The Poconos-to-New York commuter | Tomorrow's headlines tonight

We launched a new segment, and it's to give you some of what's to come. So you'll be the first to hear it if you tune in for this. The segment's called Tomorrow's Headlines Tonight. It's at the bottom there. And so the effort is to bring you a big story that will, as they would say back in the day, hit the print or hit the press or be put out tomorrow, today, tonight. And I have a reporter with me. She's a labor reporter at The City Reporter, Claudia Irizarry-Aponte. Thanks for being with us, Claudia. Thanks for having me. You're putting out an interesting piece tomorrow titled Welcome to Hotel Rav for the Brutal Commute of New Yorkers Priced Out to the Poconos. I was just able to read it in advance because it's out tomorrow. Extensive reporting with a lot of history here. You're looking at the commute from the Poconos to the city, the back and forth. Essentially, people who work in the city but weren't able now or in the past to buy a home and bought in the Poconos. quite a deep history. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of the many things that I learned over the course of this reporting is that this is a demographic of New York City workers that has existed since the 70s. This is not a phenomenon. So New Yorkers make all sorts of decisions and do all sorts of things to make ends meet in an expensive city. Some folks have a second or a third job to supplement their income. They double up with family or they live with family or they get roommates um some people leave the five boroughs entirely um and even far beyond its suburbs you know for their slice of the American dream and their chance of owning a home and so I've been long and fascinated by folks who live in the Poconos in the town of East Stroudsburg in Monroe County and continue to work in New York City so I had the opportunity to meet folks and to learn a little bit more about how they make it work You have some really strong characters in your piece here. I want to ask you, what sparked the idea for this project now? Is it something you've been working on a while? The economy isn't in the best place now. We've been reporting on it locally. A lot of New Yorkers feeling the pinch. So what was the inspiration to take on this project now? This has been a fascination of mine for many years. As a reporter, you meet people in all sorts of places from all walks of life. You're at a rally, you're at a protest, you're at a picket line. reported questions that you always make of people. You ask their name, you ask their phone number, and you ask where they're from. And every once in a while, I would meet someone from East Stroudsburg, someone I wouldn't expect, someone who's perhaps a civil servant, an EMS, a paramedic, a nurse, or another type of job here in New York City, a porter, a construction worker. And I've long been fascinated by just how people make it work. And I would have these one-off conversations, but with affordability being such a topic, Like, especially in the most recent election here in New York City with the mayor Zohran Mamdani and nationally with the midterms, I thought it would be a good opportunity as any to just really dive in into how people make this lifestyle work. Yeah, and I noticed in the reporting that you did for the city, you traced it back all the way, like you said, decades. I was learning a lot as I was reading it. And you talked about this migration pattern that started all these decades ago because of affordability even back then. So some trends that kind of sparked this when we're talking about the Poconos example and maybe other examples that you've probably learned of along the way, but that people can kind of, you know, they say, look at history to understand the current situation. So it sort of crosses over history and the present. It really does. And talking to local leaders in Monroe County and East Stroudsburg, this whole migration really dates back to the completion of Interstate 80 in the mid 1970s. And I was very surprised to find articles from 50 years ago in the New York Times starting to track this phenomenon, again, of New Yorkers moving out to Pennsylvania, often moving there and starting careers and their families there, or buying property there as second homes, and really transforming the towns in the region in the process, such that there have been several booms and several waves of New Yorkers moving into the region from the 70s to the late 90s and again today with um the transformation brought on by covid and the remote work revolution lots of people moving out to the region as well so interesting and i don't want to give too much away because i know that um this hasn't been um released yet or tomorrow the report is going to drop but uh you start with a very interesting subject as we call them in journalism but an interesting person an individual a hard worker um he's a lieutenant um i won't give away anymore but he talks about sleeping in his vehicle several nights out of the week i mean that's extraordinary yeah it really is i mean i was really surprised over and over again talking to folks about how they make this crazy lifestyle work um like in the case of this gentleman right here he's an EMT lieutenant with the FDNY emergency medical services he's a new york city civil servant and he's lived out in the Poconos for almost his entire career 30 years and when he works the overnight shifts, consecutive overnight