Updated 2026 · Based on median market data for Yonkers, NY
Yonkers is the fourth-largest city in New York State after New York City, Buffalo, and Rochester — a fact that surprises people who think of it as a Westchester suburb. The population at around $213,000 sits in southwestern Westchester County along three miles of Hudson River waterfront, immediately north of the Bronx, with Metro-North Hudson Line service that puts Grand Central twenty-five to thirty-five minutes south depending on the station. The city encompasses everything from the gritty Getty Square downtown to the leafy Crestwood and Lawrence Park West neighborhoods that look and feel like Scarsdale-lite. Sarah Lawrence College sits on the Bronxville border. St. John's Riverside Hospital is the main healthcare anchor along with the Westchester Medical Center system's footprint. Yonkers Raceway and the Empire City Casino — now MGM Empire City — sit at the city's eastern edge along the Cross County Parkway. The median price at $705,000 reflects a real Westchester-County tax bite combined with NYC-metro proximity, and the cap rate at 2.83% reflects the resulting yield compression. Yonkers is its own market, not a Bronx outer-borough analog and not a Scarsdale or Bronxville substitute. Understanding what makes it distinct is the whole game.
One of the most quietly remarkable urban transformations in the Northeast over the last fifteen years has been the daylighting of the Saw Mill River through downtown Yonkers. The river was buried under Larkin Plaza in 1922 as part of a misguided urban-renewal scheme that turned the historic downtown into a concrete deck. Starting in 2011, the city — funded largely by federal and state grants and pushed by the late Mayor Phil Amicone and his successor Mike Spano — began removing the deck and exposing the river. The Mill Street Courtyard reopened the river to the sky in 2012; the Van der Donck Park section followed in 2016; further phases extended south toward the Hudson confluence. The transformation has anchored a downtown residential development wave — Hudson Park, Sawyer Place, Hudson Piers, the redevelopment of the old Otis Elevator factory site, and the Greystone-to-Getty-Square corridor that now has thousands of new market-rate apartments. For investors, the daylighting changed downtown Yonkers from a place renters avoided to a place they actively sought out. Cap rates downtown have compressed below the citywide 2.83% as the new construction has come online and the older walk-up housing stock has been rehab-comped against the new product. The investment thesis here is appreciation-dominated, not cash-flow, and the trajectory is positive.
Yonkers Raceway has been a harness-racing track since 1899 and a video lottery terminal facility since 2006, generating real employment and tax revenue. MGM Resorts acquired the property in 2019 and rebranded it as MGM Empire City, with periodic discussions of a full-casino license expansion as part of the downstate New York casino bidding process. Whether or not the full-casino license arrives, the existing facility employs around eighteen hundred people and generates the largest single-property tax bill in Yonkers. For investors, the practical implications are twofold. First, the casino provides a stable mid-wage employment anchor for the eastern half of the city — dealers, food service, hospitality, security, maintenance — and that wage base supports rental demand in the Tuckahoe-side and Cross County neighborhoods. Second, the full-casino license expansion (which has been pending through 2023-2026 with no resolution yet at the time of writing) is a real catalyst with material upside for nearby property values if it lands. The risk is the inverse — if the license ultimately goes to a Manhattan or Queens competitor, the existing Empire City facility becomes a relative loser and the development upside disappears. Underwriting Yonkers near the casino without considering the licensing question is a real omission.
Hudson Hill and Park Hill are the two neighborhoods that rise dramatically west from downtown to the Palisades-style ridge overlooking the Hudson. Hudson Hill sits north of downtown, Park Hill south. Both contain pockets of late-Victorian and Edwardian mansions, many subdivided into multifamily over the twentieth century, with some recent reconversion back to single-family among the wealthier streets. The view properties — anything with a westward orientation on the ridge — command real premiums above the citywide median $705,000. The Untermyer Gardens Conservancy on the northern edge of Hudson Hill is one of the most stunning public gardens in the Northeast — the restored Walled Garden, the Vista, the Temple of Love — and the gardens have become a real destination that pulls residential demand to the surrounding streets. Below the ridge, the neighborhoods transition rapidly into more modest multifamily, with cap rates rising toward and through the citywide 2.83% as you move down-slope. The Hudson Hill investment thesis is appreciation-dominated, with the geography (the ridge, the river views, the gardens, the proximity to the new downtown) all reinforcing the upside. The operational complexity is real — many of these are century-old houses with slate roofs, copper gutters, plaster interiors, and capital expenditure schedules that out-of-state investors materially under-budget.
