Pull up the citywide median for White Plains and you get a tidy number. Zillow's home value index sat at $694,605 as of April 2026, up 3.2% year over year. Movoto's May 2026 median list came in at $399,000. Realtytrac's median estimated value was closer to $739,000. Three sources, three answers, one honest conclusion: the citywide figure is not describing a single market.
It is averaging two.
One is a downtown condo and co-op market where price per square foot has been climbing faster than the citywide figure and inventory sits tight against transit-oriented demand. The other is the surrounding single-family neighborhoods, where the price ceiling and the buyer pool look nothing like the towers going up around the Metro-North station. Until December 1, 2025, you could treat those two markets as loosely coupled and move on. That is no longer true. A single vote by the White Plains Common Council put one of them on a clock, and buyers deciding between a two-bedroom condo off Main Street and a colonial two ZIP codes over are now making a materially different bet than they were six months ago.
The median is hiding two markets
The submarket spread inside the city is wider than most buyers expect. Late-2025 portal data pegged Downtown White Plains near a median of $862,500, while the Eastview submarket sat near $299,450, with the citywide figure floating in between. Redfin's neighborhood breakout for Downtown White Plains showed a median sale price of $420,000 at $487 per square foot, with year-over-year per-square-foot growth of 52.2%. The citywide per-square-foot figure was $466.
Read those two numbers next to each other. The downtown submarket is smaller and denser, so a lower absolute median coexists with a higher per-square-foot cost. What your dollar buys in downtown White Plains, in raw square footage, is less than what it buys a mile away. That is not a quirk of the data. That is the market pricing walkability, elevator buildings, and a 20-minute commute to Grand Central into every square foot.
| Metric | Downtown White Plains | Citywide |
|---|---|---|
| Median sale price (recent month) | ~$420,000 | ~$635,000 to $730,000 depending on source |
| Median $/sqft | $487 | $466 |
| YoY $/sqft change | +52.2% | +22.3% |
| Typical days on market | ~30 to 31 | ~28 to 40 |
The story the table tells: downtown is not the "cheaper" option. It is the tighter one.
What changed on December 1, 2025
On December 1, 2025, the White Plains Common Council unanimously approved a rezoning that created a new Transit Development 2 (TD-2) district covering the 11-acre former Galleria Mall site on Main Street. The same vote authorized the sale of the city's Lexington-Grove East and West garages, commonly known as the Galleria Garage, to Galleria City Holding Company LLC for $50 million. The development team is led by the Cappelli Organization, Pacific Retail Capital Partners, SL Green Realty Corp., and Aareal Bank Group.
The project, District Galleria, is a roughly $2.5 billion redevelopment. As currently proposed, it will demolish the former mall and the two municipal garages and replace them with approximately 3.7 million square feet of mixed-use development: about 3,001 residential units across seven towers ranging from 250 to 450 feet tall, roughly 96,780 square feet of retail and commercial space, and about 3,400 on-site parking spaces. Under White Plains' inclusionary requirements, considered the most favorable in Westchester County, developers must set aside 12% of units for tenants earning up to 60% of area median income. That translates to more than 300 units of affordable housing on this site alone, sized the same as the market-rate units.
The garage sale terms matter for anyone tracking timing. Cappelli's holding company makes a $5 million down payment, then $17.5 million within 30 days of Planning Board site plan approval, with the city holding a three-year mortgage on the remaining $27.5 million. Site plan approval is the next public milestone worth watching, and the city can lease the remaining Galleria garage back from the developers for up to two years while phasing begins.
The project is expected to take up to a decade to deliver.
How a 10-year supply pipeline changes today's math
Here is where the two markets separate. A 3,001-unit downtown pipeline is not a rounding error against the current downtown inventory. Whether that supply lands as competition or as validation for existing owners depends on when you buy, when you sell, and what phase you catch the market in.
A few practical implications:
- Buyers of downtown condos and co-ops today are buying into scarcity that has an announced end date. Nothing about District Galleria helps you compete for inventory this year. The vote was zoning, not delivery. But your resale timeline in five to eight years overlaps with the first tower deliveries.
