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Northern New Jersey House Market Absurdity
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2010 Dec 16, 11:38pm 7,623 views 47 comments
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15k a year?!!
Have you ever been fishing? The bait always dies. Nice try though. Happy Holidays!
You know, last year I spent $15,000, and it wasn’t on property taxes.
Glad to hear you have $15k to spend....
bubblesitter
2010 Dec 21, 3:05am
What? 15K on taxes? What happened to banks share? insurance? maintenance? ....and where is the price appreciation to justify that? I am happy renting.
klarek
2010 Dec 21, 10:22pm
No, I don’t live in Alpine. Would be nice if I did though. Where do you live klarek? Are you also in NJ?
No, I mistook you for an old zillow regular that called himself Alpine. He was screaming from the rooftops for ages that there was no housing bubble, at least in Bergen Co. I was born around those parts but haven't lived there as an adult. Too expensive!
NJ certainly has some nasty parts. Elizabeth, Newark, etc.--anything visible from NYC across the river--and then pretty much all the way down to Old Bridge. The beach towns to the south are not so much dirty as just filled with trashy people.
But if you go to towns like Bridgewater, or Short Hills, or Princeton, you see why they call it the "garden state." We used to drive out on Routes 80 and 78 going west and picnic all over the great scenery . . . mountains, lush trees, etc. If you go out on 80, anything past Parsippany on to the Penn state line is gorgeous. Northwest and centralwest Jersey are not anything like what most New Yorkers think Jersey is.
We used to go to Jenny Jump state park--some beautiful lakes, trails, even some moderate hiking. There's also a nice basin/valley in that area that is fun to drive around and get nice photos.
All that, I would never live/buy in NJ. Probably one of the must fuct up housing markets, 'cause the roads are stupid and the taxes are high, and I'm not sure why you'd overspend on a house for those kinds of privileges.
Incidentally, the taxes are so high because in NJ, each boro pretty much 100% funds their own public schools and most of their police. In other words, NJ's system localized the burden of government funding much more so than most other states. Property taxes have become the main source of that local funding. And I assure you, they will go up more than usual as they continue to have shortfalls, and that's the primary way to continue funding local services.
NJ taxes are so high mainly because there are 568 governments in the very small state, each with it's own services. Polices, fire, schools, pensions, administration, courts etc., etc. are duplicated over and over again. This is a result of a very bad change in the constitution in 1875 that provided for creating new governments almost at random. Whenever a group of people disagreed with the policies of their existing government they were more or less free to break away and create a new one. So they did, a lot.
It's a disaster from a financial point of view to have for example 70 police forces covering a small area (250 sq miles) like bergen county that you can drive through in any direction in 15 minutes.
HousingWatcher
2010 Dec 22, 4:43am
NJ taxes are also high because certain public workers are way overpaid. And contrary to the propaganda you may have heartd on Fox News or from Chris Christie, it's NOT teachers. It's actually the cops. In several towns, cop pay is close to $120k a year.
And despite the insane cop pay, there is an unwritten rule here that you do not talk about it. NEVER. Someone my neighbor knows once spoke about cop pay to a local reporter, and she got threatening phone calls at 2 in the morning.
The median salary for municipal police in Bergen County, $109,700, was 60 percent higher than the median salary in Salem County, $68,792, the lowest in the state. (For reference, that’s higher than the median salary for all teachers in the state, $57,467.)
In Bergen County, 59 of 68 towns have median police salaries above $100,000. The highest median pay in the state was $134,132 in Rochelle Park, where 19 cops patrol a one-square-mile borough near the intersection of the Garden State Parkway and Route 80.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/09/nj_police_salaries_rank_highes.html
But yet the NJ Republicans think that the teacher's union is single handedly bankrupting the state.
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I'm a homeowner (or mortgage renter, if you prefer! lol!) here in Northern New Jersey, approximately 10 miles west of New York City. I've been in my current house for close to 10 years. We planned to be here only for a few years and then sort of upgrade but the housing market went nuts and we had to wait. In fact, I bought my house in a private deal without any house tour guides involved or maniac bidders. We sort of got lucky in that sense because even in 2000/2001, there were lines to get into open houses here and multiple bids were placed on everything and anything within hours of a house coming onto the market.
Anyway, it's 4 or 5 years since the so-called peak and the prices here are still hanging on with only a minimal drop. The prices rose 90% in the span of 4 years and they seemed to have not come down much at all. It's beyond absurd and I think potential buyers are suckers for even making any bid unless it's a considerable lowball. On top of that, we have property taxes that are so ridiculous, words cannot describe it. A piece of sh1t cape code on a 50 X 100 lot that requires a gas mask to walk into with a price tag in the upper 400s to low 500s with a property tax of over $10,000 per year. This area is easily the least affordable in the country and it's frustrating beyond belief. The buyers are id1ots for even considering anything around here. When the he11 are prices gonna revert to the mean in this area? Everything is still ridiculously overpriced.
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