NJ is the state I resided in for the longest period of my life. When I was a little kid my parents decided to avoid the increasing 'hoodification of our current residence and into the supposedly greener pastures of the Garden State. So, when I was about 4 we shuffled off to NJ. It really was the only state of my childhood I significantly recall, so I guess I would have to consider myself a Garden State native.
When we moved into a small town in Central NJ it was quiet. Only a few thousand residents, most of them multi-generational types. Lots of farmers (our house was built on an old potato farm back in the 60s or 70s). Everybody in school knew each other through their families, so I was kind of the odd ball, but it was okay because when you start school in Kindergarten you make friends right away.
Over the years things changed, even though our town was about ~75 minutes away from NYC. The area became even more populated, the school board released figures showing student numbers growing in an exponential manner. Everybody thought they were wrong and trying to justify extra taxes but it turned out they had actually underestimated. Massively. As the years went by all of the empty space and farmland disappeared, costs went up, and traffic became a massive gridlock.
Many of the multi-generational classmates took their leave, often selling the family houses (and their acreage) for massive bucks. It was common to hear from people who had just sold out that even they wouldn't be able to buy their own houses back if they wanted to -- property prices were flying. The soccer moms took over the area with their giant SUVs, strip malls grew from the ground like weeds, and characters from the city moved in and set up crack houses (often without the watchful residents noticing).
It was odd to watch an entire area lose its culture and morph into a bedroom community in the space of probably a decade. I used to do EMS (first as a volunteer, then as a way to earn extra money during college) so that gave me a chance to meet all of the residents and see places I normally would not interact with. Crack houses sprung up in middle class neighborhoods, and the people next door would not know because they were almost never home or just thought the neighbors just really liked Dylan. One time I picked up some kid I went to high school with who needed to go to a detox/lockdown facility and on the way there he pointed out all the various "pharmacies" which I had no idea even existed.
Bangers from the local "branch" of gangs from Camden, Trenton or NYC would come from two or three towns away to parties and start trouble. There were also parts you would not want to visit, and these areas would be mere miles from nice upper middle class areas. A couple of times the ambulance (thankfully didn't happen to me) took stray gunfire at stoplights for no clear reason.
Upon graduation everybody left. Seriously. You either joined the military, or went to college. (One thing I remember from my HS graduation that still kind of makes me angry is they had a list in the program of kids who were going to which college, and all that. IIRC, people who joined the service or had signed on for a job didn't get that recognition. WTF?) A few of my friends who tried to stay (one got a temporary civil service engineering job inspecting amusement park rides) quickly found out that even married they had to live with parents or friends. An entire generation got priced out of its own village and left the state. The taxes do not help either, they are insane.
Why stay there? You could get a much better life, at a lower cost in another place. My entire family has moved out and not looked back. ("Don't look back, you can never look back.") One of the reasons I never go back home is I don't think I would recognize my old home or the surrounding area anymore. The state... it is a changin'.
The irony here is that my first girlfriend and I broke up almost entirely because she never saw herself leaving the Garden State, and I never saw myself living there. I wonder if she still feels the same way now? Anyway, I'm glad it worked out that way and I think my wife is too ;-)
