Accessing America’s wealthiest suburb doesn’t require a PIN code or showing your ID to a security guard. Simply board a commuter train, the Metro-North, like anyone else. In as little as 30 minutes from Grand Central Terminal, you can step off at the Tudor Revival station that sets the tone for this charming 18,000-person settlement in Westchester County, less than 40 kilometres north of NYC.
Here, a Rolex-authorised jeweller shares the block with a bagel shop. Patisseries and Pilates studios tuck beneath timbered roofs alongside branches of J.P. Morgan and private-markets specialists. The olde-worlde aesthetic echoes through the elm-canopied roads of Heathcote, one of Scarsdale’s five neighbourhoods, where a flash of orange through a hedge might be trumpet honeysuckle or even a sculpture by Alexander Calder, who spent his formative years in nearby Croton and Yonkers.
[See also: Ultra-wealthy boom: US dominates as super-rich numbers soar]
It has proven to be a lure for the rich and famous. Titans of finance including David Siegel, co-founder of Two Sigma; Eric Mindich, the Goldman Sachs partner turned hedge fund mogul; and Daniel Och, founder of Och-Ziff, one of Wall Street’s largest alternative investment firms, all settled here. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy calls it home, too; as does his predecessor’s brother, Mark Bezos.
Related
The village has produced NASA astronauts, NBA All-Stars and Oscar winners. Linda McCartney picked up her first camera here. Yoko Ono’s parents came after the Second World War. Jay-Z and Beyoncé reportedly filed their marriage licence in the village hall back in 2008.
Scarsdale has been popular with boldface names for decades, but it has recently risen to a kind of pre-eminence. In the past few years, the suburb has been dubbed the wealthiest in the United States thanks in part to analysis of federal data by GOBanking Rates. The firm examined more than 50 metropolitan suburbs with at least 5,000 households, ranking them by inflation-adjusted mean household income. In 2023, Scarsdale’s mean household income reached $601,193 (£447,000) – about $180,000 more than its nearest competitor, Rye (about 15 minutes’ drive away). Property values reflect those income levels. In 2025, the median sale price of a Scarsdale property was $2.48 million, according to Houlihan Lawrence, a luxury real estate brokerage.
Inventory is limited; at the start of 2026 there were only 13 single-family homes on the market. And when they do go up for sale, properties can be snapped up quickly – in just over two weeks in one recent case.
Scarsdale has many signifiers of wealth; not least an abundance of high-quality golf and country clubs. The historic Winged Foot Golf Club, in nearby Mamaroneck, staged the 2020 US Open and is considered one of the most difficult courses to have ever staged a major. Within the village borders, the Scarsdale Golf Club, founded in 1898, remains a local anchor. Nearby, the Westchester Country Club has two championship courses and has hosted the PGA Tour on various occasions over four decades.
Content from our partners
Yet when residents are asked about their community’s crown jewels, they rarely point to the clubs. Instead, they tend to emphasise the importance of the institutions everyone can share: a luminous public library, reimagined in a $21.7 million renovation completed in 2021; a municipally run aquatic campus with four pools; and, above all, the public schools.
Property taxes are sky-high: often running into six figures for owners of multi-million-dollar homes. That funding supports local schools such as Scarsdale High, and enables facilities and standards that would be considered elite in a national or international context. The high school’s design lab and fitness centre are collegiate in scale, and the community’s non-profit Scarsdale Schools Education Foundation sees generous parents make donations that lift the bar even higher. While prestigious private schools such as Hackley or Horace Mann are within commuting distance, the vast majority of wealthy Scarsdale parents choose the local public route. The Scarsdale Union Free School District consistently ranks among the top-performing districts in Westchester County, and is placed near the top of statewide rankings.
Scarsdale was founded in 1701, 74 years before the War of Independence, by English aristocrat Caleb Heathcote – who went on to be Mayor of New York City (while his brother served as Lord Mayor of London). Heathcote purchased 6,000 acres of inland forest and christened it ‘Scarsdale’: purportedly scar for crag, dale for valley. At that time, commerce rode the Hudson River, eight miles to the west; but Scarsdale, as its new name suggested, was landlocked. Lacking a port, mills or factories, the hamlet fell behind as riverside neighbours Yonkers and Tarrytown thrived; exporting grain and industrial goods down the Hudson with ease. Scarsdale’s farmers, meanwhile, had to haul their crops over rutted roads. The geographic disadvantage stunted Scarsdale’s growth. Only when railroads arrived in the 19th century, pulling New York City’s commercial centre north to Midtown, did Scarsdale’s fortunes begin to change.
In the 1910s, professionals in law, medicine and business wanted to escape the crowded, flu-stricken metropolis. When they came to Scarsdale, the very liabilities that once prevented its growth were now its USP. In the industrial age, ‘sparsely populated’ and ‘landlocked’ were rebranded as bucolic and self-contained. ‘Scarsdale was basically a vacuum that the professional classes were able to fill,’ says resident village historian Jordan Copeland. ‘In the river towns, you had larger numbers of industrial workers, agriculture workers, families – but Scarsdale’s population was small. So when the professionals arrived, they could make decisions relatively quickly, like pushing for higher taxes, because they weren’t impeded by large groups of lower-income people.’
