughly $180.56 per square foot—we have an affordable home that provides families with an equity stake in their future. At current mortgage rates of 6.41%, the monthly mortgage payment would be only $1,147.75, representing less than 17% of the household's monthly income. This results in a lower monthly housing cost than the rental model. As part of the cooperative, homeowners would also pay a modest annual fee of $1,200 (or $100 per month) in cooperative dues. These fees would help cover expenses such as the salary of the building supervisor, property management, maintenance, and other shared operating costs.

The Cost of Construction:

Utilizing estimates from the building industry, I arrived at a total construction cost of $6.325 million per building. We did not factor in land acquisition costs because the Town of Can-Do-Ville already owns the properties in question. While this scenario is possible, it is not always typical. However, because we want this hypothetical model to be analogous to the real-world example of Tannersville, which received land from the county at a very low cost (and possibly at no cost), we will assume that our hypothetical community is in a similar position.

This project comes very close to the $30.211 million that RUPCO is projecting for its construction project of 60 housing units spread across three three-story buildings. I have added a fourth story to each building to incorporate commercial space, thereby maximizing the total economic output of each structure. I have also reduced the costs of design and permitting by utilizing in-house designs prepared by employees of the Town of Can-Do-Ville rather than hiring outside firms, thereby keeping more money within the local community.

Furthermore, by relying on the town’s own staff, we reduce permitting costs and minimize delays in the development process. We also create the opportunity to use additional grant funding to study both the economic and environmental impacts of development—funds that would otherwise be spent on outside consultants. In this model, those functions are consolidated within the operating capacity of the local government, allowing grant funding to support research into broader issues that affect the entire community rather than being limited to a single development project.

How the equity builds:

The housing model we’ve created contains two separate revenue sources: (1) the sale of 60 apartments to private owners, and (2) the retention of 40 housing units and 40 commercial units by the Housing Cooperative Authority, which would remain community-owned and serve as a permanent rental revenue stream. Over time, the community could also repurchase housing units from private owners to increase its stock of rental housing or stabilize the housing market as needed, ensuring that prices for these units remain relatively stable.

By giving community members the opportunity to own their own apartments, however, we also help foster long-term generational wealth while simultaneously creating the financial resources needed to continually expand the program.

In the model shown above, I used three different assumptions:

1. Thirty-Year Housing Fund Growth: All proceeds from apartment sales are immediately invested in safe interest-bearing securities earning 3.5% annually—roughly the long-term average return for certificates of deposit (CDs) or U.S. Treasury securities—to maximize the long-term growth of the Housing Fund.

2. 50/50 Hybrid Model: Fifty percent of all revenue generated from apartment sales is used to offset the initial construction costs, while the remaining 50% is invested in safe securities earning 3.5% annual interest.

3. Accelerated Payoff Model: The most aggressive approach, in which the initial construction costs are paid off over a relatively short nine-year period. Once the construction debt has been retired, all subsequent revenue is directed toward building the Housing Fund.

While each strategy has its strengths and weaknesses, they illustrate a much more important point in this broader argument: communities that outsource the development of resources such as workforce housing are not merely offloading the perceived costs of management. They are also offloading the long-term equity gains that communities like Tannersville and Windham cannot afford to lose if they hope to achieve sustainable long-term development.

Under the conventional model of community growth, Can-Do-Ville, with a property tax rate of $2.85 per $1,000 of assessed value, would receive $12,825 per year per building in property taxes if the buildings were owned by outside corporations. Across four buildings, that amounts to only $51,300 in annual property tax revenue.

Now compare that with the rental income generated from 40 housing units and 40 commercial units, which totals approximately $1.512 million per year in potential revenue. Because this is a cooperative model, once the initial construction costs have been repaid, both homeowners and renters could actually begin receiving annual returns on their equity through the cooperative. Imagine paying your monthly housing costs and then receiving a $250 annual dividend simply for being a member of the cooperative.

Cooperative dues could also be structured to replace the tax revenue that would otherwise be collected for school taxes while giving every homeowner within the cooperative the ability to vote in the school district just as if they owned a detached single-family home. Renters’ cooperative fees would function much like a traditional landlord-tenant arrangement, with each renter paying his or her proportional share of the school tax obligation.

If we assume that the school tax rate is $4.50 per $1,000 of assessed value, and that each building is assessed at $4.5 million, the annual school tax would total $20,250 per building. Spread across 35 residential units, that amounts to approximately $578.57 per unit per year. Not a bad arrangement: the school district loses absolutely nothing, while the community gains students, families, and workers—all while simultaneously building a revolving fund capable of producing additional affordable housing whenever it is needed.

