They cut the Stay NJ program — but most of us were never really leaving anyway

Born here, priced out, still here: the New Jersey paradox

I've had the conversation a hundred times. Maybe you have too.

Someone brings up the property taxes, or the energy bills, or what they're paying for a gallon of milk, and within about ninety seconds somebody at the table says it: I'm thinking about leaving. And then everybody else nods, and for a few minutes the whole table is doing math out loud about Florida or the Carolinas or that cousin who moved to Tennessee and can't stop talking about his mortgage payment.

And then somebody orders another round, and nobody leaves.

That's New Jersey in 2026.

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The numbers are genuinely hard to argue with

A new study found that New Jersey residents now need to work 16.2 extra days every year compared to 2007 just to afford the basics — rent, groceries, and a used car. Not vacations. Not a college fund. Just the floor. We rank fourth hardest hit in the entire country.

Since 2020, 192,000 New Jersey residents have packed up and gone. Last year we ranked number one in the country for outbound moves — 62 percent of everyone who relocated, left. The reasons are always the same: property taxes, housing costs, and the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you just can't get ahead.

And now Governor Sherrill's proposed budget wants to cut the Stay NJ property tax relief program — stripping $500 million from seniors who built their retirement plans around that money. The program was literally named Stay NJ. The promise was: we want you to stay. The budget says something different. Apparently staying in New Jersey just got more expensive, even for the people who already decided to stay.

Generations deep and not going anywhere

Here's what the outbound statistics don't capture: how many of us are not just residents of New Jersey, but products of it, layer by layer, going back generations. I'm not talking about living here for ten years. I'm talking about grandparents buried here, parents who never lived anywhere else, siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles all within the same county — sometimes within the same few miles. The family Sunday dinner isn't a commute away. It's down the road.

When you are that rooted, leaving isn't just a financial calculation. It's an amputation.

The food argument always gives them away

You always know when someone from New Jersey has been gone too long. They start telling you about the great pizza they found. They mention a cheesesteak place that's actually pretty good. They swear the bagels aren't that different. They've convinced themselves the Italian food measures up.

It doesn't. None of it does. And deep down, most of them know it.

The people who left New Jersey and found the food just as good somewhere else weren't really from here. Not the way we mean it.

The question nobody wants to answer out loud

For a lot of New Jersey families, staying here has become an act of faith — faith that it's going to be worth it, that the kids will look back someday and be glad they grew up here, that the state will eventually get its act together on taxes and stop driving out the very people who love it most.

That faith is getting expensive. And Trenton keeps testing it.

But I keep running into people who did the math, looked hard at the map, had the conversation at the kitchen table — and stayed. Not because they couldn't leave. Because they couldn't imagine being from somewhere else. Because their mother lives twelve minutes away. Because they know exactly which local place has been there since their parents brought them as a kid.

Because Stay NJ isn't just a tax program. For most of, it never was.

Proud to be New Jersey.