{"id":319213,"date":"2026-08-12T03:02:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T03:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/319213\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T03:02:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T03:02:12","slug":"new-york-post-article-says-no-one-wants-to-live-in-utica-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/319213\/","title":{"rendered":"New York Post Article Says ‘No One’ Wants to Live in Utica | News"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"New<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

UTICA, N.Y. — The New York Post published an article<\/a> that said despite Utica being an affordable place to buy a home, “no one” wants to live there.<\/p>\n

The article, written by Mary Jacob, highlights median home values and says that the cost of living is 33% below the New York State average.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

“For a New Yorker priced out of literally everything, that sounds like a fantasy. So why does the population keep shrinking?” Jacob wrote.<\/p>\n

She said Utica is losing population at about 0.74% a year based on statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.<\/p>\n

In the article, Jacob said the exodus started with the loss of major employers like General Electric and Lockheed Martin.<\/p>\n

Both companies left in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

Amanda Reinfelds is a real estate agent from Coldwell Banker Faith Properties.<\/p>\n

A client, whose house is featured in the article, sent it to Reinfelds.<\/p>\n

Reinfelds said the headline was “harsh.”<\/p>\n

“I saw the headline and was like, ‘Wait a second. What do you mean nobody wants to live here?'” she said.<\/p>\n

Reinfelds has been selling homes in the Utica area in 2009.<\/p>\n

She said the housing market in Utica has been strong for the past five to six years, for there are more buyers than inventory.<\/p>\n

“When a house is listed, especially if it’s an attractive price, and it’s in a price range that’s affordable for a lot of people as well, there’s always more buyers for that house than there are similar houses on the market,” she said.<\/p>\n

Reinfelds said that in the law of supply and demand, if there’s less supply and more demand, people are all going to make an offer for a particular listing.<\/p>\n

“That’s how we get multiple offers rolling and the prices get driven up, which of course makes our market better,” she said.<\/p>\n

The average sales price has increased “significantly,” she said, and when she started, it was as low as $120,000. Now, she said it is “roughly” $220,000 in Utica.<\/p>\n

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau<\/a>\u00a0shows that from 2020 to 2025, there has been a 3.5% decline in the population.<\/p>\n

In the New York Post article, it quotes an anonymous source who said, “Price isn’t the problem. Everything else is the problem.”<\/p>\n

“Unemployment hovers around 4.5 to 6 percent, according to the Department of Labor, and the city continues to bleed residents even as home prices\u2014cheap by any national comparison\u2014keep climbing,” it said.<\/p>\n

The article also states the poverty rate in Utica sits above 27%.<\/p>\n

According to the Census Bureau, the persons in poverty is at 27.5%.<\/p>\n

Reinfelds said people do leave the area for warm weather, jobs, family or life changes.<\/p>\n

She also said there are jobs in the City that draw people in.<\/p>\n

There are also people who move away and then come back, Reinfelds said.<\/p>\n

“I know that when you talk to people in the community…they want to say, ‘Oh, everybody’s leaving. Nobody stays here, nobody wants to be here.’ And that’s not true,” she said.<\/p>\n

Oneida County Executive Anthony Picente said the City offers jobs in healthcare, finance, technology and manufacturing.<\/p>\n

He said more houses are being occupied, and there has been private investment made towards restoring Utica’s housing.<\/p>\n

“That’s what they should be looking at; that would paint a completely different picture than this fake article,” Picente said.<\/p>\n

He said he felt “outraged” reading the New York Post article, and he said that the statistics in the article are inaccurate. They will push for a correction, he said.<\/p>\n

“I think you need to come here, and I think you need to take more photos of really what this community looks like,” he said.<\/p>\n

NEWSChannel 2 reached out to Utica Mayor Mike Galime, but he has not responded.<\/p>\n

NEWSChannel 2 also reached out to the New York Post reporter, Mary Jacob, but has not heard back.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The New York Post published an article that said despite Utica being an affordable place to buy a home, “no one” wants to live there.<\/p>\n


\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UTICA, N.Y. — The New York Post published an article that said despite Utica being an affordable place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2907,9,11,10,4330,49,51,50,17133,6842,4037,2352],"class_list":["post-319213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-housing","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-post","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-population","tag-poverty","tag-unemployment","tag-utica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319213","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=319213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}