Living in The Finger Lakes

The Finger Lakes region centers on Rochester, New York's third-largest city and a genuine single-defining-story Rust Belt rebuild -- Eastman Kodak's dramatic rise and fall, disclosed honestly alongside a real, current optics/photonics industry cluster (more than 150 firms, over $3.2 billion in annual output) that grew directly out of the Kodak/Xerox/Bausch & Lomb precision-optics legacy, and the University of Rochester's substantial UR Medicine/URMC anchor. Ithaca, at the southern tip of Cayuga Lake, is the region's most singular market: Cornell University and Ithaca College combined enroll more students than the city's own year-round population, and its 'Ithaca is Gorges' identity (more than 150 waterfalls within roughly 10 miles) is genuinely unmatched elsewhere in this dataset. Geneva and Canandaigua, both Ontario County lake towns on Seneca and Canandaigua Lakes respectively, carry genuinely different demographic profiles -- Geneva younger and college-driven via Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Canandaigua older and more retirement-relevant, and the real, still-living historic site of the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. Auburn, on Owasco Lake, rounds out the region as its most affordable anchor, home to the William H. Seward House Museum and Harriet Tubman National Historical Park. Every place in this region runs more affordable than New York's statewide average, though Rochester's and Ithaca's own county property tax rates both run above the national median.

Explore The Finger Lakes in depth

• Cost of Living & Housing in The Finger Lakes
• Best Places to Live in The Finger Lakes
• Moving to The Finger Lakes
• Climate & Lifestyle in The Finger Lakes

Places we've researched in The Finger Lakes

• Rochester -- Monroe County
• Ithaca -- Tompkins County
• Geneva -- Ontario County
• Canandaigua -- Ontario County
• Auburn -- Cayuga County