Welcome to Albany!
Columnist wonders if influx of newscomers from New York City area will change upstate./
InAlbany 1972, The New York Times published a travel piece about Albany. It was not flattering.
“As anyone in New York knows, a visitor to Albany is there either on business or by mistake, and the less time spent, the better,” read the opening sentence of an article that went on to describe the “tired shops” of a “grimy northern city” offering “as much appeal as a junket to a leper colony.”
I can’t speak to the Albany of the early 1970s, but I can place the Times article within a long tradition of downstate Albany bashing that still flourishes. Whatever. Let them bash.
There aren’t many of us living in Albany or its surroundings who would rather be in that massive megalopolis to the south. Life is better here. It’s cheaper, friendlier and more relaxed, with the good of urban
living mixed with quick access to the countryside. Why be a racing rat?
Lots of downstate folks agree, of course. More than a few arrive here to stay every year, and there’s evidence a new wave is arriving now.
The Capital Region’s real estate market is surprisingly strong. Prices and the pace of sales are up in most areas, despite a pandemic that has crushed the economy. More expensive homes, in particular, are selling fast. It’s a bit baffling. What gives?
Well, a massive exodus from New York City is underway, seemingly fueled by difficult pandemic living conditions and a diminished quality of life, along with a shift toward working from home that is freeing people to live where they want.
Nowhere is that exodus being felt more than the Hudson Valley.
The pandemic, writes Joshua Simons of the Benjamin Center at SUNY New Paltz, “has accelerated a northward migration of people from the City the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the cholera epidemic of 1832. And just like back then, it is people of means who are fleeing.”
Bloomberg News recently noted that Kingston, in Ulster County, has the fastest-rising home prices in the country. Last week, the New Yorker reported on an “an upstate real estate gold
rush” that’s being felt as far away as Oneonta, three hours northwest of Manhattan.
Laura Burns, who heads the Greater Capital Association of Realtors, said the rush is also changing the housing market in the Albany area. That’s more true in outlying areas such as, say, Washington County, where the median sales price in August, at $180,000, was up nearly 14 percent from a year ago, or in areas, like Columbia County, that have long been second-home destinations.
But the rush is having an impact even in Albany, Burns said, where the median jumped more than 5 percent to
$190,000.
“You have to remember something,” she added. “If you’re coming from the city, even Albany looks like the country.”
Burns conceded that evidence of an influx from the New York area is anecdotal and based largely on what she’s hearing from agents in the field. She said GCAR only recently decided to track buyer Zip-code data to better document where new arrivals last lived.
I suspect, based on my own anecdotal observations, there’s something of a ripple effect happening, in which Hudson Valley homeowners are cashing out and buying cheaper homes to the north.
But I can also see why cities like Albany, Troy or Saratoga Springs might be newly appealing to someone living in Manhattan or Brooklyn. The pandemic, after all, has stolen, at least for now, much of
what was wonderful about big-city life.
Crowded sidewalks and subways, once energizing, are now either threatening or surreal in their emptiness. Theaters and ballparks are shuttered. Many restaurants closed for good, windows shielded by plywood. Cities are about people in proximity and the beauty of unexpected interactions, not social distancing.
With the vitality outside dramatically diminished, living in a $3,000-amonth Manhattan studio would quite obviously start to seem not only claustrophobic, but insane. Why not move to Albany, Troy, Kingston or another place where you can get so much more space for your money?
You can even afford, dare to dream, a garden.
No, the pandemic hasn’t killed New York City, as alarmists claim, nor will it. That resilient city has been through worse. But the pandemic might leave New York forever changed. Maybe it will change the Albany area.
If the myopic bashing in that 1972 article was ever accurate, it surely isn’t now. We have great restaurants, Chinese and otherwise, and there’s hardly a gingham dress or leper in sight. This is an increasingly cosmopolitan region, truly, and an agreeable place to live.
Not to mention the white sand beaches, mild winters and ...
Maybe I’m getting carried away.