[This is Part 2 of my research into how the New York Times reports on the Hudson Valley. For Part 1, click here.]
In this post I return to the 694 articles that the New York Times published online about the Hudson Valley from 2002 to 2022. Although they don’t compose a balanced picture of the Hudson Valley, the collected articles offer a complex, multi-faceted narrative on the localities, economic changes, cultural developments, and news events in the region. Here, I pull out a single thread of this reportage: their references, in primary focus or passing mention, to second homes in the Hudson Valley.
The significance of HV second homes
Second-home ownership is merely one way that metro New Yorkers have made an impact on local housing, lent fuel in the COVID era to pandemic gentrification, and contributed to what I have called the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley. It’s not the same as genuine relocation to the region, the subject of many rosy prognostications for assorted Hudson Valley localities, instead indicating that second-homeowners retain primary residential attachments or cultural identifications elsewhere (e.g., the metro New York area for “Brooklynites”). Where tourism is concerned, second homes may not even be the most common way that non-locals visit and consume the Hudson Valley. We need data to see how second home ownership stacks up in the Hudson Valley against the other modalities of Brooklynization — day-trips; conventional hospitality like hotels, motels, and B&Bs; short-term rentals like Airbnb and VRBO; RV camping and nouveau glamping sites; creative/spiritual retreats, spas, and wellness resorts; and old-fashioned specialties like sleepaway camps and bungalow colonies — but my gut tells me second homes don’t count for a third of the entire Brooklynization economy. In any case, in this array second-home ownership is distinct, economically more exclusive, and somewhat culturally peculiar.
In the Hudson Valley, second homes have a special relevance. Historically, they were associated with “old money,” whose fortunes lay in real estate and whose pastimes were more rural patrician than let’s-go-camping commoner. The tradition of old money having a “country home” in the Hudson Valley still endures, but the centrality of real estate in local economies, as well as the incentives of rent stabilization/control for many New York residents (who can save up and then look for the tax shelter associated with purchasing property outside the city), have made second homes viable for many more households for decades. With residential durations that are long-term and/or recurring, second homes offer urban residents a way out of the common axiom (still taught in urban studies) that city dwellers consume services whereas non-city dwellers consume commodities. Second homes give urban owners settings to practice (and literally put in place) consumer lifestyles — maybe more than one lifestyle, if they really own property across different destinations.
What does looking at how the New York Times writes about second homes add? By no means should this accumulated reporting be thought to accurately reflect the tenor of Hudson Valley life. For one thing, the New York Times isn’t the primary newspaper for the Hudson Valley; the six-county region (Orange, Putnam, Ulster, Dutchess, Greene and Columbia counties) has between them six daily newspapers, most of them struggling under corporate consolidation and the internet’s erosion of their traditional advertising revenue. Instead, the Times offers a useful lens onto the Hudson Valley — arguably, it punches above its weight in the region’s news ecosystem — because of its brand connection to the metro NYC residents who have impacted the region’s tourism sector and real estate under the process of Brooklynization. Insofar as the Times is targeted to metro New Yorkers and other non-HV subscribers, its reportage reveals and, in many ways, cultivates the economic motives and cultural sensibilities of its readers — including their relationship to hinterland ‘getaways’ like the Hudson Valley.
Preliminary findings
As in Part 1, my student Neil Kotru Gode and I conducted content analysis on our archive of 694 NYT articles of the Hudson Valley, this time coding for any mention, of any depth or superficiality, of second homes in the article. (Click here for methodological details on this research process.) Remarkably, we found 233 articles with second home references — essentially a third (33.0%) of the entire NYT/HV archive. They’re collected here; the larger pattern they present looks like this.
To begin, recall from Part 1 that the Times doesn’t publish a steady annual volume of articles about the Hudson Valley. Following the top outline of the stacked line chart above (which shows total articles, i.e., without and with second home references) shows that the newspaper typically published more in the early years, with a peak of 54 articles in 2006 and a nadir of 18 articles in 2016. 2020 brought a new burst of volume with 43 articles, and our 2022 endpoint sees 45 articles. (As reported in Part 1, the mean annual volume in the distribution of total NYT/HV articles is 33.0, and the standard deviation is 10.8.)
