When the World Stopped Making Sense

The soft power of liberal comfort

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I had a bifurcated childhood after my parents split: schooldays in Poughkeepsie, rotating through whatever rental we could afford that year— my mom’s only constant being her determination to keep me in the same school district. The rest of my time was in Manhattan: MetroNorth ten-trips, apartments with too many people in too few rooms, my air mattress always deflating by morning. I’d walk out the door into Pilates moms and Dalton kids, full-body dissonance. I code-switched easily. I’m from both places and neither. I used to think that made me the right person to tell this story. Now I just know I have to.

I started this column a year and a half ago because I was angry and didn’t know where to put the anger. I was 20, newly out as trans, stuck in bureaucratic limbo— too broke to stay at Northeastern, too proud to call myself a dropout. I was living in North Carolina, a place I felt nothing for beyond survival, after the last member of my extended family had just been priced out of where we were from. By then, the Mid-Hudson had already blurred into something curated, unfamiliar.

Some of what I penned back then holds up. Most of it doesn’t. Those drafts were raw— bitter in places, aimless in others. Less analysis than exorcism. I was still at the mercy of what I was trying to explain. It never quite cohered. I’m hoping this will.

I’m not here to write another screed against transplants. I understand them. I’m friends with them. I’m starting to resemble them. For all my couch-surfing precarity, I am palatable. I speak fluent Park Slope. I hold a position in the internal bureaucracy of New York City’s ascendant socialist left. Our guy is going to be the next mayor, and part of the targeting strategy was a droning whitepaper I wrote. I get invited to panels now. Sometimes, someone comes up to me afterward, visibly moved— reassured by my biography that the system still works, sometimes, for someone, eventually. That I’m going places. I nod, thank them, and go back to a borrowed bedroom.

Next year, CUNY Hunter will hand me a piece of paper that says I can do things. I’ll probably get a job I don’t hate. With Slack. And health benefits. Maybe I’ll straighten the bottom tooth that’s been quietly jabbing my tongue for as long as I can remember. My greatest fear is that in fifteen years I’ll make a grotesque return— resembling what I critique more than where I came from.

The frustrating part is: they’re not villains. They’re well-meaning, community-oriented, unusually self-aware. The world got scary, and work-from-home gave them options. Turns out you can decouple capital from place now. They wanted space. They wanted homeownership. They wanted meaning, and they found it in towns small enough to shape. They know what they’re doing— moral theater in an undead region.

This is a story of economic distortion. Not malice, not scheming— distortion. Of prices unmoored from wages. Of intentions warped by scale. Of towns reshaped by people who mean well but arrive with invisible battering rams in their wallets. They buy homes for what seems reasonable— because they’re not benchmarking against the people who already live there. The money talks, seeking charm and community, and without realizing it, bids up the price of belonging.

And when it arrives in cities like Kingston, Beacon, Newburgh, or Poughkeepsie, it doesn’t shout— it coos. It paints murals. Opens bookstores. Launches co-ops. It doesn’t flinch at bidding fifty grand over asking, all cash. You don’t even hear it until your lease ends and you can’t find another.

When did water stop being wet?

The Strivers

The Mid-Hudson has seen more waves of demographic change than can be done justice here: from the Wappinger people, to the feudal domains of the New Netherland elite, to the Irish refinery workers of the mid-1800s. But all roads in the contemporary Mid-Hudson Valley lead to IBM.

I’ve covered IBM’s economic dominance from the ’40s through the ’90s, especially their 1993 layoffs in “Molinaro’s Gambit.” Their absence is felt constantly, yet their collapse also created an unlikely opening for the working and lower-middle class: a buyer’s market of suburban-style homes, decoupled from the upward cost pressure of urban proximity and high-paying local jobs.

Commuting to the city is possible, but not for the faint of heart. From Poughkeepsie, it’s four hours round-trip on Metro-North or the Taconic Parkway. Most people work locally or brave the long haul for Westchester and Rockland salaries. Before the New York Times started dropping the word “bucolic” into headlines, this was where working families could get a backyard at prices unmatched in the suburbs. We may roll our eyes at the white-picket-fence American dream, but it’s far more legible to those of us who weren’t born into it.