The eastern side of Yonkers along the Tuckahoe border contains a string of neighborhoods that look and feel more like classic Westchester suburbs than like the rest of the city — Crestwood, Bryn Mawr, Lawrence Park West, parts of Beechmont. These are the Yonkers neighborhoods that send their kids to the Tuckahoe school district by quirk of municipal boundary, or to the better-rated Yonkers public school zones. Sarah Lawrence College's footprint extends into Bryn Mawr. Crestwood Metro-North station puts Grand Central at thirty-three minutes. Pricing in these eastern neighborhoods runs well above the citywide median $705,000 — typically thirty to sixty percent above, depending on the specific block — and cap rates compress materially below the citywide 2.83%. The investment thesis here is essentially Westchester suburban appreciation with a slight Yonkers tax discount versus equivalent Bronxville or Scarsdale product. The risk is that the Yonkers Public Schools' overall ratings are genuinely weaker than the surrounding Westchester districts, and that perception affects the marginal renter or buyer even in the eastern neighborhoods that are technically Yonkers public school territory. Operational dynamics are clean — high-credit-quality tenants, low turnover, the standard issues of old wood-frame Westchester multifamily.
Getty Square is the historic central business district of Yonkers, the location of the Yonkers City Hall (the 1908 beaux-arts city hall is one of the finest in the state), and the heart of the Hispanic and African-American working-class Yonkers economy. The neighborhood is named for the Getty Oil family, who developed much of it in the late nineteenth century. Nepperhan Avenue runs east from Getty Square as the historic industrial spine — Otis Elevator (which invented the safety elevator in the 1850s and was headquartered here for over a century), the carpet and hat factories, the brass works. The industrial economy has largely transitioned out, but the housing stock — three-and-four-family frame and brick buildings from the 1890s to 1930s — remains. Cap rates in Getty Square and along Nepperhan run above the citywide 2.83% and can approach numbers more typical of Newark or Paterson. The investor calculus here is cash-flow-oriented with operational complexity similar to other Northeast urban cores — lead paint, tenant-quality variance, code-enforcement dynamics. The Yonkers Department of Housing and Building Inspection has been moderately aggressive on rental registration and code enforcement, particularly around lead paint and habitability standards. New York State's lead-paint regime is less aggressive than New Jersey's but still requires landlord attention.
Westchester County has among the highest property tax burdens in the country, and within Westchester, Yonkers sits in a middle range — higher than river-town hamlets like Tarrytown but lower than the wealthiest Bronxville and Scarsdale levels. The effective rate at roughly 1.65% of market value reflects the combination of the Westchester County levy, the City of Yonkers levy, the Yonkers Public Schools levy, and various special-district assessments. On a property at the citywide median $705,000, annual property tax at 1.65% runs roughly $11,633. The school district levy is the single biggest component, which creates the perverse dynamic that Yonkers homeowners pay a Westchester-County-scale school tax bill for a district whose ratings significantly underperform the surrounding Westchester districts. This is the central political and fiscal challenge of Yonkers and it has not been resolved. From an investor's perspective, the tax-to-rent ratio in Yonkers is meaningfully worse than in the comparable NYC outer-borough neighborhoods on the Bronx side of the city line, even though the gross numbers can look superficially similar. Underwrite at full rate, not at the prior owner's grandfathered STAR-adjusted bill.
Yonkers's Hudson River waterfront has been a development focus for the last fifteen years, with the downtown daylighting, the Hudson Park apartments, the Sawyer Place and Hudson Piers projects, and the planned redevelopment of additional waterfront parcels. The geography creates both the upside (Hudson views, ferry-adjacent transit, walkable downtown) and a real climate exposure. The Saw Mill River and Hudson River confluence sits at sea level. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded the Yonkers waterfront, the Metro-North Hudson Line tracks (which run on a narrow shelf between the river and the cliff bases), and several blocks inland. Sea-level rise projections add one to two feet by 2050 on top of current baseline. The new construction has been built to a higher flood-resilience standard than the older waterfront stock, but the underlying topology is unchanged. The Metro-North Hudson Line itself is the single biggest infrastructure dependency for downtown Yonkers rental values, and that line is genuinely climate-vulnerable. For investors in the older waterfront housing stock (which sits in the FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area in many places), insurance costs have risen materially and continued NFIP rate restructuring under Risk Rating 2.0 will continue to bite. Map the flood zones before you buy waterfront.
