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After a twelve-hour shift, most people would undergo a bleary-eyed commute home, enjoy whatever show they’re currently binging, and go to bed before doing it all over again the next day.

Gomez, a 31-year veteran of the city’s Emergency Medical Services, lives in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, a longtime landing strip for New Yorkers looking to buy a home that would otherwise be out of reach in an increasingly expensive city.

At the end of each work day, Gomez punches out of his station at Harlem Hospital and heads towards the parking lot to his SUV, lays the driver’s seat all the way down, cracks open the window and tucks in for the night. He has done some version of this routine three to four days a week since 1997, when he bought the Poconos home where he lives with his wife and raised their two children.

“Everybody at work jokes around,” says Gomez, a supervisor. “They call it ‘Hotel RAV4.’”

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He is one of an untold number of workers who’ve chosen to make their lives two states away in the Pocono Mountains, where New York salaries stretch farther, and they’re surrounded by nature, peace, quiet and space for their children to roam.

In the approximately five decades since the migration began with the completion of Interstate 80 connecting New York to eastern Pennsylvania, these New Yorkers have transformed a cluster of towns, making them among the most diverse in that region.

In his election night victory speech last year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani invoked the Poconos commuter, describing an 1199SEIU member named Wesley as “a New Yorker who lives elsewhere, who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because rent is too expensive in this city.” (Wesley, through his union, declined to speak with The City Reporter.)

The Poconos-to-New York commuter comes in many forms.

There’s the white-collar worker taking advantage of the work-from-home revolution to try exurban living. There’s the yawning immigrant day laborer arriving at the George Washington Bridge before dawn to start looking for a gig. And there’s the blue-collar worker — the civil servant, the medic, the union porter or electrician or laborer — who, priced out of the five boroughs and their immediate suburbs, is forced to venture westward for their slice of the American Dream.

A recently renovated 1,383 square-foot three-bed, two-bath ranch-style home on an acre of land in East Stroudsburg is currently listed for $315,000 ; a comparatively sized ranch on Staten Island — the borough with the largest concentration of civil servants — is going for more than twice as much, at $760,000 .