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[This is Part 2 of my research into how the New York Times reports on the Hudson Valley. For Part 1, <\/em>click here<\/em><\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The significance of HV second homes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>. It\u2019s 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 \u201cBrooklynites\u201d). 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 \u2014 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 \u2014 but my gut tells me second homes don\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Hudson Valley, second homes have a special relevance. Historically, they were associated with \u201cold money,\u201d whose fortunes lay in real estate and whose pastimes were more rural patrician than let\u2019s-go-camping commoner. The tradition of old money having a \u201ccountry home\u201d 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 \u2014 maybe more than one lifestyle, if they really own property across different destinations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does looking at how the New York Times writes about<\/em> 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\u2019t 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\u2019s erosion of their traditional advertising revenue. Instead, the Times offers a useful lens onto the Hudson Valley \u2014 arguably, it punches above its weight in the region\u2019s news ecosystem \u2014 because of its brand connection to the metro NYC residents who have impacted the region\u2019s 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<\/em> the economic motives and cultural sensibilities of its readers \u2014 including their relationship to hinterland \u2018getaways\u2019 like the Hudson Valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Preliminary findings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> for methodological details on this research process.) Remarkably, we found 233 articles with second home references \u2014 essentially a third (33.0%) of the entire NYT\/HV archive<\/strong>. They\u2019re collected here<\/a>; the larger pattern they present looks like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To begin, recall from Part 1<\/a> that the Times doesn\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 I focus on how second homes get written about during the pandemic years later \u2014 but for perspective, that\u2019s just two percent greater than in the first three years, 2002-2022, which comprise 18.0% of all second home references.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The placement of second home references across Times sections<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Only 49 of the 233 articles with second home references appear in the New York Times\u2019s Real Estate section, which might seem to many to be the most logical location on the paper\u2019s 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\u00a0second 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\u2026 (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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019 geographical relationship to the Hudson Valley, from a remote destination for recreation to an extended property market \u2014 that is, at least from the perspective of New York Times editors and reporters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n How the Times writes about second homes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second homes as article focus<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In many articles, the Times presents second homes as a newsworthy focus in themselves. This was never more so than the COVID years \u2014 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?<\/a> and The Little Fraught Schoolhouse<\/a>. 2022 offered articles on the impact of metro New Yorkers\u2019 seasonal footprint in the Hudson Valley on housing affordability (Workers in the Catskills Can\u2019t Find Housing. Bosses Are Trying to Help<\/a>) and electoral campaigns (Where Are All the Manhattan Voters in August? Try the Hamptons<\/a>). 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<\/a>, In Woodstock, Values Collide Over Housing<\/a>, and Judd Hirsch\u2019s Wind-Power Plan Unsettles Catskill Town<\/a>. 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\u2019t exclusive to discussion of second homes, of course; the 461 articles of the NYT\/HV archive that don\u2019t mention second homes also include comparable pros vs. cons reporting on other modalities of Brooklynization, like tourism and arts development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s menu bar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cWhat You Get For\u2026 [dollar amount]\u201d column doesn\u2019t 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>, A Second Home, A Second Career<\/a>, The Tyranny of the 2nd Home<\/a>, Time for a Place in the Country?<\/a>, Buying a Second Home First<\/a>, Summer House Madness<\/a>, and They Fled for Greener Pastures, and There Were Weeds<\/a>. 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?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>, Country Dinner Parties: Mind Your Manners<\/a>, The Name Game<\/a>, and Your Country House Is a Disaster? Tell Me Everything.<\/a> Traditionally \u201ccorrect\u201d style and decorative fashion are offered in pieces like You May Be Ready for Summer, but Is Your Home?<\/a>, while \u201cfashion-forward\u201d renovations and remakes are featured in articles like Thrill Rides on the Color Wheel<\/a>, An Architect\u2019s Design for Weekend Living<\/a>, and A Cozy, Minimalist Retreat Perched Among the Treetops<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s because the Hudson Valley is comparatively affordable for \u201cBrooklynites,\u201d 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<\/a>, Now Rated R (for Resale)<\/a>, For a Very Old House, Some Very New Ideas<\/a>, A Country Home, by a Modernist at Play<\/a>, and Hay House: How Designer Sheila Bridges Made Space for Herself<\/a>. Conspicuous consumption shades into conspicuous production for today\u2019s 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?<\/a>), maker space (After Etsy, Scratching an Itch<\/a>), or a residential \u201cagri-community\u201d (The D.I.Y. Developers<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second homes in Hudson Valley place profiles<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest example of this comes with the reporting on Beacon following the 2003 opening of the Dia:Beacon gallery and the city\u2019s 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\u2019t include articles that group Beacon with other places (usually in service journalism pieces about art crawls<\/a> and weekend itineraries<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/files\/2025\/09\/NYT-HV-second-homes.jpg\")
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