By RONDA KAYSEN FEB. 23, 2018
If you are considering making the leap from New York City to the suburbs, I have an exercise for you. Call a friend who already lives there and ask her if she thinks she still lives close to New York. She might say something like “It’s like I never left! Practically everyone here is from Park Slope.” After talking to her, you’ll think, “Geez, I’ve really got to get on this!”
And why wouldn’t you? Montclair, N.J., a popular destination for many New York expats, bills itself as the town “where the suburb meets the city” and in these very pages, readers were once told to call Maplewood, N.J., “Brooklyn West.”
But I am here today to dispel the myth. The city is nowhere near the suburbs.
Sure, on a good day, like, say, Sunday at 11 p.m., you can zip from Midtown to your picturesque colonial in 30 minutes flat. But try that trip at rush hour, and there’s a good chance you may have an existential crisis sitting on a bus stuck at a standstill on the helix, the hellish ramp that connects the Lincoln Tunnel to the expanse of New Jersey roads.
Granted, the subway is no picnic for city dwellers, with mornings invariably spent wedged against half of Brooklyn while the train idles in a tunnel. Many of the forces plaguing the subways — crowds, delays and aging infrastructure — are also at play in suburban mass transit. But the biggest difference — and the one suburbanites and their brokers often conveniently forget to mention — is the lag time between rides on trains like New Jersey Transit, particularly during off hours.
Miss a subway, and another one will probably come along soon enough. Miss a train to suburbia, and there you are, hopelessly staring at your Clever Commute app while you nurture an intimate relationship with the bowels of Penn Station. When your train arrives an hour later, the buzz from that ill-timed extra glass of Chardonnay has worn off, and you are left wondering why you even bothered to leave the house.
This is no indictment of suburbia. I fully enjoy the trappings of my suburban life — the schools, the space, the fawns in our backyard. My husband and I bought our house in West Orange, N.J., after first renting 10 minutes away in Montclair. We entered the deal aware that we were forever signing away our previous life in Brooklyn. I accepted the bargain because I like the slower pace and the small-town vibe. But I have also made peace with the fact that the city is no longer at my doorstep, and that my quaint downtown strip is no New York.
I, of course, am not alone. In 2017, home sales hit a 35-year high in Westchester County and a 14-year high in Nassau County, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants. “City costs have risen more than the cost of a home” in the suburbs, Mr. Miller said. “We can see that in the massive migration in the last three or four years of city dwellers.”
Over the past 25 years, the number of people commuting across the Hudson River has grown by 28 percent, to 320,000 people a day, with bus trips up 83 percent and nearly tripling the number of rail trips in and out of Penn Station, according to a 2017 Regional Plan Association report.
Companies like PicketFencer and NeighborhoodScout offer services that play destination matchmaker for these newcomers. But until you get here, it’s hard to realize how far you have actually gone. Train and bus schedules are deceptively optimistic. Talk to real estate brokers and they reinforce the rosy narrative, rattling off options — the jitney stops at the corner! There’s a park-n-ride five minutes away! You can walk to the train!
Maps don’t do the situation justice either. Just ask Ilana Dubrovsky, 32. When she was considering moving out of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, with her husband, Allen Razam, 40, and their two children, she pulled out a map and drew a circle around the city. She limited her search to towns less than an hour away. She settled on South Orange, N.J., where she and her husband bought a six-bedroom house in 2014. “I wanted that access. I wanted to see our friends,” said Ms. Dubrovsky, who works in sales.
Do you want to know how many times she has been to Brooklyn in the past four years? Twice.
“It’s such a pain in the butt,” she said. “I don’t want to put two kids on the train, so then I drive. Last time it took us an hour to get from Bay Ridge to Park Slope. An hour! Do you know how many places I go to in an hour in New Jersey?”
To her surprise, Ms. Dubrovsky, who works from home, found that she did not miss her old stamping grounds. Why battle crowds and traffic to go to Prospect Park when there’s a nature reserve with a zoo and miniature golf up the road? “I just don’t have the patience for the city anymore,” she said.
Her husband, however, a real estate broker and personal trainer, still works in Brooklyn, and leaves the house at 4 a.m. every morning to beat the traffic.
Leave Brooklyn and you trade Sahadi’s grocery for impromptu barbecues with a dozen neighbors. Have you seen the size of the parking lot at Costco? You can really load up on burgers. Join the town pool, and you spread out your towel on the grass — yes, there’s grass at the pool — and wait for friends from the neighborhood to just show up.
The perks make it easier to forget the two miserable hours you spent commuting on the train this morning when a city friend asks what it’s like to live out here. Instead, you focus on the charm. Did I tell you about those cute fawns in the yard? And, of course, there are the happy Park Slope transplants.
This might explain how Jennifer and Mark Loga ended up buying a four-bedroom house in Maplewood last December without realizing how long their new commutes would soon be. “Everything that we heard was that it was really convenient,” Mrs. Loga, 31, told me in January when she was eight months pregnant. It was about three weeks after they had moved from Jersey City. The couple had lived in Brooklyn before that.
“Nobody was like, ‘Yeah, it’s a great area, but your commute is going to be horrible,’” she said. Mrs. Loga works in marketing near Madison Square Park and Mr. Loga, 32, a civil engineer, works in the Financial District. “Did we think it was going to be an hour and a half each way? No.”
Wondering how buyers can arrive here unprepared for what’s ahead, I called Leslie Kunkin, a real estate broker who I met one night in 2010 while trapped on a bus for three hours in a snowstorm. Finally, at 3 a.m., we were dropped off on a deserted Montclair street corner to trudge home in knee high snow. Yet, somehow, the odyssey didn’t completely sour me on the suburbs and Ms. Kunkin sold me my house three years later.
In December, Ms. Kunkin and a group of other brokers started an agency, West of Hudson Realty Group, because Montclair is, you know, west of the Hudson River. “Despite our snowstorm, I stand behind our commute,” she said, describing the commute, on the whole, as “amazing.”
“Sure you get stuck in traffic,” she said. But compared with the subway, the ride to the suburbs “is so much more civilized.”
From Ms. Kunkin’s perspective, a ride where you can usually get a plush seat with some elbow room offsets that rigid train schedule.
I asked Mrs. Loga if she regretted her decision, or if the charm of a conductor who stamps your ticket takes the edge off. “You have all these great things, but it’s the one little blemish,” she said. “If you can deal with it, you’re fine.”
And if you can’t, well, then maybe you end up working from home.