Turning now to articles with references to second homes (the solid black curve) shows a lesser volume that roughly follows the total pattern. Variation in volume becomes more pronounced toward the end of the 2002-2022 period, with the fewest second home references (13.0%, just three articles) in 2019 and the most second home references (48.9%, or 22 articles) just three years later. (For those following the statistics, the mean annual volume in the distribution of articles with second home references is 11.1, with a standard deviation of 4.9.) The last three years under review here are of course the pandemic years; they correspond to almost an exact fifth (20.1%) of all second home references in the NYT/HV archive. That may sound like a lot — I focus on how second homes get written about during the pandemic years later — but for perspective, that’s just two percent greater than in the first three years, 2002-2022, which comprise 18.0% of all second home references.
The placement of second home references across Times sections
Only 49 of the 233 articles with second home references appear in the New York Times’s Real Estate section, which might seem to many to be the most logical location on the paper’s website for discussions of home and property. Some of this can be be explained by how the paper played around over this period with section titles that contain somewhat similar content. The Real Estate section appears in the NYT/HV archive as early as 2003, but only really by 2015 does it regularly host second home references. Prior to then, other sections that seem editorially equivalent to Real Estate feature references, but for unknown editorial reasons have gone defunct in recent years. Adding these sections like House & Home (4 articles), Home & Garden (13 articles), Great Homes & Destinations (13 articles), and The Hunt For… (1 article) boosts this broader Real Estate category to only 34.3% of the articles with second home references. Where else do these references appear in the Times?
One place is the Travel section, which has 37 articles about the Hudson Valley containing second home references. An editorially related category, Escapes, adds 14 articles to a broader Travel category, which in turn accounts for 21.9% of the 233 articles with second home references in the NYT/HV archive. Escapes is now a defunct section on the Times website, while Travel remains very active, but both effectively peter out as sections for second home references by 2010, eclipsed by the increase in appearance under the Real Estate category.
The transition from the Travel category to the Real Estate category as significant sites where 2nd home references appear is worth speculating about. Maybe it indicates a qualitative shift since the 9/11 era in metro New Yorkers’ geographical relationship to the Hudson Valley, from a remote destination for recreation to an extended property market — that is, at least from the perspective of New York Times editors and reporters.
Otherwise, second home references also appear in the New York section (including bygone Metro and N.Y./Region sections), the Style section (including Sunday Styles and the monthly offshoot T Magazine), and then at decreasingly lower frequencies Arts, Business (not including Real Estate), and miscellaneous categories (Sports, Green, The Upshot).
How the Times writes about second homes
What does a mention of Hudson Valley second homes in the Times look like? Here I offer qualitative interpretations that await quantitative confirmation through more content analysis. I find the variety of approaches is organized along three categories: whether second homes are the chief focus of the article, appear in profiles of Hudson Valley places, or are given simple passing mention in articles on topics that are seemingly unrelated to the first two. The eyeball test suggests the first two categories comprise substantial and roughly equal fractions in the NYT/HV archive, while the third is a small fraction (say, under a tenth of the NYT/HV archive).
Second homes as article focus
In many articles, the Times presents second homes as a newsworthy focus in themselves. This was never more so than the COVID years — the last three in the period under review here. So, 2020 occasioned articles that presented pros and cons of New Yorkers fleeing to second homes, like Did New Yorkers Who Fled to Second Homes Bring the Virus? and The Little Fraught Schoolhouse. 2022 offered articles on the impact of metro New Yorkers’ seasonal footprint in the Hudson Valley on housing affordability (Workers in the Catskills Can’t Find Housing. Bosses Are Trying to Help) and electoral campaigns (Where Are All the Manhattan Voters in August? Try the Hamptons). While the pandemic years brought special attention to local conflict surrounding second homes in the Hudson Valley, the archive shows earlier examples of this tone, like City Brushes Up Definition of Artist, In Woodstock, Values Collide Over Housing, and Judd Hirsch’s Wind-Power Plan Unsettles Catskill Town. On the whole, these articles frame second houses as vehicles of demographic, economic, and political change in the Hudson Valley and elsewhere. This bigger sociological picture isn’t exclusive to discussion of second homes, of course; the 461 articles of the NYT/HV archive that don’t mention second homes also include comparable pros vs. cons reporting on other modalities of Brooklynization, like tourism and arts development.
