defend the indefensible: new jersey

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/business/media/senator-seeks-fcc-review-of-wwor-tvs-license.html?hpw

no news? really?

Portions of the shore, particular towns, and beauty of the nature near my hometown are to always be defended.

i'm in North Jersey near Newark and it's hard finding things to defend. it's like a combination of the worst of the suburbs and the worst of urban environments. there's nothing to do, you have to drive in dense, perpetual traffic on shitty roads just to buy a thing of milk which ends up taking a half an hour, etc. commuting to work takes over an hour to go about 11 miles daily. everything's barely a notch below NYC in affordability.

it's probably OK if you have a family, but woe be to any young single adult living here. the more rural areas can be nice, though. the town i grew up in had some pretty nature and old architecture that gave it a sorta idyllic Northeast American feel in some parts, though you'd get pulled out of that pretty quickly with the redneck bigots who populated the area. honestly, most of the defensible for me comes from being so close to NYC (heresy!!)

Northeast Jersey other than Jersey City and maybe Hoboken is particularly bad -- expensive, dense, mostly pretty uncharming.

And then again

http://gawker.com/passenger-records-nj-bus-driver-jerking-off-on-the-job-754944696

I grew up north-west of the Sopranos-zone where all the shitty jokes about smelly NJ are born. Up there it's all hills, mountains, woods, creeks, railroads... very pretty. Newark is shit and so is Jersey City mostly. I live in Hoboken and the best of culture is almost completely drained yet it is still safe and quaint looking.

Where are you spectrum? That's sounds about the opposite if my experience growing up and of everyone I know still out there or whove moved out there. Queens and Brooklyn transplants to lovely places like Maplewood, South Orange, Montclair etc. All "near Newark".

the town i live in is absolutely beautiful but it sucks

But yeah spectrum. Didn't notice the second part. Why would any young single person live anywhere that isn't a major city i'll never know.

I moved outta "near Newark" (Passaic counts, right?) 21 years ago, don't miss it.

I live in Hoboken and the best of culture is almost completely drained yet it is still safe and quaint looking.

tru dat.

i was born & raised around Princeton ... what countryside is left (i.e. hasn't been turned into miles of McMansions and strip malls) is still pretty nice and bucolic.

Center of town is pretty there!

xp eisebar that is also where i am from, and live currently (cranbury). i am in the princeton public library right now.

Hey Hurting: you up for some fast pro bono advice? Or know someone who does Jersey residential law? My lease has gone month to month for quite some time now and my new landlord (last one died, this is his brother who inherited the space) is evicting me in September. I'm going to go in any case but I'd like to know how much leeway I have over him for negotiating purposes. How much does the law support the renter?

I know a lawyer that specializes in that but he is $$$

Btw Spectrum if you settle somewhere a bit west or north-west of where you are you can find much more defensible environments. Why be so close to Newark?

forks I don't know anything about jersey landlord tenant and I don't want to commit legal malpractice. Anything I told you would just be from the internet anyway.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/13/dont_vote_for_cory_booker/

yay

lucky me, they're doing polling at a school right outside my apartment. i'm going to vote for rush holt. booker's the wrong kind-of democrat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/realestate/meanwhile-in-jersey-city.html
it's all downhill from here

Or maybe the nytimes means Queens?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/realestate/costly-rents-push-brooklynites-to-queens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Next week it'll be yonkers.

Can't believe they used that photo! That statue is like the funniest in-joke in Jersey City. I used to take people to see it b/c they didn't believe me.

that statue is in appallingly bad taste.

NYCers, please stay out.

i have mixed feelings about that statue -- glad it exists, but it is bizarre.

p. sure JC's charter expressly forbids ~entertaining nite lyfe~

this article is basically because fulop has connections i think

probably right but couple of things are starting to percolate around here over the past year

yeah but JC's perennial pending resurgence has been noted so many times that its dormant potential has become its defining narrative (the city's been cheap and accessible and unpretentious for so long precisely b/c its residents have insistently declined attempts to establish ~NYC culture~ that would essentially destroy it's raison d'etre even while raising its pulse above torpid). (11,000 new housing units in the pipeline obv suggest cultural upheaval via market forces, but I've also seen a fair amount of these new multi-unit monstrosities almost pitch black at night).

xp

higher prices are inevitable given NYC's real estate trajectory, but I'm not sold on the stale gloss being hustled again.

i'm looking for an apartment out here and a nice, grown up 1bedroom at 1750 is nowhere to be found

