I Live Here Westchester NY

Send us Fan Mail The country keeps saying the office is dead — but Westchester County just posted its strongest leasing quarter in years. Office leasing jumped 30.1% year over year in Q1 2026, hitting roughly 450,000 square feet, about 14% above the 10-year first-quarter average, according to Newmark. This week on The Friday Intel, we go deeper on the counter-narrative — and the surprise buried in...

Send us Fan Mail The 2% property-tax cap is the most misunderstood rule in Westchester County, the highest-taxed county in America. It limits how much a town or school district can raise in total, not what any single homeowner pays. This episode explains the reassessment trap: how, in towns that have gone 10 to 20-plus years without a revaluation, individual assessments can jump 50% to 100% in a s...

Send us Fan Mail White Plains is rebuilding its downtown all at once. The Westchester County Industrial Development Agency moved to approve three mixed-use projects worth roughly $1.2 billion, including the $585.2 million Hamilton Green tower that replaces the White Plains Mall, and moved to grant $32.87 million in public incentives to make them happen. We walk through the projects, the 140-out-of...

Send us Fan Mail Geoff Rose started his career as a strength coach at Clemson. He left convinced the problem wasn't the coaches or the methodology — it was the model. Not enough time, not enough specificity, and no framework for building structure before building load. Today Geoff runs REP Athletics in Larchmont, where he works with elite athletes and chronic pain patients using the same meth...

Send us Fan Mail Mount Vernon closed three elementary schools to save $17 million, but the actual recurring savings landed closer to $6.8 million. In the county that pays the highest property taxes in America, the Mount Vernon City School District is in its sixth straight year of state-designated fiscal stress, and it still cannot close a roughly $5.5 million gap. We walk through the rejected budg...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester commuters are paying higher Metro-North fares in 2026, but the marquee benefit keeps moving. We break down Penn Station Access, the New Haven Line's one-seat ride into Penn Station that promises up to 40 minutes a day in savings, and why its timeline just slipped to 2027 at the earliest and possibly 2030 for full service. We also look at where the county is spendi...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester County wants to spend up to $150 million modernizing the HPN airport terminal. The Friday Intel digs into the data and finds the catch: HPN moves 2.2 million passengers through a 1995 terminal capped at 240 scheduled passengers every half hour, a 1980s limit the renovation won't touch. The county is buying comfort, not capacity. In This Episode (0:00) A $150 milli...

Send us Fan Mail Barnes & Noble is gone from White Plains City Center and Neiman Marcus is leaving The Westchester, while Wayfair plants its first New York store in Yonkers. We map who is moving out and who is moving in across Westchester County, and explain what vacant anchors do to mall values and the local sales-tax base. In This Episode (0:00) Two stores out, a furniture warehouse in (0:20...

Send us Fan Mail The Essential Plan cliff lands today. As of July 1, New York lowered the income line for its no-premium health plan, and roughly 47,000 Hudson Valley residents, many in Westchester County, lose coverage. We trace the change from a 2025 federal law to a Westchester kitchen table, and explain where the costs go next. In This Episode (0:00) A rule changes today, and 47,000 neighbors...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester is short roughly 21,000 homes and rental vacancy sits under two percent. The usual explanation is land, money, and demand. This week's guest, developer Nick Khamsopa, makes a different case: the real bottleneck is people, specifically the shortage of developers who can hold a municipality, a pension fund, an environmental attorney, a lender, and an architect toget...

Send us Fan Mail For seven years, Westchester County homeowners could deduct only $10,000 of their state and local taxes. For 2026 that cap jumps to $40,400, a swing worth thousands of dollars a year for most households below the income phase-out. We explain how the new SALT cap works, why it expires in 2029, and how the Conley versus Lawler race in New York's 17th district will help decide i...

Send us Fan Mail The Hendrick Hudson school district in the Town of Cortlandt, Westchester County faces a shortfall of more than $25 million for the coming year as the last of its Indian Point nuclear-plant revenue runs out. We break down how the district got here, and why an 8% tax hike or a savings raid are the only exits left. In This Episode (0:00) The promise of closing Indian Point, and the...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester County has the highest property taxes of any county in America — a typical bill near $10,000 a year. But the government everyone blames takes the smallest slice. This week on The Friday Intel, we break your property tax bill apart: how Westchester compares to the wealthiest suburbs in the country, how wildly the bill swings from Scarsdale to the rest of the county, and...

