The business model of real estate here isn’t terribly unique: find young urbanites from New York City – primarily Brooklyn – and move them into the country. It would be dishonest to imply that the New York City to mid-Hudson Valley pipeline ever didn’t exist, but it would be just as dishonest to say it ever looked quite this frantic. The easy answer is (and it’s said often) Covid. Wealthier people come in, some local homeowners cash out, renters are pushed out, the community of the area changes and the real estate goes nuts.

But that’s not the whole story, is it? Food critic Robert Sietsema started calling the out-of-town crowd around places like the Phoenicia Diner “hicksters” sometime around 2014. Our own paper first used the term “Kerhamptons” in 2018, tucked into an article in which we wrote “now after a lull, a new influx of younger people [from New York City] are buying and building homes [in Ulster County] once again.”

Covid did a lot of funny things to our brains, and one of the most enduring is making us all smush pre-Covid times into one big, static blob. But that time wasn’t static. Changes were not just happening but accelerating. So, the Covid story is all true, but we think it misses a core contributing factor to the turmoil in our housing market: Instagram.

Instagram is generally suspected to be the engine behind the sudden, global popularity of hiking. All across the mid-Hudson, people have literally died for the perfect post of a waterfall.

Because most Hudson Valley peaks are short and accessible, the beauty here translates easily to Instagram posting.

What we don’t have, really, are very many beautiful names. There are a handful, but by and large, the legacy of Lenape and Mohawk words filtered through idiomatic Dutch dragged phonetically into English doesn’t sit delicately on the tongue. In the bygone days of flipping through a guidebook or reading a map, words like “Bashakill,” “Vlei Marsh,” or “Tommanex” don’t speak of lush beauty.

The editor of this paper spent most of his life gritting his teeth and bearing people laughing at the name “Fishkill,” and even now he’s explaining to out-of-towners coming to visit that, “Yes, the word is funny but you’re going to adore the Gunks.” I’m sure all of you reading this can tell stories about someone from out of town sitting with that annoying little smirk on their face as you give directions.

In the Instagram age, you see the place first and learn the name second. That one, tiny difference changes your entire relationship with places. Not only that, but Instagram posts by their nature give you a template – people don’t necessarily go for the joy of it, but they go to get that same picture for their own feed. Hiking hotspots act as something like gateway drugs into the Hudson Valley, because people set out to get one, specific picture, and then keep coming.

Effectively, the whole region is the accidental recipient of a branding change which re-introduced it to our neighbors down south in the City. This is the trend that’s led to special places being “loved to death” – think of the crowds choking the life out of Peekamoose Blue Hole, or the seemingly endless litany of people who died taking pictures at Kaaterskill Falls. Down on the Putnam/Dutchess border, Cold Spring and Beacon are fighting for their life to stop a boardwalk that they fear will turn them into what one resident called “a concierge service” for Brooklyn. Still, for better and worse, many of our new homeowners (and renters) began as day-trippers. Come for a hike, stay for a lifetime doesn’t happen if people don’t see the hiking places.

And there’s a second, often unacknowledged problem, which is the over-hyping of our picturesque towns. Picturesque is lovely, but it’s not everything. Picturesque didn’t help Ellenville keep its grocery store. Ellenville sure looks good on the feed but still has poverty and a lackluster school – problems that even the mighty Instagram can't overcome.

This is neither absolute good nor absolute bad. New blood has meant new life to a lot of places, but it’s also cost quite a bit (and it doesn’t change a thing about the legacy of Covid on housing prices), but it is, we believe, an unacknowledged piece of the housing puzzle we’re all trying to solve here.