PropertyShark<\/a> report, obtained by The Post, tracking 13 counties across the suburban ring around New York City finds that home prices have surged a jaw-dropping 86% since 2016. That outpaces gains in all five boroughs and effectively torches the affordability calculus that sent generations of city dwellers packing for Westchester, Nassau and beyond. <\/p>\nWhat was once a ladder has become a wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n
New Yorkers eyeing the suburbs are running into a far tighter market than a decade ago. jonbilous \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n
Prices across the 13-county commuter belt have surged 86% since 2016 \u2014 roughly double the pace of gains in the city itself. Getty Images<\/p>\n
The bottom rung is gone. Entirely. Suburbs priced below $250,000 don\u2019t exist in this market anymore. Those under $500,000 are a rounding error. Nearly half the region \u2014 43% of suburban communities \u2014 now sits in the $500,000-to-$750,000 band.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And roughly one in four suburban markets now carries a median above $1 million, a figure that would have seemed delusional a decade ago. <\/p>\n
The names tell the story. Scarsdale and Greenwich were always expensive. Now they\u2019re simply in a different stratosphere.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Property Shark<\/p>\n
That rapid rise has all but erased the low end of the market: no suburbs remain under $250,000, and only a sliver still fall below $500,000. Yuriy T \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n
But the real shock is what happened to the towns that weren\u2019t supposed to be luxury markets. Maplewood, New Jersey \u2014 once a solidly middle-tier commuter town \u2014 crossed the $1 million median threshold, a reflection of sustained demand for transit-accessible communities that city buyers can now barely reach.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Nassau County\u2019s median single-family sale price hit $795,000, up nearly 6% in a single year, while Suffolk matched a record high of $680,000 \u2014 up 13% year over year.<\/p>\n
The towns that once served as the entry point have essentially changed identities.<\/p>\n
Communities like Asbury Park and Carteret, which offered sub-$250,000 footholds as recently as 2016, are gone from that category entirely. Shelton and Ridgefield Park, once the reliable middle tier, have been repriced upward. Even Westchester\u2019s relative bargains have evaporated. Rye\u2019s median now surpasses the sale price of 237 New York City neighborhoods, including Dumbo and the Flatiron District. The suburbs didn\u2019t just get more expensive. They got more expensive than the city they were supposed to be the escape from.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The priciest? Alpine, NJ (a $4.16 million median); Sea Girt, NJ (a $3.81 million median); Sands Point, NY ($3.12 million) and Spring Lake, NJ ($3 million median).<\/p>\n
Nearly half now cluster between $500,000 and $750,000, and one in four exceeds $1 million. trongnguyen \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n
Even Manhattan buyers, which is historically the city\u2019s most insulated, with the widest range of options and the deepest pockets have watched their suburban reach shrink.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Neighborhoods that were once comfortably attainable, including some of the region\u2019s more upscale enclaves, have moved out of range. <\/p>\n
For Brooklyn, the squeeze is worse. Buyers there are now locked out of roughly a third of suburban markets \u2014 up sharply from 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
Queens and Staten Island residents are clinging to a shrinking pool: only about two in five suburbs remain financially viable, down from more than half in 2016. And at the lowest end of the income spectrum \u2014 buyers from parts of The Bronx and Queens \u2014 the situation has crossed from difficult to categorical. There is now no suburb in the 13-county region they can afford. <\/p>\n
Manhattan buyers can still access the most suburbs, but have lost dozens of options. Helayne Seidman for NY Post<\/p>\n
The PropertyShark data shows approximately 100 suburban communities have seen their median sale price at least double over the past decade. That is a market-wide reset, not an anomaly.<\/p>\n
The cruel irony is timing.<\/p>\n
New York City spent the better part of the pandemic watching residents leave for suburban square footage, driving up prices in the very markets those residents were fleeing to.<\/p>\n
Brooklyn residents are now priced out of about a third of markets. jonbilous \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n
Now those same suburbs have priced out the next wave \u2014 the buyers who waited, who stayed, who figured the window would eventually reopen. It hasn\u2019t. And by the data, it\u2019s not about to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The suburbs aren\u2019t saving you any longer. For decades, the move to the suburbs was New York\u2019s great…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1586,433,98,2222,68,5013,14452,75,1066,9,24,7607,56,63,65,64,122,1491,3006,134,30395],"class_list":["post-177665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-affordability","tag-affordable-housing","tag-brooklyn","tag-connecticut","tag-exclusive","tag-homeowners","tag-long-island-real-estate","tag-manhattan","tag-new-jersey","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newark","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-queens","tag-real-estate","tag-residential-real-estate","tag-staten-island","tag-suburbs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}