It is said that life is a numbers game. Two statistics-driven items which came across your Editorial Team’s transom in recent days underscore the changes Kingston’s already experienced and offer us a glimpse of what’s to come. (Spoiler alert: It isn’t good.)

A term you’ve no doubt seen in several of our stories is Area Median Income, which is commonly abbreviated as AMI. It’s a figure used by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, among others, to assess a community’s relative wealth. In math, a “median” is the data point in a set of data points where half of everything else is greater than the median and the other half is lesser than the median. The just-released new figure for the U.S. Census-defined Kingston Metropolitan Area (which takes in not only the city but the entire county) is $83,900, up 7.3 percent from last year, for one person. That means that half of everybody in Ulster makes less and the other half makes more. The AMI for a family of four rose too, but not as dramatically: the 2025 number is $119,800, a bump of 2.2 percent. These numbers have been on the rise for a long time, but especially recently, as more high-income people choose to make their homes among us.

So what does this have to do with the price of beer at Snapper’s? Nothing, but it has a lot to do with how easy it is for the non-wealthy to actually live here. Why these numbers are so important, and an increase in them so problematic, is that they’re used to determine rents in affordable and workforce housing. We’ll spare you any more calculations and simply state the higher the AMI is, the less affordable the housing will be. So while the community continues to get more wealthy, those at the bottom, through no fault of their own, may have to spend even more of their limited incomes to keep a roof over their heads.

Look, we’re not anti-money or opposed to people getting rich. We hope it happens to us one day. But a richer Kingston automatically becomes a more expensive Kingston; nobody needs to look very far to see the evidence of this. But instead of the proverbial rising tide lifting all boats, lower-income Kingston folks are increasingly finding themselves in a fiscal riptide which has already economically drowned a lot of people. In this case, the numbers game is stacked the most against those who can afford it the least.

The other item is also related to income and is another indicator of how much our community has changed since Covid hit a little over five years ago. The website Syracuse.com recently went through Census data to find out which communities have the most college graduates living within them. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ithaca, home of Cornell University and a few other colleges, leads both New York and the nation in percentage of population with a graduate degree (master’s and above) with 37 percent and is first in the state and second in the nation with 60.6 percent when it comes to those holding bachelor’s degrees or above.

Where did we land? Higher than people might think: Fourth. Some 17.1 percent of Ulster residents have a master’s or more and 39.1 percent have a bachelor's or more. That’s 64th and 97th in the nation respectively. Long term, that tells us that college educations, once the province of the privileged, are now commonplace. More education almost always means more income, so this trend is one of the factors behind the AMI’s growth. While we are still trying to find past census’ figures on this, we figure that the influx of highly educated people into Kingston over the past five years has inflated the current number.

Deserving a shoutout for this is our school system. There are always going to be any number of things wrong with our public schools here in Kingston, and there’s always going to be room for improvement. That’s the nature of the beast: educating kids is a complex, costly and sometimes messy operation. But it doesn’t take very deep of a dive at all to see how much better we do it here than they do it elsewhere. Your Editorial Team thinks our local educators deserve some of the credit for our rise in college graduates. Our newspapers and websites have for years told the tales of students who got their start at Kingston High School and went on to do amazing things.

So what have we learned today? Nothing we didn’t already know, really, but these two datasets quantify the qualitative feel we all have had of Kingston changing. Changing for the good? It all depends on your odds in the numbers game of life.