The most caring small cities in NJ

Real estate site Movoto regularly puts out top 10 lists that touch on the country's good and bad. They list towns that are most exciting, boring and even dangerous. So, does Jersey care? Apparantly yes. Three Jersey towns were among Movoto's top 50 in the U.S.

New Brunswick (Dendroica cerulea, Flickr.com)

First, how did the site come up with their findings? According to them, they started by making a list of all the small cities in the U.S. with populations between 50,000 and 60,000, which gave them 140 places total.

They then used sources like the U.S. Census, the 2012 Uniform FBI Crime Report, business listings, and Sperling’s Best Places to look at each place in terms of the following criteria:

Student-counselor ratio
Crimes per 100,000 people (the lower the better)
Pet shelters and rescue per capita
Community services per capita
Mental health counselors and therapists per capita
Percent of workers who carpool (caring for the environment)

From there, they ranked each place with scores from one to 140, where the lowest scores were the most caring places. They then averaged each city’s rankings into one overall Big Deal Score, where again, the lowest score went to their most caring place.

How did NJ do? Out of the top 50, three made the cut.