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TagsBY JOE TYRRELL
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
Somerville residents should head for The Hills.
Anyone who lives in Princeton Borough is making a major municipal mistake.
And while you may find yourself in a beautiful house in Upper Saddle River, you should ask yourself, "Well, how do I get out of here?"
Those are some of the less heralded developments from New Jersey Monthly's 2010 Top Towns list, featured in the magazine's March edition.
Once again, most New Jerseyans are living in the wrong places. Take some advice from Groucho Marx: you shouldn't live in any place that would have you as a resident.
The latest installment of the biennial rankings by the Monmouth University Polling Institute finds Bedminster, a town dramatically remade in the past 25 years, leading the way."Bedminster has made the best of the changes have happened over the years," said Mayor Robert Holtaway.
Chatham Township, which was first in the previous rankings, slips to number two. The rest of the top 10 consists of Caldwell, West Hanover, Upper Township, Tabernacle, Plainsboro, Mountainside, Verona and North Caldwell. All did respectably to very well in 2008.
Almost as much attention has gone to two towns in the top 20. Nearly deserted Walpack, with 39 residents, ranks 17th. Teterboro, a nice place for an airport, comes in 20th with 17 people. In the most densely populated state in the nation, only two of the top 20 communities, Plainsboro and Medford, have at least 13,400 residents.
"This is not the final word in ranking towns," said institute Director Patrick Murray.
The researchers looked at population growth rate since the last census; three-year change in median home prices; 2009 median property taxes combined with the change over two years; percentage of land preserved as open space; 2008 unemployment rate; 2008 total crime; number of acute-care hospitals within 10 miles, and student performance on state tests for grades four, eight and 11.
"These are the only areas where we have standardized data for every municipality in the state," Murray said.
Even those limited data sets can be skewed by factors beyond local control, he said.
"Shore towns don't rank highly because of the crowds in the summer and the crime they bring," he said. "But that's three months of the year. The other nine months you can enjoy a nice environment."
So by these measures, Wildwood City is the worst place to live in New Jersey. The rest of the bottom dwellers are, in ascending order: Loch Arbour, Perth Amboy, Elizabeth, Salem City, Asbury Park, Irvington, Prospect Park and West New York, Chesilhurst, New Brunswick, Paterson, Penns Grove, North Wildwood and Haledon.
But those aren't the only communities with cause for regret. Theaters, restaurants, major universities? All worthless.
Princeton Borough comes in at 354 of 566 municipalities; just crossing into Princeton Township improves your neighborhood to number 43.
The "brainy borough" of Metuchen, 347, is no match for Kearny, 285. Upper Saddle River looks up from 383 to Mount Holly at 281.
With extensive pollution, Pompton Lakes dropped almost 200 places since the 2008 list, to 425. But it is still comfortably ahead of Somerville, which fell to 483.
All the way down at 510, Morristown is 202 places behind Victory Gardens.
Not to worry, these types of lists are just "snapshots," Murray said. What interests him more is what the data reveal about community trends.
"Which town is keeping its taxes down?" he said. "Which town is bringing its school scores up?"
More than in previous ratings, tax issues sorted out municipalities this time, according to Murray. In the current difficult economic climate, holding the line on property taxes has become even more of a challenge for many communities.
"There's supposed to be a 4 percent cap" on tax-supported municipal spending, Murray said. "But that's not what's happening."
In the two-year period, though, Bedminster's property taxes – relatively low by New Jersey standards – went down 3 percent, helping the township vault more than 100 places in the rankings.
"Bedminster had a bad year the last time we did the rankings, two years ago," Murray said, but it is one community that has kept its taxes down at a time "when that is a bigger deal."
A snapshot of the township in 1980 would have shown a sleepy but exclusive domain of families with names like Brady, Dillon, Forbes and Pfizer, where the greatest danger on the mean streets might have been getting trampled by strings of polo ponies. In that year's census, 2,429 of the 2,469 residents were white.
Then Route 78 opened, and Bedminster was in the forefront of exurbs luring jobs from the cities. AT&T built a gigantic campus in 1974, convenient for local executives. But the town fathers had no intention of spoiling their pastoral setting with housing for undesirables like administrative assistants, teachers, accountants, police or middle managers.
Some $2 million in legal fees later, Bedminster and neighboring Bernards Township were forced to accept The Hills, a massive development curling up the western end of the Second Watchung Ridge on the other side of Route 287 from AT&T.
(The warmth of the welcome was apparent in a Bernards councilman's comments about a K. Hovnanian "Society Hill" development. The company should change the name, he said, because middle-class homebuyers "aren't my idea of society.")
Just as The Hills has settled into the landscape, though, its residents have bonded with the town. There's much more traffic, and once sedate local politics are now hotly contested, but in many ways, The Hills woke up the community.
"I think everybody's become well-adjusted to it," Holtaway said. "They found it didn't destroy everything."
Many of Bedminster's rural lanes and hamlets "are still pretty rural," he said. Even as it preserves open space, Bedminster now offers housing affordable to wide segments of an increasingly diverse society, he said. As of 2009, more than 8 percent of residents were Asian, with smaller but growing numbers of Hispanic and African-American.
In finding its way from a stratified past into the 21st Century, "there's been the occasional rough patch, but it's been a pretty good road," Holtaway said.
Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