shifts here in New York City, instead of just driving back and forth every day, he sleeps in his car. And this is just one of many examples of how people, the extreme lengths and the sacrifices that they make in order to make their lifestyle work. And again, all further slice of the American dream. And one thing that, there are two things that I really wanna highlight about the folks that I spoke with. And one is that, it does boil down to affordability in the sense that we're talking about where people settle their roots and buy land, buy their homes and where they decide to like, you know, grow their families and just live out their lives. There's two sets of people that I that I talked to. One, it was folks who really, you know, tried. They really tried to make it work in New York City and in the surrounding suburbs, and they just couldn't. It was too expensive. And then there were folks who maybe they're native New Yorkers. Maybe they grew up in rough neighborhoods. And once it was a time for them to decide, you know, to start their own families and start their careers, they were like, you know what? I want something different for my kid. I want space for them to roam around and play in a big that they could grow up in. And they decided to make this decision. So, again, it's just like a lot of very fascinating tradeoffs that people make in order for them to get their slice of the American dream. Yeah, I can imagine that in a city as diverse as New York City, you would hear different narratives when it comes to this same topic. Because, yeah, there's the affordability piece, as you point out, but there's also like, I don't want my kids to grow up in a city like New York City. There's too much crime or whatever people may feel as opposed to a suburban life. So there's other factors as well. And I wondered in reading it, were people willing to open up? I mean, because especially the affordability part, it can be very personal. I remember years ago when I was working on a project about food insecurity and it was kind of tough because some people were willing to and some people were not. this kind of hits those tones yeah it depends um certainly not the case for the folks that i spoke to with this story but there were other folks who were very reluctant to come on the record because in the case if they were civil servants they were concerned about residency requirement questions and like being exposed to that level of scrutiny i suppose um others just wanted more privacy for their families like they just didn't want to open up in that way um but in general you know we're talking about folks you know they're homeowners you know they want to talk about their lives and the decision that they made they're for the most part they're they're happy with their decision they're proud to be homeowners to live in the city and to make whatever you know sacrifices they need to make for their children and for the life that they have you know so it's um i was very cognizant of that over the course of my reporting it's not all perfect i learned a lot over the course of recording this project. Um, and I hope what really shines through again is not just the affordability component, you know, perhaps there are folks who maybe 20, 30 years ago when they, uh, first started searching their homes were perhaps disappointed that they weren't able to stay in their home borough or their home neighborhood, but now have, you know, have been able to really make their lives in this community and transform it in the process. Right now, um, the, um, the black population in East Stroudsburg, the town that really zeroed in on for this reporting it's almost equal to that of New York City that was not the case 50 years ago so again just really interesting stuff and to see just how this community has transformed and kind of like the demographics of the city have transformed with it was really interesting to to see yeah i mean um again just reading through it it seems like you really put a lot of work and energy um in the in the reporting and you have so many different accounts when we're doing work like this you know obviously tomorrow it's going to drop and everyone will tell you what they think about uh your story but you know you can really get invested in a project like this um and essentially you're documenting or adding to the documentation of a piece of history that we've learned now as you said you learned in the reporting goes uh really far back um any follow-up pieces kind of that you have planned maybe you can give us a little look ahead the future future um because like you said it strikes so many topics that we're talking about today when it comes to affordability in the city yeah absolutely i will just say that i'm always interested in learning um as a labor reporter and just hearing from people about where they work and the conditions in their workplace and how they they get started but also how they live you know um you know how they make it how they make their lives work in order to get to work and the trade off that they make and the decisions that they make in order to make that happen so i'm always interested in hearing from more people, whether they're in the Poconos or in the Bronx or wherever it is. I am always happy to hear workers and to help bring their stories about. Claudia Rosario-Ponte, labor reporter at The City, joining us for our segment, Tomorrow's Headlines Tonight. We appreciate you being with us, Claudia. Thank you.