New Yorkers Flocking to the Suburbs

Now comes a new adage: in New York City, nothing is certain but flight and high property taxes.

WalletHub reports that the average American household spends $2,197 on property taxes each year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. New York State’s effective property tax rate is the 10th highest in the nation, and New Yorkers’ $4,738 tax bill on a median valued home is more than double the national average. Now comes the weird part. Even though homeowners in New Jersey and Connecticut pay considerably more in taxes, $7,601 and $5,443 respectively – record numbers of people are fleeing the city and moving to the suburbs.

In 2017, home sales hit a 35-year high in Westchester County and a 14-year high in Long Island’s Nassau County, according to Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants. “City costs have risen more than the cost of a home” in the suburbs, Miller tells the New York Times. “We can see that in the massive migration in the last three or four years of city dwellers.”

Over the past 25 years, the number of people commuting across the Hudson River has grown by 28 percent, to 320,000 people a day, with bus trips up 83 percent and nearly tripling the number of rail trips in and out of Penn Station, according to a 2017 Regional Plan Association report. 

Life, as we all know, is a series of tradeoffs. Those people flocking to Long Island, upstate New York, Connecticut and New Jersey generally live in houses that dwarf New York City apartments. Then again, most of them have to commute every day. 

“I stand behind our commute,” New Jersey-based real estate broker Leslie Kunkin says with a straight face. “Sure you get stuck in traffic,” but compared with the city’s subways, the ride to the suburbs is, she says, “so much more civilized.” 

To each her own.