The wealthy have always had their second homes and gated estates here— a housing stock entirely decoupled from, and irrelevant to, the broader market. After 9/11, there was a brief uptick in upper-middle-class relocations from the city, but it faded.

Exurban McMansion development from New York City eventually pushed into Dutchess and Orange counties, raising prices, but the Great Recession stopped it cold. To this day, you can still find streets in aborted subdivisions— empty but for the concrete footprints of homes never completed. The collapse in prices during the Recession created a second window of opportunity for buyers.

Those who came in that period often earned less than the residents already here. Many were on the frayed edge of the middle class in the outer boroughs. Some were resettled refugees from the Kosovo War. Most lacked the credentials they would later drill into their children as essential for survival. They came with little, which meant they asked for nothing. Their wages didn’t rise here, but they owned the house. They blended into communities past their prime, changing nothing except their bedroom count. That was the point— not revitalization, not reinvention— just math that worked. They didn’t shift the region’s center of gravity because they didn’t have the weight to.

I think of my own parents. They met in the city, started out in Yorkville. In 1994— a good year to be a Republican in New York— my father parlayed his activism into a job at the state attorney general’s office. My mother was a public school teacher, newly divorced and far from the Greene and Dutchess counties of her youth. They wanted children without subdividing bedrooms. So they crept upstate, trade by trade: a larger apartment here, fifteen more minutes on the Metro-North there. Eventually, a house with their signatures on the deed. A feel-good story— until it wasn’t. But for many, it was.

The strivers were on the 6:54 into Grand Central before dawn, their houses dark, their children still dreaming. By the time they got home, the bedrooms were dark again, the day lived without them. Absence was the price of stability. Their presence was in the lunch packed at 11 p.m., the check left for the field trip, the groceries lugged in from Walmart on Sunday. Their lives advanced in small increments— a new coat of paint, a paid-off car, the first vacation that didn’t involve sleeping at a relative’s.

Then came 2020.

The year the world locked down, a select few were set free. The average income of people moving from New York City into the Mid-Hudson spiked to over $267,000— triple that of locals. The average mover went from making 16% less than current residents to 37% more. At the same time, the income of those forced to move away began to climb. This wasn’t a gap you could bridge with overtime or frugality; it was the kind that strangles dreams. The old rupture created opportunity. The new rupture eviscerated it.

The buy-in is too high now— not the work of faceless market forces, but of unwitting agents dismantling a way of life. The ladder they climbed without breaking a sweat has been kicked away behind them. They didn’t mean to kick it away— most never noticed it was there— but it’s gone. The life of the Mid-Hudson striver, the one my parents built here, the one chased in pre-dawn hours down the Taconic, headlights carving the dark, is no longer possible.

I hope there are places where it still is.

The Paper of Record

If you work at the intersection of decline and desire long enough, you start to notice that the New York Times “Real Estate” section has a body count. Not literally, but their coverage has a gravitational pull. They have several columns of interest, “The Hunt” is a rather jarring house-hunting series featuring obscene budgets and members of the gentry that is a bit too personal for analysis. Their more interesting column to me is “Living In,” featuring towns I’ve called home, towns I could never afford, towns I wouldn’t be caught dead in. They are charming. They are well-written. They are also a form of soft power, an anointing. Once your town appears in those pages, it’s no longer just where you live— it’s a lifestyle choice.

The point of “Living In” isn’t to help you find a place to live. It’s to sell you a story about what your life could look like if you did. It’s a hallucinogen for the upper-middle class disguised as journalism. They romanticize the main street and sanitize the rough edges. They drop in a local history anecdote to give it texture, but it’s the kind of history that won’t scare off a buyer. The subdivided Victorians you grew up in become boutique Airbnbs, their creaky floors and drafty windows part of the pitch as if poverty were just another design choice.

