Lost on living options - work is Midtown (E42 and 2nd) (Jersey City: apartment complex, rental)
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Rent Budget - 2-3K.
Open to a 2 bed or a 1 bed that we use the living room as a studio for us and the bedroom for our 3 year old. Mostly want open, usable space. Trying to have another baby.
Need a preschool and classes for the kiddo. Looking for mom groups, library visits, free and fun activities? A gym with childcare? Spent 10 years in Chicago (prebaby) but the last 3 years have been in Raleigh, NC growing accustomed to Costco and creature comforts...
Have a car, undecided on whether to keep or sell.
Polling people has gotten the advice of...
Jersey City (Paulus Hook?),
Chatham, NJ,
Forest Hills in Queens
and also the Westchester suburbs, Tuckahoe.
Like I said, completely lost.
The kicker is we need to move in 3-4 weeks. Call the buildings? Use apartments.com? Streeteasy?
Every day commute to the East Side? Queens. 42nd Street also gives you options for Westchester or Connecticut on Metro North.
There's no way NJ is going to be your happiest answer since 20 minutes of your commute every day is going to be getting across Manhattan from Penn Station or Port Authority. It would be like living near Wrigley Field when you worked near Garfield Park, you'd be better off finding something out in Oak Park because the transfer in the loop twice a day is going to make your week miserable.
Somewhere along the 7 (Queens) or Metro North (Westchester) seems like the obvious choice. It's not as though other places would be impossible, but since a NJ commute gets you only to things on the West side of Midtown, working on a fairly Easterly part of Midtown will be annoying.
Finding a place in the amount of time you have will definitely be tough, it's been a while since I've directly looked for rental properties in NYC (almost 14 years) but at the time a lot of property listings are just done through Craigslist, and I think that's still the case.
I did spend some time a few years ago when were we trying to help my mother-in-law find a place to rent near us (we were looking in South Orange and Maplewood, NJ) and found that while online tools exist, they weren't really that much help. For the most part we just called all the apartment complexes we were interested in until we knew enough about the market to make a call about where to end up.
Renting and owning near NYC requires one to pretty heavily reexamine their priories, as there are no 'magic' areas that will tick everyone's boxes. (i.e. By the time you have an affordable, large house with non-insane taxes with a good school system you're probably pushing 2 hours on commute time.)
There's an apartment complex in South Orange, NJ that does short term leases that would be a potential option for a temporary base while you look further (and SO might be a town that you'd like, although it's less affordable than it once was) if you were working near Penn Station, but since you're on the far east side of Midtown I'd have a hard time recommending anywhere in NJ unless you had other reasons for wanting to be here.
I agree that New Jersey would not be good at all for a commute to the East Side. It’s completely the wrong side of the island for a New Jersey commute. This location is near a Grand Central Terminal which serves Westchester County and Connecticut. You might want to consider Stamford, CT. The train from there is about 55 minutes and there is a big beautiful new neighborhood being built there near the train station called Harbor Point that will likely have an apartment available at such short notice. There are many trains from Stamford during the day so it should be easy to find one that fits your schedule. A link to the Metro North Railroads website is below.
Another option may be White Plains in Westchester. I do not know any specific apartments there and if there are any available on such short notice but it is a consideration. Good luck, Jay
From Weehawken, uptown Hoboken, Union City, and north eastern parts of Jersey City heights, you'd be commuting by bus to Port Authority, then taking the Times Square--Grand Central shuttle. It's not that bad, about 40 minutes (more or less depending on where you are starting from). Parts of queens would be easier. You'd have an easier time if you could take your budget up to 32-3300.
Thank you all for your input!
Narrowing down these options is immensely helpful and taking NJ out of the mix now that I see more clearly the unnecessary logistics.
Looking now at Westchester for a simple commute along the Metro North.
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