My thoughts on the disparity in affluence between towns in Westchester

I go to school in Westchester County, and I have been trying to understand why hunger is so different from place to place in this relatively wealthy county. On paper, it is supposed to be one of the wealthiest counties in this country, but if you drive just eight miles, the situation completely changes. This is a mystery that has been bothering me.

The county numbers indicate disparity. In 2023, according to it, around 11 percent of households in Westchester experienced food insecurity, which means that there were about 106,850 food insecure households; and according to Feeding Westchester, one out of every five people experiences hunger once a year, including tens of thousands of children and old people. However, the county average doesn't show the entire picture. Hunger is very concentrated in certain areas, and wealth is very concentrated in other areas of the county.

One clear way to illustrate this point is to compare two municipalities. Scarsdale has a median household income of over $250,000, the median price of homes being approximately $1.65 million, and practically no children receiving free or reduced lunch. Port Chester, eight miles away, has a median income of $89,000, with more than three-quarters of its students benefiting from subsidized meal programs. It is the same county and the same taxation jurisdiction, and yet, it feels like these two towns have different lives.

Here’s what really made me realize that: the disparity is not a coincidence, it is a direct effect of an institutional arrangement. Westchester County has dozens of little municipalities, each of which controls its own zoning regulations. Rich towns exploit that power to adopt rules which indirectly maintain high housing prices. Zoning regulations in Scarsdale were put in place back in the 1920s and the municipality still has restrictive zoning that requires a single-family home to occupy a very large lot. The minimum lot size in some areas is two acres, and there is hardly any multifamily housing in the town. In Port Chester, however, multifamily housing is allowed and nearly half of all housing is classified. The less expensive housing, along with the families in need of such housing, ends up being concentrated in a few towns while the affluent remain isolated. Housing policies have caused this segregation.

Once society has been stratified in this manner, everything else falls into place. Schools operate by local property taxes, which equates to wealthier districts having higher spending per pupil compared to lower income districts irrespective of the fact that the latter ones clearly need more. For instance, Scarsdale spends a lot more money on every pupil as compared to Port Chester. The difference multiplies during the entire childhood and through generations of people, preserving the same picture on the map much longer than it could have been the case. When the state tries to amend the situation by making certain changes, the local authorities come into play. In 2023, the governor proposed certain reasonable changes in housing growth to which almost all mayors of Westchester responded to with letters explaining their position regarding her initiative.

It is necessary to take into account that food problems contribute to the situation described above. There are two trends here. In the poorer cities, poverty concentration means that there is more hunger as well, and this poverty doesn’t allow the population to access good supermarkets and find food. In the richer places things are different because here the living costs itself is a trap. A family can earn what sounds like a regular salary, but it can still be torn between paying the rent or going grocery shopping. Hence, there is not only the rich town and poor town now; there is also the county where the cost of living is so high that a significant percentage of families are close to poverty levels.