In contrast to such attention to social change and metro NYC influence in the Hudson Valley, a much larger group of articles focusing on second homes decontextualizes the bigger sociological picture to emphasize their physical, experiential, and social qualities. If there are pros and cons to be discussed in these pieces, such evaluation tends to be highly individualized. This treatment is the specialty of Real Estate, Style, and Travel sections, all of which fall under the Lifestyle category on the Times website’s menu bar.
The purchase and maintenance of second homes constitute a major and, by most definitions, discretionary investment. Accordingly, the Times dedicates much second home discussion, about the Hudson Valley and elsewhere, to investment considerations and household economics. To begin, in the Real Estate section a whole genre of articles in the “What You Get For… [dollar amount]” column doesn’t even include narrative writing so much as bespoke curations of housing prices and apartment/house/estate descriptions from around the U.S. Seldom do these pieces specify properties as second homes, even if readers can use this information to entertain their own investment calculations. Elsewhere, the dollars-and-cents foundation of such service journalism gets narrative elaboration in columns and features about searching for, purchasing, and maintaining second homes: e.g., For Second Homes, How Far to Go?, A Second Home, A Second Career, The Tyranny of the 2nd Home, Time for a Place in the Country?, Buying a Second Home First, Summer House Madness, and They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds. Typically, these kinds of articles include the Hudson Valley along other second-home regions, a comparative angle made pointedly (and uncommonly) explicit in Is the Hudson Valley Turning Into the Hamptons?
Beyond the question of price point, the utility of second homes is also social and symbolic in nature, as the Times reports in sometimes self-conscious ways. Second homes are settings for guests, sociability, and playing the social game, as reported in dishy articles like Going Up the Country, But Keeping All the Toys, Country Dinner Parties: Mind Your Manners, The Name Game, and Your Country House Is a Disaster? Tell Me Everything. Traditionally “correct” style and decorative fashion are offered in pieces like You May Be Ready for Summer, but Is Your Home?, while “fashion-forward” renovations and remakes are featured in articles like Thrill Rides on the Color Wheel, An Architect’s Design for Weekend Living, and A Cozy, Minimalist Retreat Perched Among the Treetops.
Also betraying the hierarchies of social status are the many first-person biographical profiles and interviews describing individuals and households who made the leap into Hudson Valley property ownership. Maybe it’s because the Hudson Valley is comparatively affordable for “Brooklynites,” or because lower price points are usually the province of articles about metro NYC apartments and condos, but these articles on Hudson Valley property owners tend to describe second homes as sites of quite conspicuous consumption: e.g., The Classic Box, Well Rounded, Now Rated R (for Resale), For a Very Old House, Some Very New Ideas, A Country Home, by a Modernist at Play, and Hay House: How Designer Sheila Bridges Made Space for Herself. Conspicuous consumption shades into conspicuous production for today’s creative entrepreneurs, whose country homes and family barns offer bases from which to launch an organic maple syrup company (Is It Too Classy for Pancakes?), maker space (After Etsy, Scratching an Itch), or a residential “agri-community” (The D.I.Y. Developers).
Second homes in Hudson Valley place profiles
Second homes zoom in and out of focus across the many Times articles profiling places in the Hudson Valley, of which there appears to be two distinct subsets. The first is general reporting on HV places, typically the bigger riverfront localities, in which feature-based writing reports their transformation by amenity development and metro New Yorkers relocating for primary residences. Characteristically, these articles tend to refer to second homes infrequently and in conjunction with other modalities of Brooklynization.
