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A small town wedged against one of the busiest Army posts in the country has earned an unwanted distinction as one of the least livable places in the United States.
LeRay, New York, zip code 13637, sits just outside of far-upstate Watertown and contains Fort Drum — the sprawling military base fueling the area’s economy.
The embattled burg is the lone Empire State entry on AARP’s Livability Index bottom 10 — a list otherwise dominated by scorched, isolated pockets of the Sun Belt.
But Le Ray breaks the mold. While its fellow bottom dwellers struggle with rock bottom home prices and vanishing job markets, Le Ray’s trouble runs the opposite direction.
Housing there is expensive relative to what residents actually earn — not to mention the fact that the water underneath it all has its own serious problems, the report stated.
AARP’s index, which grades communities on a 100 point scale using 61 different measures across categories like housing, health, transportation and the environment, gave LeRay a score of just 38.
That ties it with Las Vegas-adjacent Pahrump, Nevada for fourth worst among mid-sized communities nationwide — and puts it well below the national average of 50.
LeRay’s monthly housing costs average $1,489, compared with an $890 median across AARP’s comparison group.
That works out to a premium of roughly 67 percent, an eye popping gap for the rural community far closer to Canada than NYC.
Then there is the water. Nearly a third of LeRay’s 25,736 residents, 32.1 percent, are exposed to drinking water violations, according to the index.
The town’s score for civic engagement, one of the seven categories AARP tracks, came in at just six, among the worst of any community measured anywhere in the country.
Real estate analysts who reviewed the AARP data pointed to a familiar driver behind military town price spikes: the Pentagon’s Basic Allowance for Housing, a monthly stipend paid to service members to cover rent or a mortgage based on rank, dependents and local market rates.
Landlords in towns that ring big bases have long been known to price rentals up toward whatever the government guarantees troops can pay, regardless of what civilian neighbors actually earn.
Fort Drum’s on post housing itself is privatized, operated under a decades long agreement by Winn Companies, a national developer and property manager that oversees military family housing at installations across the country.
Off post, the surrounding market tells a similar story.
A review of current listings near Fort Drum found two and three bedroom units renting anywhere from roughly $1,200 to nearly $1,950 a month, figures that suggest the entire local rental market has adjusted to the military pay scale — rather than the wages available in Jefferson County.
That dynamic creates a strange contradiction for a town that, on paper, should be affordable.
Some relocation guides aimed at incoming military families describe the Fort Drum and Watertown region as reasonably priced compared with the rest of New York State, a state with among the highest costs of living in the country.
Against national or rural comparison points, though, LeRay looks like anything but a bargain.
Nationally, several communities on AARP’s bottom 10 list also reported high rates of drinking water violations, including Fortuna Foothills and San Luis, Arizona, both at 43 percent, and Greenville, Mississippi, at 47.5 percent.
But LeRay is the only place on the list combining that kind of water exposure with housing costs running well above the norm — rather than below.
