Jersey’s supply of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods is limited, and Millennials are noticing.
For 69-year-old Jeff Whipple, Bergen County, New Jersey, was about as good a place to grow up as anywhere. “Suburban New Jersey in the ‘50s, in a working-class town—it was like Leave It to Beaver,” he said. “I lived on a block where there were probably 50 other kids. I had four brothers, I married a girl from my hometown … That’s just the way things were in those days.”
Whipple left New Jersey for college, but returned soon after. He estimates that 20 percent of his high-school friends still live within a 20-mile radius of Bogota, the small town in Bergen County where they grew up. But most of those friends’ kids have moved away: “They couldn’t afford it. That’s not a scientific survey, but it’s the scuttlebutt. It’s in the air.”
These days, some Millennials can’t get out of New Jersey fast enough. From 2000 to 2013, the number of 22-to-34-year-olds living in New Jersey fell by 2.3 percent, according to Census data, even while the number of people in this age bracket increased by 6.8 percent nationally during the same timeframe. According to a calculation byGoverning using Census estimates, New Jersey ranked 47th out of 50 states and Washington, D.C., for its percentage of Millennials in 2012.
Why are so many young people leaving the Garden State? The smart-growth nonprofit New Jersey Future considered this demographic trend in a report released in September. The report measured New Jersey’s municipalities on three smart growth metrics: walkability and street connectivity; the presence of a mixed-use center; and net activity density (defined as population plus employment, divided by developed square miles).
Unsurprisingly, New Jersey’s Millennials are just like Millennials everywhere else: They gravitate toward dense, mixed-use, walkable areas. Across the 118 places that scored well on all three smart-growth metrics, Millennials are 25 percent more prevalent than they are statewide. Conversely, they are 19 percent less likely than the general New Jersey population to live in the places that scored badly on all three metrics.
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My parents recently left NJ, as they were paying over $13,000 in property taxes alone. Mind you where I grew up, it was a small farm town with no paid police, no paid fire dept, no sidewalks, no street lamps, no anything. I also graduated middle school with 68 kids in my class. NJ is a great place, but they force you out with the amount of taxes they charge.
ReplyDeleteI left New Jersey in 1986 and moved to Salisbury. I was 31, single, had a job making 63k a year and could barely afford to lie there.
ReplyDeleteYea and Md is trying to do that too 5:47
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