In fact, as the modeling demonstrates, this fund has the potential to generate long-term growth extending well beyond housing alone. With the ability to generate millions of dollars in additional capital over time, the fund could finance new housing, create jobs, support infrastructure improvements, protect the environment, and invest in countless other long-term community development projects.

So as communities like Tannersville and Windham say no to thinking big and accepting the myth that Governments especially local governments are too small and too inefficient to create strong long-term growth we socialize the risks— those being the loss of grant funds, the loss of tax dollars through PILOT programs to private companies who use these increases for their own gains with little regard to the community’s greater needs or the fact that value is a collective creation that embodies all stakeholders equally why should only a very few members of the community truly benefit fromt these developments.

Whereas the model I propose builds a community by engaging with all the stakeholders and ensures the ability to risk big and build big when successes are created while limiting the impacts of failures.

While this model is simplified and only for illustrative purposes, it shows the power of bigger thinking and taking a bolder position for what Local Government can and should be trying to achieve.

The process of gentrification has long been a project for those who wish to mold our local communities into something more palatable to their liking on the Mountain Top. The recent declaration of intent by our Town Board to become a “Pro-Housing Community” is not because our community’s desperate need to reduce the cost of housing is the primary—or even secondary—goal of this Town Board. Rather, it appears to be a necessary step to secure grant funding for large, so-called philanthropic organizations in the community that have been attempting to reshape the community’s cultural character to better suit their own vision.

In the current Overlook News article, the Town of Windham is discussing development plans for growth in the hamlet of Maplecrest.

Supervisor Tom Hoyt said he hoped the designation would bring needed grant funding to the town, particularly to smaller hamlets like Maplecrest. He said he had discussed grant money with the Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, an arts center on Big Hollow Road operated by the Catskill Mountain Foundation.

“I’ve had a sit-down with the people that run Sugar Maples because they were looking to apply for some grants for their housing for their students,” Hoyt said. “This would also revitalize the Maplecrest area. The hotel that they’ve brought back to life, it would help them bring it back to life even more if we assist them with this designation.”

Hoyt said the designation was a “positive step forward.”

“It helps them and it also helps us as well,” he said.

Exactly how does helping a privately run cultural foundation help our community address affordable housing and create long-term job growth? That is a critical question. What this appears to represent is the type of public-private relationship that benefits the private sector far more than the public goods it is purported to create for our community.

But this type of influence by nonprofit organizations that primarily benefit the wealthy in Mountain Top communities is not a new phenomenon. The Village of Tannersville, for example, recently received a Downtown Revitalization Initiative (DRI) grant in 2022. Roughly 27% of the projects that the Village of Tannersville plans on investing in are directly related to Hunter Foundation or Catskill Mountain Foundation. The DRI program was established in 2016 to stimulate growth in communities by investing in affordable housing and Main Street revitalization—both very laudable goals. The real question, however, is this: How do you create genuine, long-term growth in communities like those on the Mountain Top? Do you support the growth of extractive businesses, or do you invest in cooperative enterprises that strengthen local economies?

The fact that Tannersville has chosen to invest so heavily in projects that benefit some of the largest monied interests in Hunter and the Mountain Top in general cannot be ignored. For example, the Former Market Gardens project, which received more than $360,000, according to reporting in the Overlook News and other sources, is owned by the Hunter Foundation. The Orpheum Theater, which is undergoing a $3.5 million upgrade, according to the Catskill Mountain Foundation website, is another example. Along with this project, the Hunter Foundation also owns the Colonial Golf Course, which is slated to become the site of the Painted Village Festival Event Grounds. Three of the nine signature projects are directly related to projects undertaken by philanthropic organizations with deep pockets.

The Catskill Mountain Foundation was founded in 1998 by Peter and Sarah Finn. Peter Finn is the Managing Partner of Finn Partners, a public relations firm whose clients range from Bosch to Procter & Gamble (P&G). In other words, a $3.5 million project is relatively modest for an organization with connections of this scale. This is the type of organization that could easily make a charitable donation to fund the entire project itself. But why do that when grants and other state and federal funding sources can be used instead?

The connections go even further. The Chair of the Hunter Foundation, Amy Scheibe, also serves as the Executive Director of the Catskill Mountain Foundation. This links Scheibe to two of the largest philanthropic organizations in the region. In addition, the Town Supervisor of Hunter is directly connected to the Hunter Foundation through his role as its Executive Director.

