Getty Images (2)
When a billionaire moves into town, it might portend good things or bad. In the case of Kingston, NY, it was more than good.
Peter Buffett, son of Warren, has lived with his wife just outside of this Hudson Valley enclave of 23,000 since 2011. During that time, they’ve poured an estimated $250 million into the area, largely through his philanthropic NoVo Foundation. In addition to donating to food pantries, building a youth community center, and restoring run-down historic homes, they’ve injected their own currency, “Buffet Bucks,” to support local businesses.
Meanwhile, Kingston’s real estate prices have skyrocketed of late, rising 32% to a median list price of $499,250 since January 2023.
“Kingston has seen some sharp increases in median listing price recently,” says Realtor.com economist Joel Berner.
Which begs the question: Is the billionaire “Buffett effect” responsible—and if so, who exactly in Kingston is benefiting?
How much money does Peter Buffett really have?
Unlike his father, who is currently ranked the sixth-richest person in the world, Peter, 66, isn’t a multibillionaire.
His father famously gave him only $90,000 in Berkshire Hathaway stock when he turned 19. While that is quite a lot for most people, it was a drop in the bucket for a Buffett. Peter cashed it in to jump-start his music career.
Peter has had a long and varied career as a composer and musician, and even won a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award.
But that wasn’t all that Peter received. Warren Buffett famously said he wanted his three children (Howard, Susan, and youngest Peter) to have “enough that they can do anything and not so much that they can do nothing.”
In 2006, Peter lived out his father’s plans by founding NoVo after his father gifted him an additional 350,000 shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Over time, it would be worth more than $2 billion. This allowed Peter and his wife, Jennifer, to make a huge impact on their adopted hometown.
In 2013, NoVo purchased the local 1,600-acre Gill Farm to create the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, a nonprofit agricultural center focused on growing organic food with “an intense focus on soil health.” The hub provides farmer training, demonstrates on-farm practices, and supports food distribution channels that “prioritize people and planet.”
In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the farm hub distributed over 300,000 pounds of food to local communities.
Then, in summer 2023, NoVo in Kingston (part of NoVo) was formed to focus specifically on downtown Kingston, funding all kinds of special projects, including donations to the local YMCA and a local thrift store and food pantry called People’s Place.
The foundation has taken a keen interest in helping restore abandoned and derelict historic homes. Both the Burger-Matthews House, a historic Queen Anne on Henry Street, and the octagonal-shaped Bonesteel House on Broadway were restored thanks to Peter. The former became an African American cultural museum, and the latter now houses Radio Kingston.
The foundation also funded the Pine Street Family Health Center, which offers accessible health care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay, and a modern high-end community kitchen at the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center.
Other projects include Broadway Bubble and Bath, a local laundromat and community center, as well as The Greenkill House, a supportive space for older youth.
The foundation is currently building The Metro, a youth community center, that will be housed in a 70,000-square-foot former factory. The center will offer training and education with a focus on trades such as wood and metalworking and fabrics.
And, reportedly, Peter has created “Buffett Bucks” (as it is colloquially termed), a local currency that can be used only for local businesses, to keep money in town.
The ‘Buffett effect’ on Kingston, NY
There’s nothing to directly link the improvements his fund has made to the town with higher home valuations. But Berner points out: “Clearly, home shoppers are seeing something in Kingston that they aren’t in other locales.”
As it is, Kingston isn’t a cheap place to live. The median home listing is $450,000, higher than the national median of $425,000 for September. In early 2020, the National Association of Realtors® found that Kingston had the fastest-rising single-family home prices in the country.
Indeed, Kingston’s 32% increase in home values since January 2023 far exceeds the nation’s 6% growth rate, nearby New York City’s growth rate of 16%, and even the median listing price in nearby Poughkeepsie, NY, of just under 15%.
Stories also abound on the ground of wealthy homebuyers moving to the area—and therein lies the problem.
In 2021, Peter himself penned three letters to the city of Kingston on Medium, admitting his disappointment that Kingston was undergoing “gentrification” due to privileged people moving into town.
“Gentrification is an urgent issue,” he wrote. “It would be a tragic and deep injustice if this community was changed beyond recognition by the forces at large that are driving up housing costs and prices and driving down affordability and availability.”
Getty Images
“Our challenge has been how to support meaningful change in a particular neighborhood without those changes inadvertently contributing to those forces driving out the very people who were meant to benefit,” he continued.
Yet it’s unclear what, exactly, he might do to quell exploding home valuations, and how that might harm the very people his charitable actions have made efforts to help.
Founder-journalists of Kingston Wire, a local news service partly funded by NoVo in Kingston, claimed the foundation pulled funding because the news service wasn’t doing enough flattering stories about the foundation and published one article on Buffett’s cozy relationship with a local bank.
While the local foundation might not outlast Peter’s lifetime, he promises to keep it going for at least a decade.
“At NoVo, we believe the coming century is going to see many more shocks like the pandemic,” he says on Medium, “some considerably more severe. And so, it is our intention to help the Kingston community not just survive but thrive through these events.”
(NoVo declined to speak for this article and directed a reporter to its website.)