5 days ago
WalletHub says you're better off starting a family outside New Jersey; here's why
If you're planning on starting a family in New Jersey — there are more than a million families in New Jersey with young children, according to Child Care Aware of New Jersey — WalletHub says you may want to reconsider that decision.
Only two cities in New Jersey — Jersey City and Newark — are ranked in WalletHub's Best and Worst Places to Raise a Family study, and even then, those cities are ranked low.
Here's what WalletHub had to say about raising a family in New Jersey.
In its Best and Worst Places to Raise a Family study, personal finance resource website WalletHub ranked Jersey City 61st and Newark 178th.
In its study, WalletHub compared more than 180 cities by analyzing dozens of metrics, including affordability, family fun, education and childcare and health and safety.
Jersey City ranked low in all metrics, but ranked extremely low in the family fan metric, ranking 165th.
Jersey City also ranked 100th in the affordability metric, and ranked 82nd in the socioeconomic metric.
Jersey City fared much better in the education and childcare metric, which placed Jersey City in 20th place.
Newark, however, ranked near the bottom of nearly all of WalletHub metrics.
Newark's lack of playgrounds dragged down its family fun metric to 170th place.
Newark ranked also ranked 180th in the affordability metric, which analyzed the cost of living and housing affordability.
WalletHub's survey presents a few options if you're looking to start a family and want to stay in the region.
Pittsburgh (39th) snd Washington, DC (43) ranked in the top 50 of WalletHub's study.
New York City ranked 69th and Boston ranked 79th.
Philadelphia may not be an appealing option for you, as it ranked 143rd in WalletHubs study.
Freemont, California and Overland Park, Kansas, were the top two cities to raise a family, according to WalletHub.
At the other end of the ranking, Cleveland (180), Detroit (181) and Memphis, (182) were ranked as the three least appealing cities to raise a family in.
Damon C. Williams is a Philadelphia-based journalist reporting on trending topics across the Mid-Atlantic Region.
This article originally appeared on Thinking of raising a family in New Jersey? WalletHub says don't do it