I've had four apartments in the downtown area, but I haven't looked for a rental f/ years. (prices f/ property tho have been stagnant since the RE bubble popped, but I have noticed some of the larger buildings tenaciously clinging to their prices despite numerous empty units). $1750 admittedly seems high f/ a one-bedroom but it obv depends on yr criteria f/ ~nice and grown up~ (also JC's currency is p. cyclical compared to the more rigid arcs of NYC, maybe yr caught in a temporary upswing? idk).

i think that post-sandy everyone wants to rent and no one wants to own. There are about six for sale signs on each block out here. condos near public transit start at 2k+ for a 1br

no yr right, iirc NYC is experiencing the same upward pressure on rental prices. (I'm just curmudgeonly waving away JC's played cultural renaissance pitch, nothing to see here, move along).

i'm not arguing it's played; i heard the same schtick when i moved here a decade ago. but damned if it don't look like it's kinda taking root finally. not that i'm pleased exactly.

i moved to Hoboken in 1998, and talk about JC's resurgence was rife back then too (as well as "evidence" that it wasn't just some will o' the wisp/typical realtor bullshit). so i'll believe when i see it (to wit: when it's too late to jump in and make a mint)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/realestate/24hunt.html
^five years old now.
i'm friends with these guys, their great dane died unfortunately. sweet dog.

oh no i agree like everything feels a bit 'nicer' each year but its so gradual you barely notice. but there are these storefronts that seem to keep trying to get ahead of the curve, and have a succession of things like 8$ organic juices that just are not going to cut it, and eventually either they become another pizza and wings shop or office space. worst 'old jersey is going away' moment for me lately was europa deli having to close up.

Didn't they reopen? I thought they just renovated? Totally agree on the dipshittery of eight buck juice places. Plus they are generally poorly managed! My ex calls jersy city "the and of the half assed idea".

they renovated and reopened and then one day there was an eviction notice up and now they're gone entirely. at one point before they folded, they started smoking their own salmon on occasion. it was the freshest smoked salmon i've had.

yeah forks I don't think you're ~rong~ or w/e, I mean, sure, there's Barcade and the bike shop and a handful of new restaurants and the goddamn family circus obstacle course at the Grove Street PATH entrance and how can I forget Lucky 7 next door which proudly hosts the worst garage rock in the Tri-State, but it's just a hodgepodge of misc. venues w/o any real traction. (waiting to see if JC will do anything interesting with the ~Powerhouse Arts District~ or will look to emulate WALDO's heroic transformation from thriving art community to noxious condo cluster).

that sucks about europa, i rarely pass by there but i was happy they were there.
we need a music venue very badly. one appears to be coming soon.

RIP Uncle Joe's

Didn't Uncle Joe's close years ago?

Anyway, came to post this, which my friends make:

http://www.drivingjersey.com/drivingjersey.com/Home.html

It seems the real Bridgegate story may be in Hoboken

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/mayor-christie-camp-held-sandy-money-hostage

i'm starting to smell prison

Governor Chris Christie today announced that New Jersey Department of Transportation Commissioner Jamie Fox will transition back to the private sector by the end of the month, when NJDOT Deputy Commissioner Joseph Bertoni will take over as Acting Commissioner.

A prominent Democrat who worked for both former Governor James McGreevey and former Senator Bob Torricelli, Fox worked as a lobbyist for United Airlines prior to going to the Christie Administration, and prior to the resignation of a United Airlines CEO amid a federal probe of the Bridgegate scandal.

WNYC’s Matt Katz reported earlier this week that while a lobbyist, “Fox tried to influence Democrats in the Legislature to back off from its investigation of the mysterious lane closures at the George Washington Bridge in the fall of 2013, according to three sources from the Legislature and Port Authority close to the investigation.”

http://politickernj.com/2015/10/christie-fox-done-as-dot-commissioner/

Cory Booker's cutesy pandering to HRC crowd at today's rally makes me want to fwow up on him weal bad

@KattyKayBBC
Cory Booker - Teddy Roosevelt was wrong it's not a man we need in the arena, it's a woman.

@dick_nixon
The Navy has a name for this sort of thing.

Jennifer Epstein‏@jeneps
Cory Booker: "I hate to contradict Bon Jovi but, dear God, Hillary Clinton you give love a good name"

@pareene
Ppl shouldn't get rich as the country falls into crisis, I agree with the failed Newark mayor who became a millionaire thru a sham startup