In North Adams, the enormous Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, or MASS MoCA, inhabits a series of 19th-century industrial buildings once occupied by the Sprague Electric Company. The northern part of the county, though, is in the midst of a significant transformation. In the northern part of the county, anchored by North Adams, where 18.9 percent of the population is living in poverty and the median household income is $32,804, according to United States Census Bureau data, the average sales price was lower still, at $186,388. In the slightly scruffier central part of the county, including Pittsfield, the largest city in the Berkshires, the average sales price last year was $197,667. And in February, the number of active listings for single-family homes declined to 872, the lowest inventory has been in 13 years. The average sales price of those homes jumped 8 percent over that in 2016, to $279,557. Last year, the total number of single-family home sales in Berkshire County rose to 1,374, the highest number since the organization began tracking sales in 1997. “There’s something brewing here.”įigures from the Berkshire County Board of Realtors back up that assertion. “You feel it and see it everywhere now,” he said. He has the growing sense that they are not the only ones interested in putting down roots in the Berkshires. Svenson is at work on a number of other houses in the area, and has helped find second homes for dazzled friends. It now serves as a second home, but he plans to move to North Adams full time in August with his wife and sons, 3 and 5, after the arrival of their third child this summer.Ī short stroll away is another 19th-century home he owns: a four-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom house he got in a foreclosure auction for $77,700, and then spent about $40,000 renovating. Svenson bought a two-bedroom, one-bathroom 19th-century house in North Adams for $116,900 last winter and gut renovated it for about $67,000, exposing the original wooden posts and beams. But those who discover the comparatively quiet, unbuttoned Berkshires frequently talk about the place with reverential wonder, as though they have been let in on a secret.įor his own use, Mr. ![]() That is slightly farther afield than the areas most popular with New Yorkers and Bostonians in search of second homes, including the Hamptons, the Hudson Valley, Connecticut and Cape Cod. Stretching across the western edge of Massachusetts, the county is roughly equidistant from New York and Boston, with most towns about a two-and-a-half- or three-hour drive from either city. Such is the attraction of Berkshire County, more commonly known as the Berkshires, a destination that mixes bucolic landscapes, organic farms, hiking trails and ski hills with a bevy of top-tier cultural attractions. ![]() “And thus far, I’d have to say it’s one of the better decisions I’ve made in my life.” “I said yes to something I had no intention of saying yes to,” she said. ![]() So a year ago, she uprooted her Bay Area life and moved to North Adams, where she is planning Loom, a new restaurant at Tourists that will celebrate the area’s agricultural bounty.
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