As you can see, this creates a tangled web of interconnected interests that all lead back to the distribution of public funds in a community like Hunter—and, potentially, soon in Windham. From the quote our Town Supervisor, Thomas Hoyt, provided to the Overlook News for its July 31 article on housing in Windham, the paper mentions only in passing that Sugar Maples is operated by the Catskill Mountain Foundation. What it does not mention is that the Catskill Mountain Foundation also has a direct connection to the Windham Foundation through Phyllis Parish, who serves as Secretary of the Windham Foundation and as a Trustee of the Catskill Mountain Foundation.

This is how philanthropy can be used to capture a community—by stepping in to perform functions that should properly be the role of local government. As a result, local decisions increasingly become the province of a small group of economically fortunate people.

The Hunter Mountain Foundation claims the following will occur in this project:

“Led by the Hunter Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit economic development organization based in Tannersville, the Painted Village in the Sky DRI Proposal encompasses 14 projects with a total value of over $66 million, leveraging up to $43 million in private and philanthropic dollars. According to the proposal, DRI projects would more than double the Village’s job base and, once all projects are at full employment, would create $16.5 million in additional economic output annually.” (Hunter Foundation Blog)

Since the Hunter Foundation has not made any study or report available to the community, it is difficult to substantiate the claim of a $16.5 million annual increase in local economic output. The only report available for public review is the Village of Tannersville: Strategic Investment Plan. Unfortunately, this document contains relatively scant economic detail. Its job creation estimates for most projects are extremely modest relative to the amount of money being spent.

For example, the Orpheum Theater expansion project is expected to create 10 full-time jobs, or roughly one job for every $350,000 in construction costs. The strongest project, as I have been advocating for more than a year, is the mixed-use development at 5975 Main Street, where $3.4 million is projected to create 20 full-time jobs—about one job for every $170,000 invested. This represents a far more efficient use of community funds for job creation.

One of the least efficient projects is the Fromer Market Garden expansion, which is projected to create only two full-time jobs for $866,000 in investment, or approximately one job for every $433,000 spent.

What I see lacking in this project is the creation of a long-term growth element. Using DRI funding as seed money, the community should be developing a strong local economy. Looking at the economic leakages that occur in many of these projects, I suspect there will be far less long-term growth in economic output for the community of Hunter-Tannersville than many people expect.

For example, they are spending $30.221 million on 62 workforce housing units for the community. At roughly $300,000 per unit, this project creates only 2 full-time jobs directly in Tannersville, or about 1 job for every $15.1105 million invested. Now, they claim the project will create 60 induced jobs, but again, that is a bit of a stretch. This project carries substantial development costs that will be paid to RUPCO, a nonprofit organization based in Kingston, New York. They will use their preferred contractors, their preferred consultants, and their own management team to oversee the project throughout its lifespan. I would argue that 30 to 40 of those 60 induced jobs will ultimately be based in Kingston, not Hunter or Tannersville.

This is the problem with public-private investments like this. Imagine a project of this scale being administered by the Village of Tannersville itself. It would require at least 5 to 10 new positions, ranging from office staff to an engineer and an architect. Those are 5 to 10 well-paying jobs created immediately within the community, contributing to long-term economic growth.

If we want long-term growth on the Mountain Top, and not just band-aids that cover up the structural problems in our local economies, we have to think BIG! We need to create projects that generate long-term demand for locally produced goods using local labor. The question of long-term growth requires us to look beyond the allure of allowing philanthropic organizations and other special-interest groups to shape development. Instead, we need to build strong, locally driven economic development projects from the ground up. The key to truly sustainable long-term growth, as I’ve been advocating in Windham, is creating the framework that allows this type of development to flourish.

If Tannersville were truly committed to developing a stronger Main Street, it would be focusing on the following:

• A Business Incubator and Accelerator: Combining the functions of both a business incubator and a business accelerator into a single operation, staffed by experienced professionals who can guide local entrepreneurs from the earliest stages of starting a business through the first phases of expansion, would allow the community to grow and sustain locally owned businesses.

• A local investment system: Keep local dollars circulating locally by investing in local entrepreneurs and helping them start and expand their businesses. I particularly like the Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy (SHARE) model that operated successfully in Berkshire, Massachusetts, although other models certainly exist.

• Develop strong artisan manufacturing: Replace imported goods with locally produced products whenever possible.

• Develop buy-local programs: Keep local dollars circulating within the community for longer periods of time.

These are the kinds of initiatives that truly make a Main Street grow. Simply put, it’s about creating a long-term strategy that uses local resources and local labor while reducing the impact of economic leakage.

