On March 6, Mayor Mike Spano announced the findings of a report on the economic impact of the city’s film and television production activity. Camoin Associates, the economic development consulting firm hired to conduct the study, estimates roughly $46 million in sales activity and almost $12 million in earnings generated during 2024.
In recent years, City Hall has billed Yonkers as “Hollywood-on-Hudson,” to reflect the growing number of studios and an effort to attract the film industry to the city. Accordingly, the money and production trucks have rolled in.
In a 2025 press release, Yonkers reported generating nearly $5.5 million in revenue, counting only the filming permits granted between 2014 and 2025, according to the Mayor’s Office of Film. The city charges for the use of public locations for productions, ranging from $500 for parking spots to $10,000 to film in City Hall.Recent shows like “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins,” “Dexter Resurrection, “The Gilded Age,” and “The Penguin,” along with films such as “The Irishman,” “The Many Saints of Newark,” and “Leave the World Behind,” were all shot, in part, in the city.
But how did it happen? It wasn’t overnight. Several factors worked in the city’s favor, along with some changes at the state and local levels to help turn red lights into green-lit projects.
"You Should Be Burbank"
Mayor Spano says it started when he took office in 2012, and he received a call from then-governor Andrew Cuomo’s office about increasing film production in the city.
“The Governor’s Film Office said they wanted to talk about filming in Yonkers, so two people came in, and they said, ‘We had three shots in Yonkers in 2011. We don’t understand it, you should be Burbank,” Spano recalled during an interview with The Leveler News.
That was for a couple of reasons, Spano says. Burbank, California, is located in Los Angeles County, just 7 miles from downtown Los Angeles, home of the original Hollywood. At only 20 miles away, Manhattan is right down the road, where the industry likes and wants to be. The other was that “the industry really loves being outside New York City, and you’re just outside New York City, but still within a key 30-mile radius from Columbus Circle—a critical variable for film permitting and union workers in the industry.”
Besides close proximity, Yonkers is also diverse in terms of geography and population, allowing productions to utilize more suburban or even exurban environments in shoots, along with urban and waterfront settings.
The economic impact of the Yonkers film industry was announced from the Mediapro Studios soundstage in Yonkers, March 6, 2026. (Source: City of Yonkers)
So, Yonkers was in a key location, but there were still a few barriers largely keeping the industry away. “The reason that the industry hadn’t come to Yonkers was that Yonkers had a ‘stage tax,” Spano says, that saddled productions with extra costs. “No one charges this tax—it offends the industry.” There were also tangles with local unions, requiring a number of people to be on hand for any production, such as mandating police and fire departments at shoots, even if they weren’t needed. Another added cost. This created a third issue. With all of the extra people in and around the production, it led to more people “mingling” with the talent, which caused issues.
Spano took action. Yonkers rescinded the stage tax and hired Melissa Velez-Goldberg to run the Mayor’s Office of Film & Photography to work as a liaison between film industry contacts and local unions. Those moves, paired with some beefed-up film incentives and tax credits from the State of New York, served as a catalyst.
“We went from having three days of filming in Yonkers to having more than 200 within one year,” Spano says. ”We’re getting more than $1 million in permit fees [annually] now, people are coming to film here all the time—all that was setting us up for someone like Robert Halmi to come in.”
Hope in the Hollywood Hype
Robert Halmi, the President and CEO of Great Point Studios, spurred the studio rush in the city, building the Lionsgate Studios on Wells and Warburton Avenues, along with a couple of others. The first facilities opened in 2022, and the company has been expanding its presence in the area over the past few years.
According to the report, "the industry creates a multiplier effect throughout the local economy." That has helped employ people in and around the studios, as well as boosting foot traffic and spending at local restaurants, hardware stores, and other small businesses. The 124 productions Yonkers' studios booked in 2024 resulted in 10,972 production days of work. Camoin researchers then converted production days into years and determined that local productions have created an estimated 100 film and TV jobs that go directly to Yonkers residents, or about 10% of full-time equivalent jobs.
The hype is real, and Yonkers isn't the only city seeing industry growth. Other studios and production facilities have followed.
Yonkers, as a production hub, has quickly snowballed into a “new Hollywood,” says John Boyd, Jr., Principal of The Boyd Company, which advises companies and private developers on where to build facilities. “We’ve been very active in the film industry for decades,” he says, and helping production companies determine where to build studios and soundstages is “a big part of our current projects.”“You now have the ‘new Hollywoods,’ and it’s a highly coveted industry for cities around the country,” Boyd says. That includes areas in Georgia, New Mexico, Louisiana, Texas, and local competition on the horizon in parts of New Jersey. In February, Filmology Labs announced the establishment of a $250 million content studio in Patterson, NJ, and 1888 Studios in Bayonne, NJ, is a 58-acre production campus that broke ground in December 2025. Paramount signed a 10-year lease.