This was aided by Scarsdale’s idiosyncratic ‘Non-Partisan System’ of local government, created in 1911 to prioritise the needs of the village and reduce the divisions associated with national politics. ‘In its early decades, Scarsdale was relatively split between Republicans and Democrats,’ Copeland says. ‘But the two sides brokered a kind of power-sharing philosophy, where they would essentially collude to put the best people forward for roles and positions.’
Candidates were vetted through a committee of civic leaders, originally high-powered individuals from the Town Club and Women’s Club, who added a layer of insulation from the vagaries of open democracy or the risk of populism. This system, which Copeland describes as a form of ‘municipal elitism’, remains in place today in a slightly modified form. The Citizens Nominating Committee is a rotating body of 30 residents elected by village-wide voters on a non-partisan basis, and drawn evenly from the five school districts. The vetting panel interviews potential leaders in private sessions to select a single ‘non-partisan’ slate of candidates. While independent candidate runs are legally permitted, the committee’s nominees almost always run unopposed.
‘It all comes down to outstanding public schools,’ says Jordan Black, who represents the quintessential Scarsdale returnee. A senior vice president at Morgan Stanley, he grew up here, went through the public school system, and after living overseas for a decade, returned with his wife to raise a family of their own in the mid-1990s. ‘What brought my parents to Scarsdale is the same thing that brought me and most of the people I know. Everyone supports the public school system here. The budget just goes through.’
For families, the village offers a special kind of luxury. Twenty minutes north, hiking trails wind through the ancient forests of the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation. Ten minutes to the east, the Long Island Sound beckons with sailing and kayaking.
The cultural circuit is equally robust. Tarrytown Music Hall, a restored 1885 gem, recently hosted ZZ Top legend Billy Gibbons, while major touring acts like David Lee Roth and Brandi Carlile fill Port Chester’s rock palace, Capitol Theater, just 15 minutes away.
‘It’s the perfect balance between being in the country and being close to New York City. I’m sitting out here with large oak trees, American Elms and space,’ says Black, speaking from his home on a quiet afternoon. ‘And, I mean, it really is gorgeous. People don’t realise how beautiful it is.’
Since the pandemic, the ‘sleepy’ reputation of Scarsdale’s downtown has been rewritten by a wave of sophisticated newcomers. Moscato, a long-standing Italian favourite, has been joined by high-end Italian steakhouse One Rare. Mimi’s by Martine’s offers sumptuous gelato beside the train station, while Omni Caffe pours single-origin Italian coffee on Garth Road.
Just a few blocks from the train station, Micheline, a glamorous new French-inspired bistro, announces itself in royal blue and gold. Its atmosphere is unpretentious yet unmistakably Parisian. The zinc bar gleams like a Jazz Age relic; regulars swear its martini is the crispest in the county. ‘People have also told me we make the best burger,’ says owner Jonathan Aubrey, who was born in Scarsdale and raised in Paris, before becoming a maître d’ at Eleven Madison Park, then the world’s number-one restaurant. ‘At Micheline, I want all the hallmarks of excellence,’ he says, ‘but I’m in jeans and a T-shirt. I want the place to feel convivial, friendly, fun.’ Now and then, the dining room transforms for Micheline After Dark, where DJs spin and locals dance until it’s time to relieve the babysitter.
Beyond the food, he is struck by the strength of the village’s social glue. ‘I always thought I’d be a city person,’ says Aubrey, who lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for 10 years before moving north. ‘But honestly, within six months, I could just open the door to my backyard and my kids could go play outside. You don’t have to bundle them up, wait for the elevator, go downstairs, and walk to the park. The ease of life is just incredible. There’s a special sense of kin here.’
This fiscal boundary between New York City and its suburbs has always driven Scarsdale’s growth. But in 2026, the gap is more of a canyon. Unlike London or Paris, New York City imposes its own specific income tax (currently 3.9 per cent) on anyone living within the five boroughs. That’s on top of a top New York State rate of up to 10.9 per cent and a federal top rate of 37 per cent. When combined, a high-earning Manhattanite can face a marginal tax rate nearing 52 per cent before property taxes are even considered.
After the election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on a tax-the-rich platform to add a further 2 per cent surcharge on annual earnings over $1 million, living outside city limits is starting to look even more appealing. While Scarsdale’s property taxes are high, there is an annual charge of roughly 2.3 per cent of the value of one’s property, about double the rate of Florida’s Palm Beach, for example. Many residents believe it represents value for money, especially when factoring in a world-class education that might exceed $65,000 per child in a Manhattan private school.
For families like the Blacks, Scarsdale’s stability makes leaving almost unthinkable. ‘You can save on taxes somewhere else,’ Black concedes, ‘but education, community, balance, tradition – those are my values. And this is a community that mirrors them. My daughter and her fiancé are coming here, and she just wants to go to the Scarsdale pool, because she grew up going to it.’
The greatest luxury Scarsdale offers might just be that: the comfort of seeing your childhood home, exactly as you remember it.
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 98. Click here to subscribe