Instead of locating the 62 workforce housing units off Main Street, they should be built on Main Street. That would place approximately 124 new residents directly within the core of Tannersville’s business district, making local shopping and business growth far more likely. By placing them roughly half a mile away, the project effectively limits convenient access to Main Street for anyone with significant mobility challenges.

These are the kinds of developments that create strong, long-term economic growth. The path Tannersville appears to be taking, I fear, will ultimately lead to greater economic leakage and relatively little lasting growth for the local economy.

And it would appear that our Town Supervisor in Windham is preparing to embark on the same path of further gentrification at the behest of those who wish to shape the community according to their own preferences. Instead of creating a community that benefits its full-time residents, it risks becoming a private playground for wealthy individuals seeking a carefully curated experience that aligns with their vision of what a “Mountain Town” should be. And if that vision does not include a strong, vibrant local economy where local residents invest in one another and build each other’s futures, then it is not a vision that will produce long-term prosperity for the community as a whole.

We shouldn’t allow the pull of gentrification to shape our community. We are more than a playground for the rich, waiting for the scraps that fall from their table. Instead, we should be dominating the conversation, telling these forces of gentrification, “No, we are the ones in control of our communities. Yes, we welcome your assistance and your input into the conversation, but it will be a conversation conducted on our terms. It will be a conversation in which we recognize your importance, but also recognize that you are not the only stakeholders in these communities, and that we possess resources and abilities that are equally valuable.”

Until we take this strong stance as a community, we will always be at the mercy of the forces of gentrification, with our hats in our hands, waiting for them to signal whether they will support our plans or not. I say now is the time for our communities to stand up, redefine these conversations, and assert that local government is not the puppet of monied interests in our community. Instead, local government should shape and determine how a more equitable and prosperous future will be created for all members of our community.

This also means understanding that Overlook News, whose board of directors and advisory board includes members of the Catskill Mountain Foundation and the Windham Foundation, helps explain why its reporting has been so favorable toward the process of gentrification in our communities. Independent news should mean exactly that: independent of the monied interests in our communities, not the project of PR expert Scott Wiedermeyer and his associates from the Catskill Mountain Foundation, Hunter Foundation, and Windham Foundation. As long as information is controlled by those who stand to benefit the most from gentrification, that source of news will never fully examine how easily a community like Windham or Hunter can be captured and transformed into a playground for the wealthy.

While reading the Overlook News tonight, I came across an article that greatly amused me. The article in question was about how, on July 23, Windham’s Town Board voted to seek designation as a Pro-Housing Community. Again, like the Politburo, the vote was unanimous—no surprise there. So, too, was the vote to create Snob Zoning in Windham.

We’ve not even officially entered our second month of the zoning era before our Town Board is already attempting to rectify the colossal mistake of entering into this Faustian bargain of restrictive land-use regulations by trying to create a backdoor around some of its more negative consequences.

The problem is that you cannot put this genie back in the bottle. There is simply no good way to implement zoning without creating a quagmire of legal issues between the Zoning Board and residents who have the money and means to challenge the community. This is precisely why zoning is not a substitute for proper planning in a community like ours. In fact, it is not too late to abolish zoning and begin the process of planning for a community that welcomes middle- and working-class families.

What we’re seeing our Town Board do is an attempt to put a band-aid on what will certainly become a gaping hemorrhaging wound that raises housing prices and drives away our middle and working-class residents. And yet, it will not achieve anything at all unless we accept the fact that All Zoning Is Restrictive! The fear of noxious pollution or unsightly developments obscures the fact that at the core of the zoning phenomenon is the simple goal of excluding working and middle class from a community— these are the truly Noxious elements that pollute a community.

Windham’s adoption of the 3-acre minimum lot size with single-family-only homes for approximately 92.3% of its land area negates any potential affordability in our community from truly occurring. This paradoxical notion that somehow Windham can simply turn on the affordability of homes simply by addressing this issue with a meaningless resolution to support affordability is an insult to all the hard-working men and women of Windham and their families that require real relief to skyrocketing housing costs. And the only way to truly address affordability in our community is by building more affordable homes that our current Market Pressures Won’t Produce!

At present, our market is locked into a luxury mode. If we wish to alter this trend, it will take more than signing a declaration of intent to build more homes; it will take actually doing something that our Town Board refuses to do—THINK BIG! Thinking bigger than we ever have before. We need to develop a cohesive plan for Windham’s future that melds local economics and local labor into a coherent whole that builds a stronger future.