The biggest example of this comes with the reporting on Beacon following the 2003 opening of the Dia:Beacon gallery and the city’s subsequent art-based revitalization; in later years, similar aggregate treatment is given to Hudson, Kingston, and Catskill. In the 2002-2022 NYT/HV archive, Beacon or a Beacon destination (e.g., Dia:Beacon) was the subject of 20 articles, with second home references appearing only four times. See the table below, which doesn’t include articles that group Beacon with other places (usually in service journalism pieces about art crawls and weekend itineraries).
The episodic and non-exclusive references to second homes in these articles may be editorially appropriate — perhaps conveying a sense of proportion to the role of second homes in Beacon, where most newcomers have bought into the city as a bedroom community of primary residences. But note the cumulative effect: the collected articles’ focus on “Brooklynization” amenities like restaurants, cultural destinations, street life, and surrounding natural-agricultural landscapes imply that second homes are always and inevitably an option for some metro New Yorkers.
The second group of Hudson Valley place profiles are columns that over the years shift through various titles yet hold to a common style, starting with place names inserted directly into the headline: Weekender: Garrison, N.Y., House Tour: Athens, N.Y., Living In: Accord, N.Y., and so on. The Hudson Valley’s small towns, villages, and hamlets disproportionately appear in these columns, which characteristically introduce readers to places lacking marquee-name status where metro New Yorkers have “discovered” inviting lifestyles and attractive real estate. After a brief opening with evocations and informant quotes about the local quality of life, the columns regularly conclude with section titles and real estate information that make clear “Pros” and “Cons” of buying property, or “What You’ll Find” and “What You’ll Pay”; median sale prices invariably appear. Explicit references to second homes are found more commonly, indeed almost consistently, in these columns than in the first group of HV place profiles, although again not in exclusion of day-trips, options for long-distance metro commuting, and other modes of place consumption. In the 2002-2022 archive, these Times columns initially clustered in the Travels section; by the end, they were found in the Real Estate section.
Hudson Valley second homes in passing references
In a fraction of the NYT/HV archive, references appear in the background of pieces that are unrelated to the subject of second homes, surfacing via a casual remark from an interview subject, or a random detail from a biographical profile. I wouldn’t assume authors and editors intend these second home references to stand out for readers, given the many other details, contexts, and themes in these articles. As an example, in an article about a Hudson Valley jazz venue, a Kingston-based musician who is quoted is given additional description: “Mr. Grenadier’s regular gig is with the pianist Brad Mehldau, who has a house nearby in Newburgh, and played the Falcon in its old iteration” (Swinging on the Hudson: An Unlikely Haven for Jazz, my emphasis). Such second home references easily escape the attention of readers, not to mention content analysis coders like Neil and me! Yet cumulatively, if imperceptibly, these mentions can reinforce the idea of the Hudson Valley as a place where people go to own second homes.
Interviews and biographical profiles across a number of Times sections are frequent settings for these passing references. The New York section’s “Sunday Routines” column lets NYC movers and shakers in business and arts drop casual mentions of house-hunting and renovations in towns like Rosendale and Monroe. Features on groups as diverse as train motorcar hobbyists, incandescent light bulb collectors, and prescient art collectors make passing references to second homes, likely because of the writer’s thoroughness in identifying their informants and protagonists.
As noted earlier, Hudson Valley second homes have historical relevance as settings for metropolitan high society of the 19th and 20th century. It may be impossible to give an adequate account of, say, the region’s bevy of antiques shops or the land surrounding an ecosystem research institute without at some point acknowledging the historic connections to old money in the region. As fascination with high society endures in the 21st century, so does Times reporting on the phenomenon in the Hudson Valley, if with less of the “Page Six” juiciness associated with its rival the New York Post. Take for example And So, On to Millbrook. For every ethnographic journey into this old-money enclave, Millbrook section homes occasions several more casual mentions in interviews and articles about property developers, hand-bag designers, news anchors, crooked art dealers, and architects based in NYC.
