About

Comeback Towns is a public data site about small New York towns that could be on the way back, built for three readers: people considering a move, small investors, and the officials who run the towns.

The claim

"This town is turning around, and here is the evidence." Everyone else sells the town. This site also says when one is stalling, and that is only honest if every number carries its source and its date. So they do.

Who makes it

Comeback Towns is an independent project. It is not affiliated with any municipality, developer or broker, and it takes no listings.

Questions people ask

What is Comeback Towns?

Comeback Towns is an independent public-data site that scores 148 cities and villages in New York's Capital Region, Hudson Valley, Mohawk Valley for comeback readiness and momentum. It is not affiliated with any municipality, developer or broker, and it takes no listings.

What does a readiness grade mean?

Readiness (0 to 100) asks whether the ingredients for a revival are present: access, building stock, main street, price headroom, services, civic capacity. The grade, A to F, ranks a town against others of its population band, so a B in a village and a B in a city mean the same rank, not the same number. A town with too few inputs gets a score but no grade.

What does a momentum label mean?

Momentum (0 to 100) asks whether anything is happening now: home values, building permits, population and county tax-filer migration, each judged against a New York benchmark. 50 is keeping pace; 60 and above is rising, below 40 is fading. It is direction, not a forecast, and a town needs three of the four inputs to get a label.

Which towns are included?

Every incorporated city and village in the Capital Region, Hudson Valley, Mohawk Valley regions as New York's Regional Economic Development Councils draw them, 148 in all. Census-designated places and town-of subdivisions are not in this version.

Where does the data come from?

Public sources only: the Census Bureau (ACS 5-year, population estimates, gazetteer, TIGER), the Building Permits Survey, the National Register of Historic Places, Zillow research data, IRS county migration statistics, New York State facility and downtown award lists, OpenStreetMap and OSRM routing. Every figure on every page names the file it came from and the date it was pulled.

Can I use the data?

Yes. The dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0: use it, including commercially, with attribution to Comeback Towns. The underlying sources keep their own terms, listed on the Sources page.

Does the site measure crime or safety?

No. No input to either score is a crime or safety figure, so a readiness grade or a momentum label says nothing about safety and must not be read as a safety rating.

Is this advice?

No. Comeback Towns describes places from public data. It is not financial, investment, real-estate, legal or relocation advice, and a grade or label is not a recommendation to buy, sell, move or stay. Check the cited source before acting on any figure.

Does the site track me?

Not as a person. Page views are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, uses no local storage and does not fingerprint visitors by IP address or browser; what this project sees is aggregate counts by page, referrer, country and browser. There is no sign-up. The site is served by Cloudflare, which keeps ordinary request logs; the only data this project holds about a person is a correction email someone chooses to send.

How current is it?

Readiness v1 was computed 2026-10-05 and momentum v2 on 2026-10-05; this build was published 2026-11-02. Monthly feeds refresh on the 2nd of the month and annual feeds in January, and the scoring method only changes by publishing a new version.

How to cite

Name the site, the page and the date, and the version of each score: Comeback Towns, https://comebacktowns.com/town/<slug>, readiness v1 and momentum v2, published 2026-11-02. Every town page also lists the exact snapshot key behind each figure, so a figure can be cited to its source file. A machine-readable summary of the site is at /llms.txt.

What this site is not

• Not advice. Nothing here is financial, investment, real-estate, legal or relocation advice. A readiness grade says the ingredients for a revival are present; a momentum label says which way four public series moved against a New York benchmark over the period shown. Neither is a recommendation to buy, sell, move or stay, and neither is a forecast.
• Not guaranteed. The data is provided as is. It comes from public sources that contain errors, from survey estimates with margins of error (shown wherever they exist), and from pages the pipeline reads automatically. Check the cited source before acting on a figure, and tell us when one is wrong.
• Not a safety rating. The site does not measure crime or safety, and no score or label here should be read as one. A town can be rising on every momentum input while its crime trend worsens, or the reverse; nothing on this site can tell you which.
• Not about who should live where. The scores describe places, never the people who should live in them. Inputs such as the share of residents under 18 or the poverty rate are population statistics from the Census Bureau, used as they are published; nothing on this site may be used to steer a buyer or renter towards or away from a place on the basis of any protected characteristic.
• Not endorsed by its sources. The Census Bureau, Zillow, the MTA, the IRS, New York State, OpenStreetMap and the other publishers listed on Sources supply the inputs. None of them review, endorse or are affiliated with this site, and their names appear only to say where a figure came from.
• Not tracking you. Page views are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, uses no local storage and does not fingerprint visitors by IP address or browser; what this project sees is aggregate counts by page, referrer, country and browser. No sign-up. The host keeps ordinary request logs; the only data about a person this project holds is a correction email someone chooses to send.

Corrections

If a figure is wrong, the fastest fix is an email to data@comebacktowns.com naming the town, the figure and what it should be, with a source if you have one. Every figure links to the snapshot it came from, so a correction can be traced to the file.

What is next

Readiness is the first score. Momentum, whether anything is actually happening, is the second: it reads home values, permits, population and county tax-filer migration, each against a benchmark. Any further input arrives as a new momentum version rather than a silent change.