re: Kingston, insufferable article
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/r...residents.html
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Kingston, a small city in upstate New York, became my home four and a half years ago. Seeking space, affordability, green, and quiet, my husband and I traded Brooklyn for this city of 23,000. Unwittingly, we joined a slow-drip migration north.
Since the arrival of coronavirus, though, what had been a steadily paced increase in newcomers has become a barrage, with our adopted hometown experiencing an unprecedented and not entirely welcome real estate boom.
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of course, they moved from brooklyn. of course, the guy is a "writer"
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I was newly pregnant with twins when we purchased our house on a tree-lined block of Kingston. We were drawn to the town’s smallness, walkability, its racial diversity (in the overwhelmingly white Hudson Valley, Kingston is nearly 70 percent white, the rest an amalgam of Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous American and other non-white groups), and its natural surroundings: mountains, farms, woodlands, and the majestic Hudson River. With my husband, a chef, newly employed by the Phoenicia Diner, a popular upstate restaurant, we finally had the push to leave the city, a move I’d been impatient to make for years.
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obligatory genuflection towards "diversity" and implicit dig at boring white people (bet they don't hang out in the "diverse" neighborhoods though.
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The first day we drove upstate to house hunt, I fell for an 1850 Victorian that had been sitting on the market, uninhabited, for nearly a year and a half. I ignored the dust and the rotting back deck, focusing, instead, on the 13-foot ceilings, the light pouring in despite the wintry clouds, and the many built-in closets. We made an offer immediately, and went into contract for more than $20,000 below the asking price of $339,000.
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good for them though
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We were freelance writers and textile artists, D.J.s and furniture makers, jewelers, photographers, acupuncturists and musicians. (We were nearly all white, too.) We’d entered adulthood via the gig economy. This left many of us financially unstable, but provided the professional flexibility to live beyond daily commuting distance of the city. We felt rich in community, if not in cash.
There was more to Kingston, too: a run-down but well utilized Y.M.C.A.; a charming public library situated in the midst of one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods; a strong, minority-led social justice community; and a historically underfunded but remarkably diverse public school system.
These were facets of the city that some newcomers felt compelled to recognize and participate in, while others avoided them wholesale. Many of our transplant peers, we soon learned, sent their children to private schools in neighboring towns, reasoning that they could afford it since they were saving so much on living expenses. The cultural and economic chasm was ever-present, though rarely explicitly acknowledged.
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*GAG*!
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While we’ve watched the financial stability of our peers crumble, we have seen our little city become the receiving end of a startlingly rapid exodus of people looking to escape New York City. The effect is made clear by the numbers: this spring, Kingston had become one of the top 10 ZIP codes in the country for address changes and mail forwarding since the beginning of the shutdown.
Most of us who moved a few years ago voluntarily divorced ourselves from the city’s higher salaries in order to live a slower, more affordable life. But now, with so many white collar workers geographically liberated by telecommuting, their city paychecks — and with them, increased buying power — have become movable, too.
In many neighborhoods, prices on comparable listings have more than doubled since we moved four years ago. On our block, we’ve watched two dated homes, both with postage-stamp yards, list for half a million dollars and then go into bidding wars.
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upstate, with its grand urban spaces and cheapness, stands to gain from covid and the incompetence of de Blasio
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Joined the bus on the 33rd seat
By the doo-doo room with the reek replete
Last edited by dc_denizen; Aug 21, 2020 at 6:28 PM.
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