The Commute
This is the biggest factor for most people considering leaving the city: it just seems like you’re so far away. The truth: you are probably closer to your job than if you live in many parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Tarrytown – my town – is on an express MetroNorth stop, and it takes me about 40 minutes to get to Grand Central (55 if I’m on a non-express). And it resembles rush hour on the G train in no way at all; it’s lovely. The train runs right along the river, and you always get a (comfortable) seat, and you can drink beer and eat Two Boots from Grand Central on your way home. Obviously this is amazing.
The Schools
Obviously one of the major reasons many people leave the city is that it can feel impossible to find an apartment in a good public school district, and private schools prices are completely overwhelming. The schools out here do vary by area, but are generally very good, with Irvington’s being the best (and if you live in a neighboring town and want to send your child to Irvington schools, you can pay to do that). My impression of Tarrytown’s schools is that they are excellent, but that the average test scores are slightly lower than Irvington’s because the area is more socioeconomically diverse…and my personal feeling is that diversity is a plus that offsets the slightly lower school ranking, so there you go.
The Housing Prices
They’re still not ridiculous by Westchester standards (although they are of course ridiculous for anywhere else in the country save for – ahem – Silicon Valley), but they are going up. You can still find houses in the 450-600k range, but there is a lot of competition for them. If you’re on a first-home budget, my suggestion would be to look at Tarrytown and especially at Ossining, where you’ll get more for your money. Some people aren’t huge fans of the school system in Ossining, but my impression (which of course is just one person’s opinion) has been that the negative attitude towards the school is mostly prejudice stemming from the town’s diverse community. I’d recommend checking it out in person and making your own decisions about the quality of the education (and if your children are young, you have plenty of time to do this).
The whole thing that’s happening right now is people going around saying “the Hudson Valley is the new Brooklyn,” and while that’s true in some ways – young couples and families being priced out of the city are fleeing to cute colonials (and even loft spaces) that you can get for less than the price of a Manhattan studio, and increasing numbers of cool restaurants, bars, shops and art spaces are following them…it doesn’t feel quite like Brooklyn to me. It feels…more relaxed, somehow. The people who are moving here lately are choosing a different kind of life than you get in the city, but they still want those great places to eat, places to go out, places to do things that they’ve grown used to having…and so those places are following them.
It’s really cool to see what’s happening around here. And I feel like the area’s only going to get more and more popular – so while property prices are way higher than they were three years ago, when we purchased, it still feels like a solid investment to me.