The Yonkers Public Schools district enrolls around twenty-five thousand students and has been in some form of state-monitored fiscal and academic distress for decades. The 1985 federal desegregation case (United States v. Yonkers) consumed the city's politics for thirty years and culminated in court-ordered redistribution of public housing across the city — a story Lisa Belkin chronicled in Show Me a Hero. The schools' academic performance varies dramatically by zone — the Crestwood and Eastchester-adjacent zones perform meaningfully better than the Getty Square and Nepperhan zones — and the overall district ratings drag down marginal-buyer demand across the city even in the high-performing zones. For investors, the practical implication is that the Yonkers rental market is dominated by tenant pools who are not making decisions based primarily on school quality — younger professionals commuting to Manhattan, immigrant working families, older households whose children are out of school. The owner-occupant market in family-oriented neighborhoods like Crestwood is slower than equivalent Westchester-suburb markets where school ratings drive demand. The exit market for investor-owned multifamily is largely investor-to-investor in much of the city, with the eastern Bronxville-adjacent neighborhoods being the main exception where owner-occupant exits are routine. Underwrite hold strategies, not flips.
Take a representative three-family wood-frame building in the Nepperhan corridor or the upper Park Hill area at the citywide median price of $705,000. Three units rent at roughly the citywide $3,260 per unit, producing gross monthly rent of about $9,780 (with one of the three units typically being the larger owner's unit historically, now rented at a slight premium). Property tax at 1.65% runs $11,633 annually — the single biggest line item after debt service. Insurance for a three-family wood-frame in Yonkers runs twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred annually. Water and sewer in Westchester runs roughly nine hundred to twelve hundred per unit per year. Heat is typically tenant-paid in NY multifamily (unlike steam-heated buildings in NJ), which materially improves the operating math versus a Newark equivalent. Property management at ten percent of rent runs $978 monthly. Maintenance and capex at ten percent of rent for hundred-year-old housing. Vacancy at the citywide 4.80% during a stable year. NOI lands near $19,970, supporting cap rate of 2.83% and one-percent ratio of 0.46%. GRM at 18.021472392638035 and price-to-income at 10.337243401759531 both reflect the Westchester premium — Yonkers is materially more expensive relative to local income than the deeper NJ or Connecticut comparables. The investment math works if you can hold for appreciation; it does not work as a pure cash-flow play.
Yonkers is a real Westchester County market, not a Bronx outer-borough cheap-substitute and not an NJ-style cash-flow play. The Hudson River downtown revival anchored by the Saw Mill River daylighting is genuinely transformative and has changed the city's trajectory in ways that comparable Northeast cities have not matched. The Empire City Casino expansion question is a real catalyst with binary upside-downside that should be modeled. The Westchester County tax burden at 1.65% is permanent and structural. The Yonkers Public Schools weakness depresses owner-occupant demand and keeps the city positioned as a renter-and-investor market rather than a family-formation suburb. The eastern Bronxville-adjacent neighborhoods are essentially a separate market with their own pricing dynamics. Climate risk on the waterfront is real and growing. Population growth at 0.20% has been modest but positive. Median income at $68,200 reflects the wide range across neighborhoods. The cap rate at 2.83% and one-percent at 0.46% look unimpressive on the surface, but the Metro-North access to Grand Central and the ongoing downtown revival give Yonkers a legitimate long-run appreciation thesis that no NJ city west of Hoboken can match. Yonkers rewards investors who understand they are buying into a slow Westchester revival, not a quick urban cash-flow flip. Pick the neighborhood, hold for at least seven to ten years, and the math compounds.
Yonkers vs New York state average and national average across key investment metrics. Yonkers's cap rate is below both benchmarks — deal sourcing is critical here.