Brady Huggett is a writer and journalist who grew up in Maine and lives in New York. This is part two of a three part series exploring the effects of the housing boom in Sullivan County in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

 Historically, Sullivan County ranks in the bottom half of NY state counties in terms of joblessness, poverty and health measures. It also bore an outsized burden in the state for the opioid crisis. But it has been on an economic upswing for years. The 2010 census shows the average household income for Sullivan County to be $43,578, with a poverty rate of more than 20%. By 2020, the household income had climbed to $60,433, and the poverty rate had fallen to 12.7%.

The pandemic paused global economies, but, as county manager Joshua Potosek wrote in the 2022 annual budget, Sullivan County in 2021 became “a haven for those fleeing closer quarters,” and that has continued to better the county’s financial prospects.

Figures from the New York State Comptroller show that sales tax collection for Sullivan County increased to more than $65 million in 2021, up more than 31% over a depressed 2020. That was far and away the highest percent increase for any New York county that year, and ~6 percentage points greater than second-place Orange County. Partially the increase came from a shift in consumer spending amid the pandemic, which moved from “brick and mortar to online,” as State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli pointed out in a February press release. Since the New York Marketplace Facilitator Law passed in June 2019, sales tax has been extracted on items sold into New York state through online marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart.

But part of that sales tax increase was coming from revitalized main streets, and establishments that stayed in business, or opened, during the pandemic in Sullivan County towns. One of those new establishments is the home goods store Tess in Narrowsburg.

Tess McKeegan owns Tess. She grew up in Long Island, and worked in Suffolk County as an emergency medical technician while she raised her kids. But she had a second home in Callicoon Center, and once the kids were grown, she decided to move to Sullivan County full time. She first worked a retail job on Narrowsburg’s main street, but when The Tusten Cup cafe moved across main street to the river side and its old space opened up, McKeegan convinced the landlords to give her a shot.

She was aware that Narrowsburg had “already taken off,” but she and her husband felt the town had room to grow. They opened Tess as a home goods store in August 2020. For a while, they had almost zero foot traffic, but McKeegan knew people were going to be spending more time in their homes, and that might continue for a while, and she filled the store with home furnishings and glassware and art, from both international and local artists. 

Once the initial shut down around the pandemic passed, she said, new residents who were building or renovating their homes began to come to her. The pandemic had given her time to “get her feet on the ground,” and figure out the business, she said, but now “I’ve got regulars.”  

Yet McKeegan understands that the rapid growth in the Western Catskills is not without drawbacks. The tourists and weekenders who come here are at times not as polite as they could be. Sometimes they have “an air of entitlement,” she said, and both the generational families in the area and shop owners “can feel that.” But the more acute problem, she thinks, is in the rental market. Sullivan County was flooded with buyers during the pandemic, “but what about the people who can’t afford” to buy? she said. “It’s not right to come in here and eat everything up.”

Indeed, the fair market rent for a two-three bedroom home in Sullivan County for the 2022 fiscal year was $1,246 per month, according to rentdata.org, making it more expensive than 68% of the state.       

There are many words to describe what has happened in the Catskills for the past decade: revitalization, rebirth, rejuvenation. But there is another: gentrification. Though the term is most often used in urban settings, it’s applicable whenever more affluent people move into an area, drawing high-end businesses and driving up home prices. This is something Josiah Early and Ezekiel Miller considered before opening the Cochecton Fire Station in 2018.

“Gentrification is not a racial issue, it’s an economic issue,” Early said. He and Miller were friends growing up in Virginia, and both are sons of Mennonite preachers. Miller’s family raised chickens and Early’s raised sheep. This makes them “country through and through,” Early said.

The most recent Agricultural Census (2017) shows that Sullivan County had 366 farms covering about 60,000 acres. Ninety-eight percent of those farms are family owned. For a restaurant to succeed in a place like this, and not merely cater to summer tourists and weekenders, it should offer “flavor profiles” that “consider the palette of a working-class person,” Early said. That’s why, although the Cochection Fire Station has a cheese plate and hummus on its menu, it also has steak, chicken and macaroni and cheese. The Fire Station has also tried to stay price conscious. When it opened in 2018, Miller and Early split their menu into two sections: “$5” and “not $5” — a nod to the range of incomes they hoped to serve. Rising costs have forced them to abandon that scheme, and while that caused some initial “pushback” (mostly online), Early said, they still offer 10 items priced below $10.

But running a community restaurant is about more than just the menu. A customer came into the fire station this summer. She had not been seen for a while. Early asked how she’d been, and she told him she’d had a medical issue. But Early already knew this; another customer had told him. And he knew this woman was having trouble cooking because of it. He had set aside a few frozen macaroni and cheese dishes for her, and convinced her to take them home.

“You have to remember it’s more than just food and drink,” he said. “I grew up in a Mennonite community; remember they are your neighbors. Have respect for that.”

New neighbors, though, can take some getting used to.