Sometimes, Times writers and editors lean upon Hudson Valley second home reference as a simple metaphor to evoke the region’s geography of wealth and inequality. An article about the memorial for a community organizer in the city of Poughkeepsie, for instance, occasioned prose seemingly inspired by A Tale of Two Cities: “In some ways, [Poughkeepsie] is a gritty island in a land of plenty. It is the center of government for Dutchess County, where fox hunts still take place in some old-money towns and hamlets, and weekend homeowners flock to upscale restaurants and antiques shops” (In Their Diversity, Mourners Honor the Spirit of a Leader).
There is still higher to travel up the ranks of society than the Hudson Valley. This is illustrated in two or three articles where a second home is found in a different region than the Hudson Valley place whose mention triggered its inclusion in the NYT/HV archive. For instance, an article on evolving vacation policies reports that IBM has chip and server factories in East Fishkill, but its CEO has a vacation house in Kennebunkport, Me. Perhaps most ominously, the superstar art collector and Dia board chairman who plucked Beacon out of global obscurity for a future of curatorial renown, it is reported, actually houses his art collection in an estate in Bridgehampton, Long Island.
Why does the Times write so much about second homes?
Second homes, I’ve argued, represent a peculiar if revealing “slice” of the larger economic and demographic impact that metro New Yorkers make in the Hudson Valley through its real estate and tourism sectors. The Times has written a lot about second homes in their reporting on the Hudson Valley — i.e., a full third of all articles in the 694 articles that make up the NYT/HV archive — across the 2002-2022 period. This discourse isn’t unique to the years of pandemic gentrification; second home references are more frequent in the pandemic years, but the before-and-after-COVID pattern appears to be a difference of degree, not kind. The longer, regular stream of references raises the question: Why does the Times write so much about second homes in its Hudson Valley coverage?
At this stage, I can only hypothesize. A study in content analysis like this one focuses on the messages observed in news articles, not the thinking and processes that led writers and editors in a global media corporation to produce those news articles. It’s in the organizational behind-the-scenes where the answer ultimately lies. (I hope to conduct such a study soon!)
Urban history and the sociology of news offer two theses on metro newspapers’ concerns for economic activity in real estate and tourism, at least insofar as those are key engines for metropolitan growth and economic development. The famous example of the Chandler family publishing dynasty who ran the Los Angeles Times illustrates the most direct connection, one of vested economic interest, between a newspaper and the metro real estate industry. Harry Chandler owned vast tracts of then-undeveloped San Fernando Valley land, and his paper proselytized relentlessly for water development that increased the value of his holdings, facilitating his direct benefit from hinterland suburbanization. In post-industrial American cities, this pattern is far less common than the social interest newspapers have in exercising civic ‘leadership’ and advocating the general cause and specific initiatives that unite metro governments and businesses in “growth coalitions.”
Neither thesis seems relevant to the phenomenon I’ve analyzed here. Yes, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the Times publisher (1992-2018) and chairman (1997-2020), has owned an estate in the Hudson Valley — in Gardiner, Ulster County, where his neighbors include Robert de Niro. But this hardly constitutes an investment worth mobilizing his editors and reporters to popularize the sale of Hudson Valley property and advance the pace of rural gentrification. Nor do most media observers and news scholars believe that editors and reporters today, certainly not at the byline-conscious Times, would stand for such a vulgar and unprofessional journalistic mandate from on high. Perhaps there is a Hudson Valley growth coalition appealing to the Times for its editorial advocacy, but the institutional and cultural distances between North America’s largest metro daily and political/business elites in its metro hinterland are arguably too vast to make this likely. If the coverage I have reviewed here is any evidence, the Times simply occupies a far different world than Main Street Hudson Valley.
I hypothesize that the reason the Times writes so much about second homes reflects institutional machinations and editorial decisions internal to the newspaper, with no significant influence from external actors in the Hudson Valley or elsewhere. The 2002-2022 period under review here coincides, as Adam Nagourney documents in his 2023 book The Times, with the paper’s trials, errors, and expansion of the nytimes.com website. Publishers and editors began this period unsure how to coordinate the print and online editions, with many loathe to let the tail wag the dog and reconceptualize the newspaper as primarily an online media platform with an ancillary print publication. In 2011 the paper instituted its paywall; in 2014, its internal Innovation Report endorsed and mapped forward the paper’s redesign into a digital brand; in 2020, digital revenue at the Times exceeded print revenue for the first time (another pandemic effect); and by now, digital-only “subscription services” are in such demand that media observers sometimes call the Times an online game company fronting as a news organization.