They write for the kind of person who treats moving as a form of self-expression, who wants to be reassured that they’re not just buying a house, they’re buying meaning. And the moment your town gets that treatment, you can start the clock. Maybe the Times doesn’t cause gentrification in the strict sense, but it makes it aspirational. It says: this place is worth your money, worth your presence, worth betting your future on. By the time the Times has noticed you, so have the people who arrive convinced they’re here to “save” the place— never asking if it wanted saving, or from whom.

You can mouse over or tap this graphic’s key to filter by two year increment, and click on towns to see article headlines and abstracts. I highly suggest doing this.

Prior to 2003, Times profiles stuck to the suburbs. By the mid-2000s they’d gotten more adventurous, publishing “Weekenders” columns about cutesy tourist traps in the Catskills. Those second-home pitches ended with the Great Recession. In the late 2000s also came profile of the cardinal cities of the Mid-Hudson— Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston, and Beacon— framed as bargains in the wake of poverty and distance from the city. Kingston was “losing its backwater reputation,” Newburgh “very much a frontier,” Beacon “not a natural second-home community, given its rough edges and modest housing stock.” The Times likes to pretend they’re just holding up a mirror, but they’re measuring the drapes.

Amidst the COVID pandemic, their eyes were again upstate, but with a different script. This time, the story wasn’t “hidden gem” or “scrappy bargain.” It was “sanctuary.” The pandemic-era “Living In” profiles didn’t bother with the pretense of discovery— they assumed you were already looking for the exit. No more hedging descriptions of “emerging” towns. Instead: unspoiled, idyllic, community-minded. The towns were no longer framed as fixer-uppers in need of saving, but as salvation itself— complete, ready-to-wear identities for the anxious professional class.

The subtext was naked: your Brooklyn lease isn’t worth dying for. Here, in the land of pastoral hamlets and storybook main streets, you could buy more than a house— you could buy a way of life immune to the chaos you were fleeing. Pandemic logic seeped into the copy: backyards, fresh air, neighbors who wave from a safe distance, no coughing doorman as you walk to the elevator. They were selling a fantasy of immunity— not just from the virus, but from everything you came to believe the city was doing to you. They sold control to people who, for once, felt powerless— though their wire transfers still cleared.

And unlike the post-9/11 migration bump, this one wasn’t a ripple. It was a cascading flood, powered by emergency corporate policies that turned remote work from a perk into a permanent condition. Salaries from the city began colonizing towns where a six-figure income had once been unimaginable, and the math of local life warped almost overnight. What used to be the ceiling for a lifelong resident became the floor for a newcomer. The draw was no longer cheap housing— it was the fantasy of community without compromise, a place where you could have backyard tomatoes and still bill clients in FiDi before lunch.

Catskill for example— 3,815 people, Trump +4, broke as hell, and where my family is from, where my great-grandparents lived and died— went from “despite its rough edges... retain[ing] a grandeur from its days as a busy port” in 2005 to, by 2022, a place where “people are jazzed about making art and invested in creating a culture that isn’t a microcosm of New York City, but its own thing.” Median household income jumped from $33,901 in 2020 to $73,906 in 2023, and I’m pretty sure it’s not because my cousins suddenly started cashing bigger paychecks.

The Winners and Losers

The Times likes to pretend its real estate section is anthropology. They quote buyers while their furniture is still in shrink-wrap; they find the charming local whose job is to make the place feel storied. It’s HGTV for people who’d rather think of themselves as above HGTV.

So let’s cut to the only two questions that matter: Who are the winners? And who are the losers?

The stereotype of the gentrifier is easy to conjure: twenty-something, trust fund IV drip, bangs cut by someone named Kai, “taking art commissions” on Instagram but paying no rent because Mom and Dad want to “guarantee a baseline.” These are the gentrifiers city dwellers like to imagine— bohemian interlopers in vintage denim, all romance and irresponsibility.

