Let me guess: Because it’s the place where everyone wants to move to.

The house I am selling is 35 minutes by car to midtown Manhattan when there is no traffic (weekends) and 1 hour and 15 minutes by NJ Transit train when I went to work. There are 3 shopping malls within 20 minutes, the regional public theater within 10 minutes, South Mountain Reservation Parkland within 5 minutes and several movie theaters within 10 minutes. The Jersey shore is less than an hour away.
The price for my house? $540,000.
Taxes on said house – $8000.

Lets compare what I am looking at in the East Bay, ostensibly Berkeley, Piedmont/Montclair, Albany. First of all $540 buys a dump with 2 small bedrooms if I am lucky and no land. For something reasonably close (and there are not alot of reasonably close homes), I am looking at homes at or slightly above $1mm. Given taxes of 1.3% that’s about $13,000.

Is NJ cheaper? You bet.
-c

A NJ suburb may not be the most exciting place in the world, but you can visit Philly and NYC from central NJ about as easily as someone can get to San Francisco and San Jose. Whether the cities compare to each other favorably, well that’s another story.

Anyways, back to real estate. When I grew up in NJ, we measured lot sizes in acres. I suspect that recent construction resembles CA real estate, but there’s a lot of old housing developments out there. Even in socal, anything I buy will be measured in sq. ft, and god forbid my career takes me back north.

There is no question that home prices in the SF area are far higher, on average than anywhere in NJ, including Hunterdon, which is now the wealthiest county in the United States. What I can say is that property taxes on typical $600-900k homes here (and that is the typical range in the northern tier of the county) is probably $15k to $25k per year. Our schools are far better than those in California, and I base that on having friends with kids – and who are teachers in both places. And our traffic is a lot easier to handle – except for all the Pennsylvania folks driving through our county to get to work in NY.

Oh, did I mention, we are an hour from New York City, which as much as I love SF, is kind of a nice place to visit??? BTW, yes, Hunterdon is 95% Republican (not me) – but they are the Christy Whitman/Nelson Rockefeller Republicans – pro-choice, anti-war.