From Airbnb to stray cats: Trump’s childhood home in Queens sells for $2 million
The New York house where the US president lived until the age of four was once rented out, complete with Trump merchandising, and later fell into disrepair. Now an anonymous family has bought it
The Jamaica–179th Street subway stop in Queens is only about a 10-minute walk from Wareham Place. But an abyss separates the two places. From the crowded low-rise blocks of busy shops, where spotting a white resident is difficult, to single-family homes with manicured yards on quiet streets where cars rarely pass. “Different parts of Queens were rough; this was an oasis,” Donald Trump said in a 2015 New York Times interview. This “oasis” is where the man who is now president of the United States lived as a child, in a house an anonymous family has just bought for $1.93 million.
The property where young Donald took his first steps does not stand out today among the row of detached homes in this upscale neighborhood in Queens, one of New York’s five boroughs. Freshly renovated with new windows and doors, moving boxes inside already suggest an imminent relocation. This charming Tudor-style house, built in 1940, went on the market last November for $2.3 million.
Since its most famous tenant moved to the White House for the first time, the property has gone through several phases. “It’s very quiet now, but when Trump won in 2016 it was complete madness. There were reporters everywhere asking about the house and about the Trumps,” said John Sing, who lives a few blocks away. From that moment, when the world was stunned by the electoral victory of a businessman best known to the public for the reality show The Apprentice, the Wareham Place house became a pilgrimage site for Trump fans who, for a modest $725 a night on Airbnb, could sleep within the walls where the world’s most powerful man —with a nod to Xi Jinping — began to crawl.
The listing included an overnight stay in a house decorated with merchandising featuring the president, such as a life-size cardboard cutout, framed magazine covers, and pocket editions of his book The Art of the Deal. Plaques pointed out what was “probably” the president’s childhood bedroom and the room where he was “probably” conceived.
But the business was apparently not lucrative —$725 a night is likely a deterrent even for the most ardent Trump supporter— because later the house fell into a period of abandonment, inhabited only by feral cats. Some still roam outside today. That period ended in March 2025, when a businessman bought the five-bedroom, three-bath property for $835,000, renovated it and put it back on the market in November for $2.3 million in search of a tidy profit.
Trump may have only lived in the house for his first four years, but he spent much more time in the neighborhood. His parents, Fred and Mary Anne, moved a few doors away to a much larger, more ostentatious 23-room brick mansion with white columns that bring to mind — a topic for a psychoanalyst, perhaps? — the White House. The sellers said the buyers intend to live in the house and prefer to remain anonymous, and that their decision had nothing to do with who the former occupants were.
Opinions in the neighborhood are divided. Mohsena Mustafá, a 57-year-old woman of Bangladeshi origin who lives nearby, says that even though it was long ago, it is an honor for the area to have had such a distinguished resident. “Trump is a businessman who works hard to defend the country,” she said. Just the opposite of what a man walking his dog thinks; he cannot understand how anyone would pay so much for such a small house. Asked his name, he gestures no. “Haven’t you heard? Trump goes after anyone who criticizes him. I don’t want my name in a newspaper,” he said.
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