A lot of contentious meetings, personnel turnover, and company reorganization paved the way for the Times’s digital transformation. In a 2020 interview, Mark Thomson offered two key takeaways from his 2012-2020 tenure as president and CEO of the New York Times Company that are relevant to my hypothesis.
Geography really matters—and within that, diversity. America’s complexion is changing. Almost literally, its complexion is changing very rapidly. Age is also important. We moved from reaching one in five millennials a few years ago to reaching more than one in two per month—about half of American millennials.
With that availability to younger users comes all sorts of interesting questions about how you modernize, about how you cover things like culture, how you cover race and diversity. Which I think the Times is rising to the challenge of.
Also, the Times used to be male skewed. It’s now somewhat female skewed. And you can see, all over the news report, examples of more pieces that are commissioned by editors who are themselves wanting to be available to perspectives, to stories, that are more likely to appeal to both genders.
These are fundamental changes. You once had the idea, which had a grain of truth in it, that the 50-plus white, college-educated, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat Upper West Siders who’d grown up with the Times were the ones who loved it. We have those people. We love them. I live in a building on the Upper West Side. They are my neighbors. But we’re much broader than that. You can’t reach 160 million Americans entirely on the basis of the population of the Upper West Side [of Manhattan].
Thomson speaks here to editorial decisions since the new millennium to direct the Times toward a more inclusive and visibly younger market of “users,” a group who appreciates the paper’s venerable editorial values but embraces a wider range of issue concerns and cultural affiliations. Thomson further makes clear this new generation has made its presence known within the Times’s own organization. I might call this new generation “Brooklynites,” even though they are hardly limited to Brooklyn (much less representative of the borough’s larger population). Among other things, when editorializing about these new readers’ recreational habits, the Hamptons gives way to the Hudson Valley.
Not that the Times limits its pursuit of new digital users to the metropolitan New York area, as Thomson’s second statement indicates:
The opportunity now is to become one of the tiny handful of trusted independent sources of news in the world: of immense appeal in the United States but also throughout the entire world of college-educated people who’ve got a good command of English; who’ve got an interest in what’s happening at a global level, what’s happening in the United States, and what’s happening in Western culture; and who really want reporting that touches every part of the world.
We’re not going to put enough journalists in Australia to fully cover Australia, to compete head to head with local media and local journalism there. Our thesis is about “local for global.” We’re going to cover those stories in Australia that hopefully will be interesting to subscribers in Australia but actually are interesting to subscribers everywhere.
His statement illuminates two points. The first is obvious: the Times isn’t parochial in its coverage, in either its renowned news operation but (more relevant to the phenomenon analyzed here) in its Travel and Real Estate reporting as well. Second, “local for global” suggests that what editors and writers deem “interesting to subscribers everywhere” isn’t the wider range of news and culture issues that concern local readers outside of metro New York — Part 1 demonstrates how the Times inconsistently covers the range of issues that concern Hudson Valley residents — so much as what it anticipates will concern Brooklynites in metro New York and other global metropoles.
I hypothesize that the idea of second homes in the Hudson Valley is an emblem, just one, for the paper’s “local for global” editorial approach, most obviously in the Real Estate and Travel sections but also in its news coverage (e.g.,, the New York section) and culture and style coverage (in Arts and Style sections). The consistent, even obsessive, references in the New York Times to Hudson Valley second homes demonstrate a global media news organization tackling lifestyle concerns and digital platforms that it anticipates will interest a broader market of digital natives and old-school readers. An organizational process of market anticipation reveals itself in the NYT/HV archive in the recurrence of an editorial buzzword, “second homes in the Hudson Valley” and its many variants — a media expression reflecting larger changes at the Times for which the writing on second homes and the Hudson Valley only scratch the surface.
Appendixes