Anywhere but New York. It’s not a hard problem to defeat. Even if he wanted to live in the area of his birth, there are other states within view of NYC. All he’d have to do is have a house there.
Arbitrary choices coming from nowhere are allowed, though. I don’t think you can be denied residency in a state just because you’re moving there for craven political reasons. (Mostly since a citizen can’t be denied residency in a state at all. The 14th Amendment says that if you’re a US citizen, you can live wherever you want for whatever reason you want and the state just has to deal with it.)