I Live Here Westchester NY

Send us Fan Mail Westchester County just crossed one million residents — the highest population ever recorded, with the largest single-year gain of any county in New York State, at a moment when 38 of the state's 62 counties are losing population. Today's Friday Intel breaks down the data underneath that milestone: where the growth is concentrated, what it is doing to housing prices, why...

Send us Fan Mail A church carnival in Tuckahoe ended May 30 with three injured officers, a hospital transport, and police from multiple counties shutting the event down. Coverage has called it a teen takeover. Today's Westchester Brief asks the harder question: what was the event permit, what was the crowd management plan, and what institutional failure allowed a community institution to beco...

Send us Fan Mail A Westchester-based company just hit a $1 billion valuation in quantum computing — one of the most strategically important technology sectors in the world — and almost no one in the county has heard of it. SEEQC, Inc. manufactures superconducting quantum chips in Elmsford, expanded its facility with a $3 million Empire State Development grant, and is closing a merger with Allegro...

Send us Fan Mail The Westchester County Board of Legislators unanimously passed the Visual Gun Warning Law on June 2 — requiring licensed gun retailers to display graphic health warning imagery at the point of sale. Westchester is the second jurisdiction in the United States to enact this type of requirement. The vote is done. The implementation hasn't started. Today's episode covers wha...

Send us Fan Mail On June 22, the Westchester County Rent Guidelines Board will vote on allowable rent increases for all rent-stabilized apartments in the county — leases running October 2026 through September 2027. Last year's approved rates were 2% for one-year leases and 3% for two-year leases. Landlords say those increases fell short of actual cost growth. Tenants say any increase is a bur...

Send us Fan Mail Violent crime in Westchester County fell 25% in 2025 — and that number deserves more than a headline. All seven major crime categories declined simultaneously. Overall index crime dropped 17%. And one city — Mount Vernon — reported zero shooting incidents in the first quarter of 2026, placing it among just five departments statewide to reach that mark. This week on The Friday Inte...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester County is on the Trump administration's Department of Justice list of sanctuary jurisdictions — but County Executive Ken Jenkins says that designation is wrong, and the distinction he's drawing has real legal and financial weight. Today's episode breaks down what Westchester's actual policy says, what the DOJ designation means under Executive Order...

Send us Fan Mail In 2011, Westchester County closed its outpatient mental health clinics. This past March, after nearly fifteen years, the county opened a new Mental Health Safety Net Clinic in White Plains. County Executive Jenkins called it a signature initiative. The honest version: it's a policy reversal — and the 2011 closure was a policy choice with real consequences. Today's Brief...

Send us Fan Mail Governor Hochul broke ground on Westchester Crossing in Port Chester in April — 957 housing units, a hotel, retail, green space, and senior housing on the long-vacant former United Hospital campus. The state calls it transformational. Today's Brief asks the harder question. 105 of those 957 units are designated affordable. That's 11%. Housing advocates typically cite 20%...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of I Live Here Westchester , host Jim Jockle sits down with Cait Conley, a fourth-generation Hudson Valley native, Special Operations combat veteran, and candidate for Congress in New York’s 17th District — one of the most competitive races in the country. Cait shares how growing up in a blue-collar, service-oriented family shaped her values, why 9/11 led her to We...

Send us Fan Mail A training plane flipped over on takeoff at Westchester County Airport last month. Two people walked away with minor injuries. But that one incident follows a fatal crash in 2025 that killed six members of a family of physicians, and a federal funding standoff earlier this year that disrupted the airport's security staffing. Three incidents in twelve months. One airport. And...

Send us Fan Mail The MTA has launched a $6.2 billion capital program for Metro-North — the largest in the railroad's history. Westchester County has approximately 20,000 housing units under development across Yonkers, New Rochelle, and White Plains, all concentrated around Metro-North stations and built on the assumption that the railroad is reliable and competitive with driving. Today's...

Send us Fan Mail On June 23, Democratic primary voters in two Westchester legislative districts will choose nominees for seats that could reshape the Board of Legislators. Early voting starts June 13. Most people haven't heard of either race. Today's Brief introduces both: the 15th District, where two strong Democrats are competing to challenge the only Republican on the 17-member board,...