The Hudson Valley gentrifier is not that. They’re older. They’ve already cleared the early-career hurdles. They arrive with professions, not jobs; salaries that shrug off high mortgage rates because they buy in cash; and retirement accounts that might outstrip the town budget. They are, almost without exception, wealthier than the people they displace— often by orders of magnitude. They come here to optimize: smaller schools, more space, a “slower pace,” and a “reasonable” cash offer, benchmarked not against Beacon foursquares but Brooklyn brownstones.

Unlike the caricature who parachutes in for cheap rent and borrowed authenticity, these newcomers plant flags. They sit on arts councils, attend town board meetings, and organize library fundraisers. They open cafés with raw wood counters and pour-over stations, “coworking spaces” in abandoned factories, wellness studios where the taqueria used to be. Theirs is gentrification dressed up as civic engagement.

That doesn’t make it less disruptive— it makes it harder to fight. Policymakers take them seriously, so their vision of what a place “should be” gets codified faster. Their money quietly recalibrates the market. And because they present themselves as allies— to the arts, to small business, to “the community”— they are harder to critique without sounding like you oppose progress.

Meanwhile, the displaced rarely appear in these stories. No pull quotes about why they left. No photos beside the U-Haul paid for on credit. Their departure is framed as natural attrition— the silent exhale that makes room for someone else’s dream.

But more numerous than the displaced are the stuck. The empty nesters who can’t downsize because the cheapest condo now costs more than they paid for their four-bedroom. The twenty-something working full-time at the hospital or hardware store, still living with their parents because a one-bedroom rents for more than their take-home pay. The ones who leave for college and never return— not because they’ve outgrown the place, but because there’s nothing to return to except nostalgia.

We don’t talk about them. They don’t show up in out-migration stats because they’re still here, physically. In place but not in motion. Living in houses they don’t own, in childhood bedrooms they’ve already mentally moved out of. Watching their towns evolve without them, priced out of the very lives they’re still living. They can’t cash out like retirees selling to downstate couples, and they can’t buy in like newcomers with email jobs.

Being stuck is a quieter kind of displacement. No boxes to pack, no keys to hand over— just the slow evaporation of options. You go to baby showers for friends who moved to other states, weddings for people who left five years ago, funerals for the ones who stayed and never stopped trying. Your life becomes a holding pattern of “maybe next year” and “once I save enough.”

In the gentrifier’s story, these people don’t exist. It’s easier to frame displacement as a clean swap— one resident for another— than to admit an entire generation can lose their future without ever leaving. And for the lucky few who do leave, there’s something of a Hobson’s choice: live somewhere affordable with real economic mobility, or come back to a “quaint” hometown whose charm guarantees your economic doom.

At this point, the expected move is a pivot to long-winded policy: guardrails to throw up, incentives to offer, imaginary levers to reverse the tide. Build more housing. Opt into Good Cause Eviction. Regulate Airbnbs. Impose vacancy taxes. All necessary. None enough.

Because the mechanics driving this— especially in the Mid-Hudson’s pressure cooker— aren’t easily reversed. As long as there’s a steady stream of people willing to pay these prices, the market isn’t overpriced. The people who leave rarely return. The ones who stay acclimate. Wealth arrives concentrated and stays concentrated. Even the most ambitious policies can only slow the pace of transformation, not stop it.

One of my ongoing frustrations: how long it takes to get the data. IRS county-to-county migration figures— flawed to begin with, since they give averages instead of medians— arrive years late. The latest is from filing year 2021, and even there the shift is obvious. But the truth is, the most profound impacts won’t be quantifiable on any chart, this decade or next. They will slow-bleed entire generations.

We act as if every problem has a legislative hack, as if this were just a matter of finding the right key for the right lock. It’s not. So instead of pretending there’s a fix, let’s just call it what it is: the winners get the view, the losers get the bill, and the stuck get the slow fade.

“Caller, You’re on the Air”

I’m a newly minted Brian Lehrer listener— my quiet surrender to the ecosystem. Last year he did a segment on Hudson Valley gentrification. I listened like someone watching a car hydroplane into a ditch. You already know how it went.

