A friend of mine has decided to sell her house and move from one Rivertown to another, mostly because she feels like the people in her current village aren’t “her people.” From an outsider’s point of view, the residents of the Rivertowns* all look pretty much the same. And as history shows, that kind of a statement could be misconstrued as bigoted. But as birds of a feather flock together, we members of the human race also like to be with our people. For some, that means sticking with your race, ethnicity, religion, or age. But the way my friend means “her people” is something less tangible, less definable by a check-the-applicable-box standard.
To simplify this point, let’s use one of the greatest TV shows ever created. No, not All in the Family. Not MASH. Not Game of Thrones. No. Instead, we’ll look at Beverly Hills, 90210.
Brenda, Donna, and Kelly were best friends. Sure, they were all white and they all had money, but that’s not what made them friends. They spoke the same language. And the fact that Andrea Zuckerman was never really a part of their posse wasn’t because she was poor or Jewish (thank you, Aaron Spelling for always playing the “Jewish” music whenever we visited her house.) It was because Andrea didn’t love shopping as much as they did. She didn’t drool over boys the way they did (her love for Brandon was always on a superior level, right?) And she always picked working on the school newspaper and helping the deaf kid at summer camp over lying out and getting a tan. She spoke a different language than Donna, Kelly, and Brenda did. Not better, not worse (well, maybe a little better.)
I could try and tell you the personalities, and likes and dislikes of the people in each town in Westchester, but who am I to make that deep of an evaluation on a population? Speaking of groundbreaking television programs, it is a known fact that the characters in Scooby Doo were based on the five liberal arts colleges in the northeast that make up the “Five College Consortium” (Scooby was UMASS, Shaggy was Hampshire, Velma was Smith, Fred was Amherst, and Daphne was Mt. Holyoke.) I’d love to make a snap judgment and, say, use the TV show Friends to tell you that Rachel is Scarsdale, Phoebe is Hastings, Monica is Irvington, Chandler is Dobbs Ferry, Ross is Ardsley, and Joey is Yonkers, but I won’t.
That same friend of mine, when she was explaining their geographically small move to a demographically different town, asked me: do you feel like Dobbs Ferry people are your people? I hadn’t ever asked myself that question in quite the same way. But I’ll admit that since most of our friends were made from our daughters’ preschool, where the population comes from all over lower Westchester, that most of our friends aren’t from Dobbs Ferry. Now that our oldest has finished kindergarten in the local public school, we’ve gotten to know a few more of the Dobbs Ferry residents, and so far we like them very much.
I don’t want to live in a town of only Gwyneth Paltrows, but I also don’t want to live in a town of so few Gwyneths that the school system hasn’t been coerced into being top notch. If you’re hunting for a town to move to, how do you know if the people are like Andrea, or Scooby, or Monica? You can do a few things: first, read my blog 🙂 After that, you can go sit in a Starbucks and people watch. Are there a lot of baby carriages? Are there a lot of college students? Are there a lot of spoiled kids? Drive around the neighborhood and see if there are a lot of Bernie lawn signs, or a lot of Trump bumper stickers.
While no town is perfect, I hope you find the town that’s perfect for you. And if you buy in the wrong town, and you end up needing to sell it, just remember what my father says: “There are no mistakes in real estate.” Of course, he’s completely wrong, but hopefully you’ll catch his sentiment.
Happy hunting!
* “Rivertowns” refers primarily to the towns/villages of Irvington, Dobbs Ferry, Ardsley, and Hastings, with the occasional add-on of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.
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