As the Overlook News reports, the real impetus behind this change is not because our Town Board is focused on developing a stronger community for the everyday working people of Windham. Rather, it is a special-interest giveaway to the Catskill Mountain Foundation’s Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts:

Supervisor Tom Hoyt said he hoped the designation would bring needed grant funding to the town, particularly to smaller hamlets like Maplecrest. He said he had discussed grant money with the Sugar Maples Center for Creative Arts, an arts center on Big Hollow Road operated by the Catskill Mountain Foundation.

I’ve had a sit-down with the people that run Sugar Maples because they were looking to apply for some grants for their housing for their students,” Hoyt said. “This would also revitalize the Maplecrest area. The hotel that they’ve brought back to life, it would help them bring it back to life even more if we assist them with this designation.”

Again, our Town Supervisor appears motivated not by a desire to support the growth of this community or to pursue the long-term development of its average residents, but instead to provide an inexpensive way for already well-funded organizations to tap into additional state funding for their own projects at the expense of genuine economic development in our community.

Notice how our illustrious Town Supervisor eagerly attempts to declare that housing students and guests of Sugar Maples is an economic boom for a section of our community that literally consists of little more than a post office.

By contrast, during the April 30, 2026, Public Hearing on Zoning, I was approached by two separate residents with heart-wrenching stories about the affordability crisis in our very own community. The first was a woman with a family who was deeply proud that her children were the fifth generation of her family to attend our local public school, WAJ. Yet she was also deeply distressed because, despite being employed full-time in the town, she was unable to afford a home.

The second resident, a Boomerang (like myself), had lived outside the community for many years before recently returning, only to discover that her hometown no longer welcomed her. She worked full-time in a medical office outside the community, and she made a point of saying how proud she was of her job. She also hoped to start a small business creating stained-glass artwork.

Where will the full-time jobs come from? Where will the long-term growth in our community come from? The answer is that our Town Board has neither the vision nor the will to create a bold future that supports the average resident of Windham. Instead, it is beholden to monied interests in the form of the Windham Foundation, the Catskill Mountain Foundation, and, of course, the Windham Mountain Club.

Instead of standing up for our community and creating a more inclusive, stronger, working-class community, our Town Board appears more interested in developing a gentrified community. Remember, our community needs to grow—not become a playground for the wealthy at the expense of our own residents.

Make no mistake: this is what a local government captured by special interests looks like. It is a government that seeks to pick winners among those who have already carved out large pieces of the pie for themselves and now want to create the perfect enclave by shaping and controlling the very future of the town.

We can fight this, and we must fight this.

Windham Stronger Together
CD Lane Pavilion. August 15th and August 22nd ( August 8th is cancelled due to a conflict) 10-11:30 am — Coffee and Lite Snacks will be served— We can plan and we can create a better future together. We are What Makes Windham Local.

There seems to be some friction in the housing market in Greene County, NY. The New York State Association of Realtors (NYSAR) recently released its second-quarter report on home sales across the state. The report shows a slowdown in home sales alongside an increase in the median selling price.

Home sales during the second quarter were 3.9% lower than they were in Q2 of 2025; however, the median selling price was 8.9% higher than during the same period in 2025. Overall housing listings also declined by 1.7% compared with the same period in 2025, while overall inventory grew by 3.5%, reaching a supply of 8.9 months.

Unfortunately, the NYSAR data in these reports isn’t detailed enough to isolate individual communities like ours in Windham. But with only 147 sales during the entire quarter in Greene County, it is rather clear that home sales are slowing.

Obviously, this shows a problem in our housing market; most of the indicators are trending downward between the first and second quarters of 2026. One wonders what is driving housing prices upward. Clearly, there is some positive pressure on prices from the fact that new listings declined by 5.4% when compared with the second quarter of 2025. Yet, when coupled with the fact that sales were down 3.9%, there is a difference of only 1.5 percentage points between the two trends. One wouldn’t necessarily expect an 8.9% increase in the median selling price to persist under these conditions. Are we seeing an equilibrium point being achieved in the market?

My best hypothesis as to why we’re seeing this increase in the median selling price is that homes priced at $500,000 or more are making up a larger share of the homes being sold. This would push the median selling price upward each quarter while having relatively little effect on the overall number of sales in the market. So, you end up with demand concentrated in a particular segment of the supply curve. And that gives us the impression that our housing market is much stronger than it might otherwise be.

But this trend has been present since the end of the housing boom associated with COVID—the median home selling price increased by $89,000 from 2021 to 2025, according to NYSAR. Currently, the median selling price is $390,000 in Greene County, NY, which makes it $11,000 higher than the final median price of 2025, which was $379,000. Clearly, this corresponds well with the 2025 Yearly Report from NYSAR that shows homes in the $700,001 or greater listing price showed the greatest increase in sales, 11.9%. Obviously, this trend is continuing unabated in our state.