- Sellers of downtown units in 2026 and 2027 are selling into the last chapter of the current supply picture. Sale-to-list ratios of 100.73% and 2.4 months of supply, as Houzeo reported for March 2026, describe a seller's market that is running on today's inventory. The pipeline does not weaken that today. It shapes the conversation around your comps in 2029.
- Buyers who plan to hold 10-plus years are underwriting a different asset. The plan calls for a quarter-mile green promenade, pocket parks and plazas, and roughly 46% to 60% open space depending on which stage of the plans you read, plus a food hall, retail wrapped along Main Street, Court Street, and Martine Avenue, and an amphitheater and farmers market under discussion. If those elements land, the surrounding blocks look different than they do today.
- Everyone underwriting a purchase should distinguish between "downtown White Plains" as a stat and as an address. A condo three blocks from the site and a condo across the Bronx River Parkway are both "downtown" in the portal data. They are not the same asset against a construction phasing plan.
The single-family side isn't on the same clock
Nothing in the TD-2 rezoning touches R-zoned single-family neighborhoods. That sounds obvious, and it is the point. If you are choosing between a downtown condo and a single-family home in one of the outlying White Plains submarkets, you are not choosing between two versions of the same bet. One is exposed to a decade-long supply story with named developers, an approved zoning envelope, and a public milestone calendar. The other is exposed to the same forces shaping single-family stock across lower Westchester: interest rates, inventory turnover, and the countywide balance HGAR tracks in its monthly briefs.
Westchester County sat near 2.8 months of supply in May 2025, per HGAR reporting, with the tightest conditions under about $500,000. Freddie Mac's weekly rate survey showed the average 30-year fixed near 6.09% in mid-February 2026, down from roughly 6.8% to 6.9% a year earlier. Those numbers move the entire single-family segment together. They do not care whether the Galleria Garage gets torn down in 2027 or 2029.
If you want single-family in White Plains, the honest question is not "when will District Galleria affect my house." It is "how does the interest rate environment interact with the sub-$500,000 tightness HGAR is flagging, given that starter inventory in Westchester is thin regardless of what happens downtown."
Friction points buyers miss
A few transaction-specific items worth surfacing before you tour anything:
- "Days on market" is not one number. Realtor.com reported an average of 62 days on market for White Plains in December 2025. Zillow reported a 45-day median to pending as of January 31, 2026. Movoto reported 39 to 40 days in mid-2026. Each source uses a different clock. Confirm which one your comps are running on before you price an offer.
- The submarket lines matter more than the ZIP. White Plains contains five ZIPs, and Realtytrac's data showed median home values for active listings ranging from $295,800 in 10601 to $1,600,000 in 10606. Pulling comps by ZIP alone will mislead you.
- Condo per-square-foot growth has been outpacing single-family. Realtytrac flagged that in a recent week, list price per square foot for condos moved up 9.38% while single-family moved 1.93%. Read that as a signal that the pricing engines for these two products are decoupling, not converging.
- The Galleria site's phasing will be public. Planning Board site plan approval triggers the next $17.5 million tranche of the garage payment, per the Common Council ordinance. Watch that milestone. It is the first hard signal that shovels are close.
Short FAQ
Does District Galleria only affect downtown values? Directly, yes. Indirectly, a large affordable and market-rate delivery downtown can shift where entry-level buyers in Westchester look, which can loosen or tighten neighboring submarkets over time. The near-term effect on outlying single-family stock is minimal.
Should I wait to buy downtown until the pipeline is clearer? Waiting has its own cost. Downtown supply is currently constrained, sale-to-list ratios are above 100%, and rates in early 2026 were meaningfully lower than a year prior. "Wait for more information" is a real strategy, but it is not a free one.
Is the project definitely happening? The zoning is approved, the garage sale is authorized, and the development team is in place. Site plan approval, financing structure, and phasing are the next public steps. ABC7 has reported the full build could take up to a decade.
Working the numbers with someone who lives here
The citywide median will keep telling you a tidy story. It will keep being wrong for your specific decision. If you are weighing a downtown condo against a single-family home in outer White Plains, or trying to decide whether to list this spring or hold into the next phase of the Galleria calendar, that is a conversation worth having with someone who tracks the submarket week by week. Daniel McKeon works these blocks and can walk you through the comps behind the median. Schedule a consultation when you are ready to put your own numbers on the table.
