Hi! OP here. I'm in NYC. I tunneled to Washington D.C. and that seemed to do it. I figured I'd try a location as close as possible first.

Tried the same thing on TWC from NYC with no difference in speed. Will experiment with other setups.

Also would like to note we pay for (and can get) 50 Mbps down. Netflix comes in at ~560 kbps and just stays there.

Cool. You may want to test different VPN services in case that's it. I've been using vyprvpn and I'm quite happy with it, but there are probably a few others that would work well.

It's not the location that matters, it's which uplink to Verizon a given VPN goes though.

If Verizon's recently released data is accurate, location probably doesn't make much of a difference. The key is that packets from the VPN provider to the user need to not arrive via the congested Level3 <-> Verizon interconnections.