The guest, Professor Richard Ocejo, wrote a book I still need to read. He spoke in specifics, not theory: an archetype of how Hudson Valley gentrifiers differ demographically (which I shamelessly cribbed), how their impact is outsized in small cities. He talked about Newburgh. Said displacement. Said whiteness. Had some policy ideas.

And then the calls started.

Caller after caller, each with some version of the same meandering confessional: their good intentions, their respect for their new neighbors, the fact that they “always shop local.” They freely identified as “gentrifiers.” They vote the right way. They spoke like they were up for parole— not from the people being displaced, but from us, the listening jury of WNYC.

David called first, from Brooklyn. He and his wife moved to Newburgh because it was “the only place affordable for us”— which is unsettling. He refused a realtor’s pitch to evict tenants in a multifamily, and I’m glad he did. He bought instead from an older Italian couple “ready to sell,” and now he’s friends with all his neighbors. That’s liberal exceptionalism: believing you can square a circle when the market is brazen enough that a realtor can pitch eviction with a smile. Refusing the pitch soothes the conscience. It doesn’t change the conditions that made it standard practice.

Then came Emily. She’d lived in Washington Heights, retreated to her small California hometown during the pandemic, and moved to Newburgh less than a year ago “for the smaller community and nature.” She is, she says, “very aware” of gentrification and wants to be sure she’s “not a negative impact.” She still commutes to the city but is “engaging with the community,” making sure to do more than “just sleep in Newburgh.” For many who’ve lived here their whole lives, only sleeping in Newburgh was never a moral lapse— it was the unavoidable result of spending waking hours earning the right to stay. The phrasing is familiar: careful, deliberate, eager to land on the right side of the story. I want to be part of the community. But in towns like this, the community existed long before newcomers arrived. Wanting to join it is not the same as leaving it intact.

It’s a fascinating re-listen. Lehrer had asked to hear from “Hudson Valley gentrifiers,” so naturally it’s a self-selecting group— the ones who believe they can account for themselves. Every caller came armed with caveats, moral footnotes, and rehearsed empathy. You could hear them trying to prove they deserved their houses. They were uncomfortable, yes— but only in the way you’re uncomfortable when the dentist asks if you floss. They confessed just enough to prove their self-awareness, but never enough to feel culpable.

Maybe that’s the most revealing thing about gentrification here: even the socially conscious want to be forgiven for winning a game they pretend they’re not playing.

And that’s the trick of it, isn’t it? Whether on public radio, in think pieces, or in the letters to Hudson Valley One, the conversation always seems to orbit the feelings of the winners. Gentrification gets framed as a moral puzzle for the comfortable, not an existential crisis for the displaced. We measure the “goodness” of the gentrifier by how earnestly they narrate their self-awareness— treating displacement as a matter of intent rather than consequence.

In polite spaces, the story becomes one of awkward dinner party admissions— we know we’re part of the problem, but we love it here as much as anyone else— instead of one about the people quietly packing storage units, doubling up with relatives, or sleeping in cars while scrolling Craigslist for the impossible. It’s a discourse curated for the brunch crowd: soft on the edges, allergic to guilt unless it can be metabolized into virtue.

We’ve built an entire public conversation on the premise that if you’re aware of harm, you’re halfway absolved. That self-awareness is a form of resistance. That good intentions should weigh as much as outcomes. It’s easier to talk about your moral calculus than to face the fact that you’re here now because someone else isn’t.

The victims rarely get the mic. They don’t call in to Brian Lehrer. They live farther away now— if they live anywhere near here at all— busy picking up the pieces of lives they didn’t plan to leave behind. Instead, we hear from the people who replaced them, brushing against discomfort like it might stain.

May the displaced find ground that won’t give way. May they find a place that won’t crumble under the weight of someone else’s dream. May they find home again. And as their absence is glamorized as progress, may they be remembered as more than just collateral.