patrick.net

HousingWatcher says

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.

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.