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We (me, husband and our one year old boy) are currently rentingan apartment in downtown Jersey City, NJ. I work in NYC downtown and my husbandwork in NJ, his project is currently close to Paramus and he sometimes have totravel too. The only reason why we opted for downtown jersey city was to savetime my commute time to NYC, even though the apartments are super expensive ($3kplus for 2 BR 1 Bath) and not so clean neighborhood (roach and rat infections).
We are planning to buy a single family house in NJ, andlooking for an area which should have good schooling system and a good train commuteto NYC (good as in travel time under an hour).
I need my travel time from home to NYC downtown office to beless than an hour, as I would need to drop-off/pick-up baby from his daycare.[/SIZE]
Hereby summarizing the main aspects that I am focusing on:
Budget < $700k
Good School district
Good commute to NYC (train travel under an hour;prefer train over bus)
Safe and clean neighborhood
Look forward to your suggestions on cities/areas which wecan start to explore before making our final purchase. Thanks in advance!
Look at towns along the train line, Westfield and Cranford are good options, as is Millburn, Maplewood. Edison is a possibility also, but I think you are pushing it for 1 hr into downtown NYC. Montclair and Glen Ridge are also nice suburbs but the commute from there is better to midtown than downtown, not sure if you can make downtown in less than 1 hr. Actually getting downtown from anywhere in suburban NJ in under an hour (in a good school district and nice surroundings anyway) is tough to find. There might be a couple of places further north in NJ that suit such as Oradell, Ridgewood but I'm not that familiar with the commute from there.
Where Downtown, Battery area? SoHo? 14th Street? Cranford to 14th street is about 50 minutes with the PATH train transfer and that's about as fast as that line gets (this morning I got on the 8:17 and arrived at 14th at 9:07). I also walk to the train in Cranford, so I left the house at 8:10 and actually got into the office at 9:15.
If you were headed to WTC you could do that in an hour, but it's the Manhattan walking and Cranford parking that'll get you. But your budget would work out here and the schools are certainly good. Westfield is pricier but the schools are slightly better and it's a longer commute.
Where Downtown, Battery area? SoHo? 14th Street? Cranford to 14th street is about 50 minutes with the PATH train transfer and that's about as fast as that line gets (this morning I got on the 8:17 and arrived at 14th at 9:07). I also walk to the train in Cranford, so I left the house at 8:10 and actually got into the office at 9:15.
If you were headed to WTC you could do that in an hour, but it's the Manhattan walking and Cranford parking that'll get you. But your budget would work out here and the schools are certainly good. Westfield is pricier but the schools are slightly better and it's a longer commute.
Yeah, call it 20 minutes from Cranford to Newark and 25 minutes from Newark to WTC. A few minutes on the Newark transfer and it rounds out to about 50 minutes on the train.
700K can do well in Cranford, depending on the location, but a 3BR should easily be within your budget as long as you don't demand new construction. The new construction condos that shared a wall around the corner from me went for 700K when our 1920's house is half that price.
Thanks everyone!
I did some research on Cranford and Westfield and I guess, the population is not diverse there.
What i missed in my original post is that, we are an Asian - Indian family and would like to have few Asian - Indian families around us. I understand that Edison has a huge Asian Indian community, however the train commute from Edison to NYC - WTC would be over an hour and a half. I really want to avoid that long train commute.
Please let me know if there are other towns which have under an hour train commute to NYC -WTC, good schools, safe and clean neighbor hood and few Asian Indian families in the community.
Checkout Holmdel, best schools and near train station for easy commute to NY
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