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The wife and I are looking to make the plunge to the burbs, from West New York, NJ.
We both work in midtown, NYC and are looking for relatively quick and easy commute. Prefer train and hoping for a max of 1:15. Bus is not a dealbreaker but not ideal.
We have a 1 year old baby so we need a good town, with good day care options and elementary schools as well as some kind of a community/downtown.
So far we have looked at townhouses in West Orange and Wayne. We like the options that we saw but are concerned about commutes and towns. Taxes in both are pretty outrageous but it's NJ so we'll just have to bite the bullet. What are some of our other options?
The wife and I are looking to make the plunge to the burbs, from West New York, NJ.
We both work in midtown, NYC and are looking for relatively quick and easy commute. Prefer train and hoping for a max of 1:15. Bus is not a dealbreaker but not ideal.
We have a 1 year old baby so we need a good town, with good day care options and elementary schools as well as some kind of a community/downtown.
So far we have looked at townhouses in West Orange and Wayne. We like the options that we saw but are concerned about commutes and towns. Taxes in both are pretty outrageous but it's NJ so we'll just have to bite the bullet. What are some of our other options?
Thanks
West Orange and Wayne have both high taxes and most of NJ will. Think about if you really need a townhouse. At your price range you could get a decent place in Wayne or West Orange and have single family home which has no HOA. Even if you pay for landscaping you will come out ahead.
Wayne has no downtown, just a bunch of neighborhoods built on old farmland. The train station in Wayne is far from large parts of the town. I would skip Wayne.
Yea we're open to single family homes as well, however what I've been seeing are much older homes in need of a lot of renovations in that price range.
We're very open to other towns as well but unless I go to Monmouth county, single family homes seem to be huge projects if they are under 500k in a decent town.
You might want to think twice about relying on NJ Transit regional rail. I recently got an apartment in Jersey City because dealing with the endless NJ Transit issues was wearing me out.
Cancelled Trains, Late Trains, Overcrowded Trains - Routine. There are constant issues with the Amtrak tunnels.
It's a shame. What could be a nice, relaxing, quick way into the city is a nightmare instead.
You might want to think twice about relying on NJ Transit regional rail. I recently got an apartment in Jersey City because dealing with the endless NJ Transit issues was wearing me out.
Cancelled Trains, Late Trains, Overcrowded Trains - Routine. There are constant issues with the Amtrak tunnels.
It's a shame. What could be a nice, relaxing, quick way into the city is a nightmare instead.
I will add to this. I took the train in for decades. OCCASIONALLY there were cancelled trains, a little more often late trains. Most of the time trains were not overcrowded except when another train had broken down and we had to pick up the passengers or on days when non-commuters herd into the city by train to get drunk--St. Patrick's, for example. And on the NJCL, there used to be a bunch of loud, stupid, drinking fetuses (people in their early 20s) on Tuesday nights in summer, which perplexed me until one of the conductors told me that there was a bar in Belmar that had 25 cent beers on Tuesday nights and they were on their way and getting a head start.
So, it's never perfect, but most of the time it IS a nice, relaxing way into the city.
However.
Rarely in my commuting years using different rail lines did I go into NY Penn. THAT is the biggest problem of all, the tunnels going into Penn Station in Manhattan. If you use a train line that goes to Hoboken, where you connect to the city via PATH, it is much better. I also in my last commuting years took the train to Newark Penn and then connected by PATH from there. That's a little worse than PATH from Hoboken, because it's much more crowded and the ride is longer, but still better than the risk you take going to NY Penn.
So if you are adamant about finding that fabulous one-seat ride into Manhattan, you might want to rethink it, because often it is less fabulous than the NJ Transit/PATH combination.
Like msulinski I'd recommend you look further south into Union County, around Cranford possibly. It's about an hour fifteen door to door for me and I'm around Union Square.
As long as you don't mind the transfer at Newark Penn Station every day the transit provides a few options, either the train or an express bus. Pricing is under 500K for a single family home but right now the inventory is really limited, just a very hot market for some weird reason. But check out Scotch Plains or Mountainside as well.
Is there still a zoo in Scotch Plains? When I was around 13, I had to go to the Scotch Plains Zoo and try to get a baby elephant used to me sitting on its back so that the owners could take and sell Polaroid pictures of kids sitting on an elephant at a fair.
The elephant didn't like it. After me being shaken off into mud and elephant **** about ten times, they gave up and just took pictures of kids standing next to a baby elephant.
That's the only time I have ever been to Scotch Plains.
No, that place disappeared over a decade ago. It was a horror in terms of the way that the animals were maintained and--finally--it was shut down.
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