One of my favorite former coworkers sold a lovely, historic “project” house in Hudson this week. The asking price was almost $550,000. I suspect the sale price wasn’t far off that number. He knows his market.
Hudson’s a hot market, and has been for years now. So is Rhinebeck. And Beacon.
Why? Amtrak and/or Metro-North have stops there. To be specific, Metro-North stops in Poughkeepsie. But you can either take Amtrak all the way to the city, or switch in Poughkeepsie and save some money.
Kingston took longer to catch on, mostly because it isn’t handy to the train. It’s about a twenty minute drive to Rhinecliff station. But it has the bus. And once people began to compare the cost of the bus to the train, the train started to look pretty appealing.
Now, you can’t buy a house in Kingston and surrounding communities without a brawl with other buyers. And you’d better be waving a fair amount of cash. There are no bargains anymore.
But does mass transit matter if you don’t have to go to the office anymore? What if the city is just a place you visit now and again?
I think that explains the rush on real estate to the west this summer. Delaware County, in particular, is experiencing a crush of buyers like the influx that arrived after 9-11. But this time, they’re looking for Internet connectivity, and they don’t plan to live in the city any more.
Even in my home town of Franklin, a massive, gutted project house is likely to get its $125,000 asking price. That may sound like a deal, but it’s laughably high if you judge it by just ten years ago.
That explains this summer. But I wonder what the long-term impact on the hyper-inflated mid-Hudson market will be, long term, when fast access downstate just doesn’t matter as much. It could bring prices back to earth.
Or it may be that we’re never going back to those affordable upstate prices again. Maybe inflation is here to stay. That’s great for realtors. But it’s going to be an issue the state will have to address. Once housing gets too expensive for people without a brownstone budget, local economies, local schools, local communities transform. And an entire local generation may become displaced.
A virus is transforming our society even as we try to understand how it’s happening. This is just one issue, but it’s one worth thinking about.