Send us Fan Mail On May 4, the Westchester County Board of Legislators unanimously passed the Lessor Prevailing Wage Act — closing the gap between wage protections on county-owned and county-leased construction sites. Most people missed it. With approximately 20,000 housing units under active development across Yonkers, New Rochelle, and White Plains — and the MTA's $6.2 billion Metro-North c...

Send us Fan Mail On May 20, school budget votes ran across Westchester. 25 districts passed. Eastchester didn't. Yesterday's Brief covered the Yonkers school district's $101 million structural gap. Today's episode is the companion: what a failed budget vote actually signals, and how two different failure modes point to the same broken school finance system. Today's Brief c...

Send us Fan Mail The Yonkers Board of Education met this week to consider closing School 21 — a neighborhood elementary school — to address a $101 million structural budget gap. The superintendent said the gap isn't from mismanagement. It's from a state funding formula Albany hasn't fixed. Yonkers Public Schools serves 23,000+ students: 73% economically disadvantaged, 22% with disab...

Send us Fan Mail This week The Westchester Brief covered Westchester's housing crisis from the municipal accountability angle. Today's Friday Intel puts a single number at the center — 11,703 — and runs the math on what it actually takes to close the gap. Westchester County has committed $500 million and produced 3,383 affordable units since 2019. At the current production pace of roughl...

Send us Fan Mail The Welcome Home Westchester campaign released housing policy scorecards for all 43 Westchester municipalities last December. The county's Housing Needs Assessment puts the current affordable unit gap at 11,703. Most local governments are not helping close it. Today's Brief covers why the county can fund housing but cannot force municipalities to allow it, which towns ar...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester County announced last week that overall crime dropped 17% in 2025 — violent crime down 25%, every major index category improved. This week, police departments across the county are reporting a surge in vehicle thefts. Both things are simultaneously true, and the gap between them is the story. Today's Brief examines what annual aggregate crime statistics actually m...

Send us Fan Mail In March, the U.S. Energy Secretary and a Republican congressman showed up at the gates of Indian Point to announce a restart push. County Executive Jenkins said no. The political story is simple. The legal story is not. Today's Brief maps the five-party consent framework that governs any restart, identifies where each party stands, and explains the federal preemption argumen...

Send us Fan Mail Tuesday, May 19th, voters across Westchester County head to the polls for the annual school budget vote — the highest-stakes, lowest-turnout election of the year. If the budget fails, there's no revision: districts default to a contingency budget, which means automatic program cuts and frozen staffing. Today's Brief covers what's on the ballot in White Plains, how N...

Send us Fan Mail Ken Jenkins led his State of the County address with a crime number: overall index crime down seventeen percent, violent crime down twenty-five, murders down fifty-seven percent — the lowest January through May count since 1990. Today's Friday Intel benchmarks those numbers against every regional peer and the national average. Against Nassau (down 10.1%), Suffolk (8.7%), NYC...

Send us Fan Mail July 1, 2026: the federal government begins narrowing health coverage for lawfully present immigrants. By October, federal Medicaid funding for a significant portion of that population is eliminated under the 2025 reconciliation law. Nationally, 1.4 million people are projected to lose coverage. Westchester County has not publicly quantified how many of its own residents are affec...

Send us Fan Mail In February, Westchester County's Real Time Crime Center announced it was monitoring social media for teen takeover threats following a chaotic incident at Bay Plaza in the Bronx. It was covered as a public safety story. Today's Brief covers it as a surveillance story. The RTCC operates 480 license plate recognition cameras capturing sixteen million plates per week, AI p...

Send us Fan Mail Westchester County's 2026 budget has a name: Ken Jenkins is calling the 5.27 percent property tax increase the Trump Tax. And on the mechanics, he's right — federal funding uncertainty, shifting aid formulas, and tariff costs created a $197 million gap the county could not absorb without raising taxes and cutting services. Today's Brief examines what the federal fra...