Unfortunately, the quarterly reports that NYSAR produces lack the granular data necessary to show which housing groups are selling best each quarter. So, my hypothesis cannot be tested with the data currently available to me. But the overall trend is clear—sales are still down from the same period in the previous year, and new housing listings are also lower.

The fact that housing listings remain lower tends to keep supply constrained, and thus housing prices should remain somewhat elevated. At the same time, demand is still 3.9% below the second quarter of 2025, which is traditionally one of the strongest periods for home sales. This suggests that external pressures may be pushing buyers out of the more modestly priced segments of the housing market. A greater number of homes selling in the $175,000 to $350,000 range would significantly reduce our countywide median sales price. It is unclear whether the trends from last year are persisting, when this group accounted for roughly 32.409% of total sales.

Obviously, the cost of living in the United States has risen dramatically over the past decade—especially since COVID. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, inflation between March and June of this year (2026) remained stubbornly between 3.5% and 3.7%, peaking in May at 4.1%. Clearly, inflation is still exerting significant pressure on demand at the lower end of the housing market. Along with rising energy and utility costs, these pressures make purchasing a home increasingly difficult for buyers at the lower end of the market.

The fact remains that housing prices in Greene County continue to rise. In fact, according to the data NYSAR has available online, the median selling price is now 57.2% higher than it was in 2014.

Could this be a sign that the market is approaching an equilibrium point, with supply and demand reaching a relatively stable state? It would appear so. And if that is the case, what does this equilibrium mean for communities like Windham? That’s the question, right? Are we going to see a long-term stabilization of property values for homes in the $500,000+ price range, while simultaneously seeing a decline in the market for homes priced under $250,000?

That outcome alone would help explain the data we’ve been seeing from NYSAR over the last several years. The data show an increasing supply and growth of homes in the $700,001-and-above price range, while the other segments of the market have remained relatively stable or declined. As we can see from the trend between 2023 and 2025, housing in the two lowest, more moderately priced segments of the market has lost ground. As can be seen in the image below:

As can be seen here, homes in the less-than-$150,000 to $250,000 segments have consistently lost sales since 2023. Homes priced at $150,000 or less saw their sales decline by 44.73% since 2023. This compares with a decline of 13.21%for homes in the $150,001 to $250,000 bracket. Combined, these bottom two ranges of the housing market saw a 57.94% decrease in sales.

In fact, the only two groups that saw a net increase in sales were homes in the $250,001 to $350,000 range, with a 5.47% increase since 2023, and homes in the $700,001+ range, with a 32.85% increase over the same period. These two segments of the market represent the only areas showing sales growth between 2023 and 2025, and this is troubling.

This means we have homes selling increasingly in the $700,001+ price range, while traditional middle-class homes in the $250,001 to $350,000 range are showing only slight growth (5.47%). Again, if this trend is driving the data we’re seeing in the current second quarter—and it stands to reason that it is—we are in for a difficult future, with housing prices remaining persistently elevated across the market and fewer and fewer affordable options available to prospective homeowners.

What I’m hearing from people I’ve spoken to in the local real estate market is that our current market in Windham is stuck—housing is moving slowly, and what is moving tends to be homes in the $700,001+ price range. This tracks with the second-quarter report from NYSAR, which showed only 147 homes sold in the entire county.

All of this anecdotal information appears to track with the larger picture of a stratification in both the statewide and local housing markets, where high-value homes are seeing expanding sales, lower-priced homes are seeing declining sales, and moderately priced homes are slowing and may eventually decline in total sales as well. This will place even greater pressure on housing affordability in communities like Windham.

The only real solution to this problem is to expand the ability of families to afford homes in the less-than-$150,000 to $350,000 price ranges. This is the only way Greene County will begin to solve the dual problems of housing affordability and population loss that continue to plague the Hudson Valley.

I’ve lived in Louisville, Kentucky, and Los Angeles, but Windham is home. I’ve spent time in Europe, and I’ve traveled to most of the states along the Eastern Seaboard and Midwest, yet Windham calls me back every time. Why? The answer is simple—it’s my home.

Living in cities like Louisville and Los Angeles for nine years made me understand just how special our little community truly is. It’s more than the buildings; it’s the people who make up the character of our community. It’s also the history of this community. Those of us lucky enough to have been born here have a privileged connection to Windham.