Send us Fan Mail When Washington cuts food aid, the cost lands somewhere, and this month it landed in Westchester County. This episode examines two federal nutrition programs under pressure: WIC, which a House spending bill would fund $200 million below current levels while cutting its fruit-and-vegetable benefit 10%, and SNAP, whose lapsed funding hit local food providers immediately. County Exec...

Send us Fan Mail Dan D'Amico has knocked on nearly six thousand doors in Yonkers District 16. Not with a team. Largely by himself. What he's heard is not what the county is spending money on. D'Amico is a former FDNY firefighter, a working real estate broker, and the Republican candidate challenging the incumbent for Westchester County Legislature District 16. In this conversation,...

Send us Fan Mail Playland, the county-owned amusement park in Rye, opened its 98th season this spring with the historic Dragon Coaster restored. But behind the nostalgia is a real governance question for Westchester County: after the private operator Standard Amusements exited its contract in January 2025, the county is running the park directly, and last season drew just over 213,000 visitors. Th...

Send us Fan Mail For decades, thousands of Westchester County deeds have carried restrictive covenants, clauses that once barred homes from being sold to people of certain races, religions, or ethnic backgrounds. They've been unenforceable since 1948, but the language stayed in the records. This episode explains a new process, effective June 3 under New York Real Property Law Section 327-a, t...

Send us Fan Mail For seven years, Westchester County homeowners could deduct only $10,000 of their state and local taxes. For 2026 that cap jumps to $40,400, a swing worth thousands of dollars a year for most households below the income phase-out. We explain how the new SALT cap works, why it expires in 2029, and how the Conley versus Lawler race in New York's 17th district will help decide i...

Send us Fan Mail Tomorrow's Democratic primary will settle several Westchester County races outright, yet turnout will be a fraction of the electorate. This episode breaks down what's actually on the June 23 ballot, from State Comptroller and the 17th Congressional District to two County Board of Legislators seats, town supervisor races in Greenburgh and North Castle, and the Larchmont m...

Send us Fan Mail The World Cup final will be played 12 miles from Westchester County — and the data says this region is less a bystander than a home team. This week on The Friday Intel, we map Westchester's actual slice of a $3.3 billion tournament: the overflow economics, the matchday-train rules that will strand anyone who waits, and the surprising demographic finding that reframes the whol...

Send us Fan Mail On Monday, June 22, the Westchester County Rent Guidelines Board votes on how much more tens of thousands of rent-stabilized tenants pay starting October 1. The nine-member board — three tenant, three landlord, three public members, all appointed by the County Executive — is decided by its three "neutral" public seats. The hearings across Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, and...

Send us Fan Mail Yonkers calls itself "Hollywood on the Hudson," but the city's new $1.64 billion budget still raised the combined property tax rate 4.75%. On May 29 the City Council unanimously adopted the largest budget in Yonkers history, trimming Mayor Mike Spano's proposed 5.25% increase but preserving all services and its workforce with help from $55 million in state aid....

Send us Fan Mail Linh Hoang is opening Dahlia's Song in Tarrytown — a flower shop, Vietnamese café, and workshop space inside a 135-year-old former bank building on North Broadway. She grows over 400 dahlia varieties herself, including breeds that exist nowhere else, and she's building something Westchester has never quite seen before. In This Episode: (0:00) How a lifelong passion for f...

Send us Fan Mail The Federal Reserve meets June 16–17, and markets put the odds of holding rates steady at roughly 99% — no cut since December. For Westchester County, where the median single-family home now runs about $940,000, that means mortgages stay near 6.5% and the "wait for a cut" strategy gets more expensive. We translate the Fed's decision into the real monthly cost of buy...

Send us Fan Mail About one in four Westchester County homes heats with oil — roughly 85,000 households — and this is the week they face a quiet but costly decision. Heating-oil pre-buy and cap-price contracts are sold in summer, and this year those households are pricing winter against the largest oil-supply disruption on record. We break down the numbers, why oil-heated homes get no state afforda...