Among them, Maplewood.
The story stated, in part:
A Star-Ledger analysis of Census, schools and real estate data shows the state’s outer-ring suburbs, those that exist on the fringe of the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas, have stagnated. Their populations are graying far more quickly than anywhere else in the state as younger couples flock to places like Morristown, Maplewood and Montclair — municipalities that draw a common thread in their walkable downtowns and easy access to mass transit.
"What we have is sort of the beginnings of a re-concentration of the population," said James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. "The tidal wave of metropolitan expansion moving ever outward, that has essentially attenuated."
Hughes said the trend toward more urbanized municipalities has primarily been driven by the millennials, an inexact term used to describe the generation of people born anywhere from the 1980s to the early 2000s.
"The milliennial population has essentially flatlined in some of those outer suburbs," he said. "Millenials want to live in 24-hour-activity environments. We’re seeing that they and younger families in general tend to not want to live in these" outer-ring suburbs.
While this shift has revealed itself relatively slowly over the last decade plus, there are signs it has accelerated in recent years.
The populations of Sussex, Warren and Hunterdon counties, once among the fastest- growing in New Jersey, have each declined since 2010. In many towns in Somerset and Morris counties, the median age has jumped by four to five years since 2000 into the mid-40s, and the number of people over the age of 65 has grown by more than 40 percent. Meanwhile, the median age in towns in more urbanized suburban centers like Maplewood and Collingswood has remained relatively flat or declined.
Read it all HERE.
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