Real estate site Movoto is well known for publishing "top tens" on a variety of different subjects when it comes to NJ. Their latest release honors the top small cities in the Garden State.

It's nice to see Monmouth and Ocean represented, but I've got to say the fact that Lakewood ranked number 3 in between Princeton at 2 and Middlesex at 4 is quite puzzling.

Here's a look at the top 10:

1. Borough of Florham Park
2. Municipality of Princeton
3. CDP of Lakewood
4. Borough of Middlesex
5. Borough of Somerville
6. Borough of Oakland
7. Borough of Lincoln Park
8. Borough of Freehold
9. Borough of Ramsey
10. Borough of Hasbrouck Heights

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkiepinkie_infinity / Flickr user Shawn Perez
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stinkiepinkie_infinity / Flickr user Shawn Perez
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Movoto explained its ranking of Lakewood at 3:

Just to be clear, here, we’re talking the smaller Census Designated Place of Lakewood, which is within the larger Lakewood Township. And now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what exactly makes this community in particular so special?

Well for starters, along with Princeton and a few other communities, the average commute time here was just 22 minutes, compared to some places like Guttenberg, for example, where it was over 35 minutes.

This is good news seeing as Lakewood had one of the lowest unemployment rates (4.70 percent), so there were bound to be lots of people out driving to work. And the cherry on top—it ranked as one of the best places for its low average summer temperature of 71 degrees, so you can even roll the windows down.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/joiseyshowaa, Flickr user B K
https://www.flickr.com/photos/joiseyshowaa, Flickr user B K
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Why is Freehold at 8? The site writes:

You know how we mentioned those famous New Jersey bagels in the beginning of this post? Well, we may have found the home of some of the best—Eli’s Hot Bagels is not to be messed around with. Matter of fact, Freehold is the home of lots of “bests,” considering out of everywhere we looked at, it had the very most amenities per capita.

It also had some of the best weather, a commute time of just 22 minutes on average, and the fifth lowest unemployment rate in our analysis—just 4.50 percent.

But seriously, the Everything Bagel at Eli’s? Worth. Moving. To. Freehold.

This is when we need to look at how Movoto determined their top 10. According to the site:

Whether we’re talking about exciting places, boring places, or even the topic of safe places, when we create our Big Deal Lists we use facts and figures rather than our own opinions (even though our own opinions are most certainly always correct and awesome).

So in creating this list, we started by gathering up a list of places in New Jersey with populations between 10,000 and 60,000 people. We then used sources like the U.S. Census 2010, Areavibes, Sperling’s Best Places, and business listings to collect data on the following criteria:

  • Amenities per capita
  • Quality of life (cost of living, median home price, median rent, median household income, and high school graduation rate)
  • Total crimes
  • Tax rates (sales tax and income tax)
  • Unemployment
  • Commute time
  • Weather (temperature and air quality)

Next, we ranked each of our 127 cities, boroughs, towns, Census Designated Places, and municipalities with scores from one to 127—the lower the number, the better. We then averaged each place’s rankings into one Big Deal Score, where the place with the lowest score was our best place, the oh-so-awesome Florham Park.

See their list of the top 50, here.

 

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