Make no mistake: those who chose to live here later in life, like my parents, who moved to Windham in the 1970s to create a new home for their family—then just my two older brothers—are extremely valuable members of our community. That is without question. But for those of us who call ourselves natives, this community is part of our DNA. It’s how we anchor ourselves to the world and give meaning to our identity. And the beauty of it is that it doesn’t require many generations—it takes only one generation to feel this pull toward the community.

So, when I talk about thinking “BIG” about Windham’s future, it’s not because I wish to mold Windham into something new or change its most important aspect—the people. It’s because I want to help create a future in Windham where old and new families alike want to call this community home and help it grow. I want to help create a future that is inclusive of everyone who believes Windham is an amazing community—people who want to preserve our past while building our future—so that future generations of Windham’s residents can feel the same sense of identity and connection to this community that I do.

To begin that conversation, meet me at CD Lane Park, under the pavilion, from 10:00–11:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 15 and Saturday, August 22, for a Listening and Discussion Tour about Windham’s future.

Coffee and light snacks will be provided. This will be an open conversation about developing a New Way to Look at Windham’s Future! We will brainstorm, discuss, and learn from one another about what makes Windham special to each of us and how we would like to see our community grow over the next 25 years. We are what makes Windham Local Again. We are what makes Windham Special. We are what makes our Community.

RSVP:
ConnorExum@yahoo.com

Had to make a change in the date from the 8th to the 15th and 22nd only— becuase of a conflict. I appologize the change, but it has to occur.

Welcome to the Future—well, not just yet, I guess. I recently read an article in Gothamist reporting that the Salamanca City Central School District ( Western NY) has abandoned its attempt to use an “Android Teaching Aid” named Sally, created by Realbotix. Described as an M-Series Robot, the company’s June 24, 2026 press release outlined the following goal for Sally’s role in the classroom: “The robot aims to encourage student participation and provide early exposure to emerging technologies.” Exactly how Sally is supposed to foster a better classroom experience is not made clear in the press release. To me, it seems more like a massive beta-testing program in which Realbotix gets to deploy its algorithms and technology in a real-world educational environment, allowing the company to refine its product—most likely at the school district’s expense.

The Gothamist article mentions a $58,000 price tag for access to Sally’s robotic AI tutoring avatar and physical robot. But I’m sure that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the cost of doing business with Realbotix. These public-private partnerships often involve long-term contracts and proprietary technologies that can lock school districts into expensive, long-term relationships with private companies. Remember how Apple targeted school districts and locked many of them into using Apple IIe computers by arguing that kids were being left behind.

In 1978, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, Inc. (as it was then known), participated in the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, a program that placed 5,000 Apple II computers in the hands of school-aged children across participating school districts. A noticeable increase in Apple II sales also occurred in areas where students had access to computers through their schools. By 1982, Jobs had moved on to his next target—one that was much larger and potentially far more lucrative: every elementary and high school in the nation. His vision was to place more than 100,000 computers in school districts across the United States.

But how do you get a computer into every school district when, in the early 1980s, most people still viewed computers as something out of science fiction, and elementary and high schools were struggling with increasingly tight budgets? The answer was to donate them. But doing so on the necessary scale would have bankrupted Apple.

Fortunately for Jobs, he found himself seated next to U.S. Congressman Pete Stark of California on a flight, and by the time the plane landed, the story goes, Stark and Jobs were already planning a trip to Washington. Together, they developed the idea for the Computer Equipment Contribution Act, which would have created a federal tax credit for companies such as Apple that donated computers to schools. Unfortunately, this is where Jobs’s luck ran out. An unwilling Senate never voted on the bill, and it died as President Reagan sought a second term in office.

This temporary setback did not deter the irrepressible Jobs. Instead, he shifted his attention to California, the heart of the Silicon Valley revolution and home to one of the largest public school systems in the country, both then and now. On September 29, 1982, the California Legislature passed a statewide tax credit for manufacturers that donated computers to schools within the state. Apple promptly donated 9,000 computers statewide, and in doing so, secured a foothold in California’s school districts that would influence educational computing for decades.

Flash forward a few decades to the early 2000s and the Apple Renaissance. Mobile computing became possible in the late 1980s, and by the mid-1990s, the first laptops and notebook computers had become commercially viable. By 2013, the tablet had arrived and was revolutionizing the size and capability of mobile computers. Instead of bulky, heavy machines, people could finally use a computer that was roughly the size and weight of the average spiral-bound notebook.

