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Hi,
My wife and I are in search of a property in NJ. We have family in Bloomfield. With so many towns in play, I would really appreciate any guidance here. Thank you for your help.
Where are you coming from? - Yonkers, NY most recently. Brooklyn, NY for the past 10 years.
Why are you moving? - In search of buying a house in a good school district. We love the Hudson Valley but cannot find anything affordable so we are hoping that NJ may unlock some possibilities, but I do not know if that is really the case and that is the main reason I am asking here.
Where will you be working? Upper East Side, Midtown
Will you buy or rent? Buy
What is your budget? 375-400k
What kind of place are you looking for ? 1-2 floor smaller home/town home. 2br 1.5ba at minimum.
Hoping for a home with good bones, that would require minimal updating or work.
Will anyone (spouse, children, pets) be moving with you? Spouse, cat, maybe a child in the future.
Do you need/want good public schools? Yes.
Briefly describe the kind of neighborhood you'd like to live in. Safe, Food/restaurants, Parks, Diverse, a little bit of space.
List three things that are important to you in order of importance.
1. Commute to NYC. I work in the Upper East Side/Yorkville (Q train). My schedule requires me to be in by 8am hard start every day day of the week without exception. My wife is in Midtown at a couple of different offices but works from home at times and travels many weeks so that will be mostly EWR and more flexible overall. The commute to UES is the hardest problem for us to solve in my view. I am interested in the commuter bus options but am also somewhat skeptical of hanging my hat on a bus given the lack of flexibility in my 8a hard starts.
2. Price. Our budget is fairly limited as listed here.
3. Schools.
“Hard start at 8:00 am without exception” is going to be the ultimate deal breaker here. Unless of course you plan on being at your office by 7:00 am each day so that only a delay of greater than 1 hour would make you truly late.
The budget is a little low for wanting good schools AND commuting to city, but certainly no impossible if you’re ok with a small home needing updates. How much of a commute time would you be ok with?
You’re familiar with Bloomfield, have you looked there? Commute to the city is decent and you can get a pretty good home for that budget but the high school isn’t very good.
Alternatively you can do Fair Lawn and get not as nice a house but have much better schools.
You'll want to spend a night at the family's house in Bloomfield and see if you like the commute, because I think that's a reasonable idea of what you'd be in for from a lot of the places people are going to mention.
So try it for a few days, see if it's more reasonable than Yonkers, but if your 8:00 start is a real issue then I think you should look closer along the Metro North line and transfer at 125th Street instead of Port Authority and then the S and then up the East Side.
Not a good idea. You said "maybe a child in the future"... why not stay in Brooklyn until then, maybe the job situation will have changed? There are no good commutes to the UES in New Jersey.
“Hard start at 8:00 am without exception” is going to be the ultimate deal breaker here. Unless of course you plan on being at your office by 7:00 am each day so that only a delay of greater than 1 hour would make you truly late.
The budget is a little low for wanting good schools AND commuting to city, but certainly no impossible if you’re ok with a small home needing updates. How much of a commute time would you be ok with?
You’re familiar with Bloomfield, have you looked there? Commute to the city is decent and you can get a pretty good home for that budget but the high school isn’t very good.
Alternatively you can do Fair Lawn and get not as nice a house but have much better schools.
Thanks for your response. As far as commute time is concerned, I am not sure what to expect as a reasonable guess 1hr15min feels like my maximum. Is that unreasonable?
You'll want to spend a night at the family's house in Bloomfield and see if you like the commute, because I think that's a reasonable idea of what you'd be in for from a lot of the places people are going to mention.
So try it for a few days, see if it's more reasonable than Yonkers, but if your 8:00 start is a real issue then I think you should look closer along the Metro North line and transfer at 125th Street instead of Port Authority and then the S and then up the East Side.
That's a good idea to spend the night there and then commute. I appreciate it.
Thanks for your response. As far as commute time is concerned, I am not sure what to expect as a reasonable guess 1hr15min feels like my maximum. Is that unreasonable?
Yes, it is a bit unreasonable considering it's the UES. The west side of manhattan is easier to commute to from NJ.
You can go to to the NJ Transit Trip Planner to see what some commutes would be like. I put in a starting point of Radburn Station in Fair Lawn with a destination of Hunter College, arriving by 8:45 am, and that was a 1hr 23min commute, without even counting the time it takes to get to Radburn station. Play around with different towns to your work place and see if there's one that works but keep in mind those commute times are usually best case scenarios.
Thanks for your response. As far as commute time is concerned, I am not sure what to expect as a reasonable guess 1hr15min feels like my maximum. Is that unreasonable?
So much of this depends on if you mean door to door as your commute or if you mean time on the train. Your problem is transfers and schedules.
You leave the house at 6:30, it takes 10 minutes to get to your local station, park, get to the platform and wait on the 6:40 train. Hooray, it's on time and you find a seat! 45 minutes later you're in Manhattan and you pull into Penn Station, it's now 7:25. You then leave Penn Station and walk the five minutes over to 6th Avenue to take the Q train uptown. You just missed it, but that's fine, there's another in five minutes. Now it's 7:35 but that's fine, it's only 17 minutes uptown, so you get out at 86th at 7:52, plenty of time to walk to work, take the elevator, get through the door and sit down at your desk. Ninety minutes door to door, not too shabby!
Now, I'm not saying you have to take the train, maybe you take the bus, so imagine a similar schedule but you get off at 42nd and take the S to GCT and then the 6 uptown or whatever. All of this precludes a schedule for public transit that works for you. What if the train isn't at 6:40 but 6:45? That's cutting it close, right? So you then take the earlier train at 6:25, which means now you leave the house at 6:15 and you've got an hour and 45 minute commute because of the schedule alone, not to mention missing a second Q train because it's too crowded or the signals on the NJT being frozen or something take just takes up an additional five minutes on one of your transfers.
So a 75 minute commute starts to look kind of difficult to the UES if you mean door to door. I have a 75 minute commute door to door and I live in Cranford working on the west side of Union Square. Every time I have to start my day on the UES I plan on at least 90 minutes door to door but the schedule generally makes it closer to two hours door to door.
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