Stop hating on New Jersey

It’s buckle-down time in New Jersey. Our state is about to be swarmed with visitors coming from Pennsylvania, New York, and beyond to enjoy the splendors of our beaches, lakes, and mountains. Tourists drop cash to fill their Instagram feeds with photos of sunrises, sunsets, and hanging with their best pals in clumps at bars and restaurants that are open for only a few months out of the year.

But from September through May, we’re the butt of the joke. I’ve heard them all — New Jersey smells, we talk weird, and we’re all overtanned and under-educated spaghetti shovelers who stepped out of either The Sopranos or Jersey Shore (even though most of that reality-show cast isn’t from here).

Yet when the weather turns warmer, you will descend anyway, and pretend for the three months of summer that you didn’t really mean it. Because Philadelphians “need” the bounty that our state provides.

What I ask, though, as you race down the Garden State Parkway or Atlantic City Expressway, or even just over the Walt Whitman Bridge to the cannabis dispensary in Bellmawr, is to remember that people live here all year. For more than nine million people, New Jersey isn’t just a land of conveniences. It’s a full-time state of mind — one that you already, sort of, embrace.

We want you here. Last year we welcomed 96.6 million visitors. Tourists also spent $37.5 billion in New Jersey in 2021, according to a new VisitNJ report. All those amusement pier owners, pizza shop parlors, canoe rental operators, restaurants, real estate professionals, and casinos rely on the billions you drop into their coffers. Visitors generated $4.6 billion in state and local taxes in 2021, too — going a long way to blunting the high property taxes you like to laugh at us so much about, even though those taxes pay for things like parks and schools and vaccine clinics not run by a 22-year-old student with no background in health care. (Looking at you, Philly.)

You’d think that with all the tourists — and new residents, since New Jersey grew by 5.7% between 2010 and 2020, according to the U.S. Census — the slings and arrows would abate. But still we’re an easy target, stuck between two major cities without a similar metropolis of our own, and at the mercy of Philadelphia and New York City media outlets to cover us when it’s convenient. New York production companies make reality TV shows parodying us, because we’re close and talent is cheap, to make us the punching bag of a nation. And it’s harder over here in the suburbs to turn a historically Black high school into a setting for rooftop bar photos, as happened at the Bok Technical School in South Philadelphia.

But we also have a Wegmans and a mall right over the Ben Franklin Bridge, 127 miles of coast, and 71.6 miles of the Appalachian Trail — and that’s not even counting the 1.1 million acres of the Pine Barrens. We have some of the best public schools in the country, and reproductive rights were codified as a constitutional right in January. According to the CDC, 1,309 people traveled to New Jersey from other states for abortion care in 2019. That includes pregnant people from Pa., since N.J. doesn’t have a 24-hour waiting period, or require parental consent or a judge’s OK for teenagers to access vital health care, as Pa. does right now.

This sounds like a silly lament — just ignore people dumping on you! — but after living here all my life, it grates to hear other people mock a state they use as a playground, and a resource. Recently, a Brooklyn vintage-store owner told me that he couldn’t believe prices at a secondhand store in Asbury Park, where he’d gone for a long weekend, were on par with New York, and then called the town a backwater. I was too stunned to respond, but not surprised. I felt the same way when a Philadelphia resident complained on Twitter about how the Cherry Hill Wegmans was hard to get into in April 2020, as if he was entitled to be here because our grocery stores were just better, despite a raging pandemic that made it hard enough for our own residents to access food.

So what I say to you, dear out-of-stater, is that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t hate on our state until you’re trying to find items to buy and then mark up in your store, until that first kid turns 4 and you “need” our schools (or enrolled them in a Shore town school during the pandemic because you have a beach house here), or until you need weed, an abortion, or just a summer break. Don’t complain about the prices that you drove up, or the crowds that you form. Doing so is like hitting a piñata and then complaining about what kind of candy comes out.

I know you won’t listen, and you’ll do all this anyway, and perhaps write me off as some dumb suburbanite who doesn’t “get” why your state is so great — until you’re here and decide New Jersey is fine now, which is what I’ve been saying all along.

And also, the town that gave us our patron saint Bruce Springsteen is not a backwater. Get some education. Rutgers will give you an in-state discount, once you move here. I won’t say “I told you so” when you do.

Jen A. Miller is author of Running: A Love Story. @byJenAMiller