Once again, Apple recognized an opportunity to secure lucrative educational contracts. The company swung for the fences and landed a deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District to place iPads in the hands of students. This was soon followed by Google and its Chromebooks, along with a myriad of online educational software platforms that promised dramatic improvements in educational outcomes.

In fact, former MSNBC co-host of The Cycle, Krystal Ball, writes in her self-published book, Reversing the Apocalypse: Hijacking the Democratic Party to Save the World (2017), about her early experiences developing educational software for online schools with her now ex-husband. My point is simply this: technology companies need open and willing markets in which to develop, refine, and test their software and products as inexpensively as possible. And what better place to do that than a school district?

The byproduct of putting products directly into the hands of future consumers is that it builds a sense of trust and familiarity with those devices. The early computer revolution was marked by a widespread computerphobia, much like the fear that led the Luddites of the nineteenth century to attack power looms. By 2013, however, people were no longer merely accepting computers in the classroom—they were demanding them.

That shift did not occur because people are somehow smarter today than they were 44 years ago, when computers first began entering classrooms in earnest. It occurred because computers have become an integral part of our daily lives, performing tasks that most people could never have imagined. There is a computer in your car, your television, your phone, your refrigerator, and your thermostat. In many ways, we have been thoroughly indoctrinated into the computer revolution.

Computerphobia no longer exists in our society, but there is a growing backlash against machine learning. I deliberately avoid calling it artificial intelligence, because chatbots are not actually intelligent; they merely employ highly sophisticated algorithms to present information in a way that mimics human thought. And, quite rightly, there is skepticism. As with every major technological innovation throughout history, those who seek widespread adoption often overstate its current capabilities and, more often than not, present what are essentially parlor tricks as revolutionary breakthroughs.

At the beginning of the age of electrification, pioneers such as Thomas Edison made equally bold claims about the social transformation that electricity would bring to the home, as illustrated in the image below.

As you can see in the highlighted segment of this passage from Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 by David E. Nye (1992), grandiose and absurd claims such as this one about electricity's effects on women's intelligence are really no different from Sam Altman talking about the "Singularity" being achieved through artificial intelligence. For those unfamiliar with the term "Singularity" in this context, it refers to the concept that artificial intelligence has surpassed human intelligence.

At this point, these claims are more smoke than fire, designed to keep the frenetic pace of investors excited about the next round of seed funding or, perhaps, to boost a company’s stock price ahead of an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Of course, this highlights another problem with our modern version of capitalism—its hyper-financialization. The relentless pressure to maximize investor returns forces companies to aggressively promote their products and seek out markets with little resistance and a willingness to serve as unwitting laboratory rats in the name of progress.

This is all part of the Schumpeterian paradigm of “Creative Destruction,” which drives innovation within the capitalist system, even when that destruction proves detrimental to society as a whole. Austro-Hungarian economist Joseph Schumpeter developed the concept of “Creative Destruction,” arguing that firms must continually innovate and introduce new products to attract consumers. That is why we do not drive cars that look as they did in 1940, now in 2026. Increasingly, however, the process is less about creating products that genuinely improve upon existing concepts and more about ensuring that the cycle of consumption continues.

Sometimes those innovations are genuinely worthwhile. But your refrigerator is not dramatically improved simply because it now contains a computer that warns you when your milk is running low. Nor is your coffee maker fundamentally better because it can communicate with your home assistant—it still cannot drive to the store and buy you another can of coffee. What it can do is brew a fresh pot before 8:00 a.m. each morning. And if the coffee pods are equipped with barcodes, it can recognize that you’ve inserted pod number 10 out of 15 and determine that it’s time to order more. If the machine is linked to your preferred online retailer, it could even automatically purchase another carton of your favorite single-serve coffee.

Now, whether you believe this represents genuine progress or simply another way to ensure that computers find their way into every aspect of your daily life is ultimately up to you.

But those changes to your coffee maker do not necessarily mean it brews a better cup of coffee, nor do they mean that your milk stays fresher longer in your new refrigerator. Likewise, this push to place Androids in classrooms was not really about teaching children to read and write more effectively or making them more engaged in the learning process. Rather, it was about indoctrinating people into a future that increasingly resembles The Jetsons.

After all, once children become accustomed to working with robots, they will grow into adults who are comfortable using them. That, in turn, creates lifelong consumers of robotic technology. Sociologist and economist Juliet Schor notes that marketers have been targeting children through advertising campaigns for decades. In her book Born to Buy, Schor argues that children as young as 18 months begin to show product preferences, and by three years of age they exhibit product recognition and brand loyalty. And that, ultimately, is the real heart of this endeavor.