The tax incentives are one thing. The lower costs, relative to New York City, are another. But there’s also the fact that Yonkers is near “other high-growth, high-tech sectors. The proximity to universities with multimedia AI is a major asset for Yonkers, schools like Pace and Cornell Tech,” Boyd said.
The Robert Halmi Sr. Academy of Film and Television, a public middle and high school, was built specifically to prepare young people for jobs in the film industry. “We wanted an opportunity for our kids to get these jobs. By creating this magnet, we’re going to graduate 90 kids per year—90 kids will have an opportunity to work in the industry, because they will be exposed to it directly,” Spano says.
The local film industry boom is even spilling into neighboring villages. Electric Owl Studios, for example, plans to build a production complex at 1 South Broadway on the Hastings-Yonkers border. Hastings Mayor Tom Drake tells The Leveler News that the project has been in talks for years, but some paperwork—and a “hiccup with the water supplier”—is really all that stands in the way now.
“It’ll be a huge benefit for the village,” he says. Hastings already sees a number of film productions in the village itself—”The Leftovers,” “The Girl on the Train,” “The Sinner,” and “Divorce” have all been shot in the village in recent years. But Drake says that overall, “it will be a win, a commercial tax source, and they aren’t using village resources.”
But growth spurts, no matter how beneficial, are rarely without their growing pains.
Fringe Benefits, Community Concerns
Mayor Drake says that for the Electric Owl project, a big hang-up was “the size and scope of it all, and the disturbance” it would cause to neighbors who live close by. “There were also complaints about the environmental effects on the Lenoir Preserve,” a 40-acre preserve in Yonkers proper.
The concerns are echoed by many locals across Yonkers as well. Brad Crownower, president of the Ludlow Park Residents, says that he’s been “taken by surprise by the very rapid installation and expansion” of the industry’s footprint. While that’s “raising the profile of Yonkers, which has been a real benefit,” he says, neighbors feel that community members have been largely left out of the conversation.
“Yonkers’ attempt to become Hollywood-on-Hudson—it’s definitely a positive thing for the city, but it just needs additional community engagement and involvement,” he says. “We’re concerned about quality of life issues and how this will affect our neighborhood.”
Of particular interest to Crownower is what could happen to the 28-acre Leake & Watts campus at 463 Hawthorne Avenue, which was purchased by a subsidiary of developer National Resources in partnership with Great Point Studios for nearly $53 million in 2022. The plan for the facility is to turn it into additional film studios and a performing arts school.
“We’re not feeling like we’ve been heavily involved in conversations about how the site should and could be developed. We understand that it was purchased—it’s not our property, but we think that Great Point could definitely be doing more to partner with the neighborhood,” he says. “And if we’re going to make major changes, could they get some feedback from the community in terms of how it’s going to be used?”
Velez-Goldberg, Film Director at the Mayor’s Office of Film & Photography, says that Yonkers City Hall does get complaints and understands people’s concerns. Much of that, too, relates to short-term changes such as closed streets for productions, props in the streets that might be unsightly, such as graffiti or abandoned cars, which are cleaned up once production wraps.
“We don’t do anything different from what New York City does, or any other city of our size, for the amount of filming that we have,” she says, adding that the Mayor’s office does its best to take the feedback seriously while also giving productions some leeway. “We listen to the residents, and we don’t do as much as other cities” in terms of residential disruptions,” she says.
In all, the Hollywood-on-Hudson campaign has seen results, but there’s still a give and take. The city has attracted a burgeoning new industry, with increased revenue and jobs. That’s spilled over into the surrounding areas, in line with national trends. During 2024, the film industry supported more than 3,100 jobs in Westchester County as a whole, an increase of 51% from 2023. It also contributed more than $924 million to the county’s economy that year.
Spano anticipates the industry to continue to invest and expand in Yonkers. “There are nine studios now, and we’re going to end up with 22 in total,” he says. “We’re happy. We’ll keep the momentum going. We’re building an industry that is providing jobs, especially jobs for our kids. We’ll keep on morphing and growing.”
Many questions remain that may not be fully answerable for some years, when more studios are operational. Will Yonkers remain competitive among new studios nearby? Will Yonkers start tracking metrics for more definite measures of success and impact? How much will the growth cost Yonkers residents? Will the industry’s growth be worth the collective benefit? Are there policies that can build local capacity? In this report, business and property owners are the biggest winners. Only 10% of production jobs went to local residents. In the future, Yonkers could establish adult training and skills-building programs to complement its new film magnet school, like the Made in NY Production Assistant Training Program in NYC.
If Spano’s predictions hold true in terms of additional job opportunities, with more training, Yonkers residents could find themselves behind the camera, in video editing bays, and maybe, even in front of the camera.
This story is part of The Leveler News’ new business beat. Subscribe to The Leveler News for continued reporting on Yonkers’ growing film and television industry.