NJ raised them, and now it’s pricing them out of ever owning a home

I have spent a lot of time lately writing about what New Jersey is costing the people who live here. Retirees doing the math on fixed incomes. Seniors watching Stay NJ get scaled back after they planned their lives around it. Families in their 50s deciding whether to stay or go.

Now I want to talk about the ones we haven't talked about enough. The younger generation. The kids who grew up here, went to school here, got jobs here — and are now staring at a housing market that is essentially telling them: this place was not built for you.

My own adult children feel it. Coworkers in their 20s and 30s feel it. I hear it constantly, and it sounds less like frustration now and more like resignation.

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The math that stops them cold

The median home price in New Jersey right now is approximately $535,000. That number alone is enough to stop most young buyers in their tracks. But the real wall is what comes next. A standard 20% down payment on that home is $107,000. Add closing costs — typically another $10,000 to $16,000 — and you are looking at needing somewhere in the neighborhood of $120,000 just to get your foot in the door.

Where does that money come from when you are 28 or 32 and you are already stretched to the limit paying rent, a car payment, insurance, groceries and — for a lot of these young people — student loan debt that follows them around like a second mortgage they never got a house for?

I know this firsthand. Linda and I would not have had a down payment when we bought our first home if it hadn't been for an inheritance when I was 29. And a decent down payment in the early 1990s was somewhere in the $20,000 range. We are not talking about the same world anymore.

A pattern that keeps repeating

Here is what I keep thinking about. I have been covering New Jersey's affordability crisis in one form or another for most of my career at NJ 101.5. In the early days it was the tax revolt — a massive tax increase in the early 90s that ignited our listeners and honestly put this station on the map. After 9/11 it was safety. After Sandy it was infrastructure and the long painful process of rebuilding. Through all of it, the cost of living kept creeping up in the background, never going away, always getting worse.

Mikie Sherrill understood this. She identified affordability as the defining issue of this moment, leaned into it hard, and won. The issue has never been more urgent — and it has never touched more generations at once.

The boomers and Gen Xers wrestled with this in their own time and most of them figured it out, one way or another. Now their kids — the millennials and Gen Z — are hitting the same wall, except the wall is taller and they are carrying more debt when they get there.

The next wave of the exodus

The Carolinas keep coming up. I hear it from young people the same way I hear it from retirees. More house. Lower taxes. A down payment that does not require a small miracle or a family tragedy to pull together.

What worries me most is what happens when both generations make that decision at the same time. The grandparents go south for the retirement math. The adult kids go south for the ownership math. And suddenly the multigenerational family life that New Jersey used to make possible — grandparents nearby, cousins down the street, Sunday dinners that did not require a flight — disappears.

There ought to be a Stay NJ for every generation. I know what that actually looks like. It looks like lower taxes. We have been saying it from the top of a thousand-foot radio tower for 36 years.

We are not going to stop.