Like most towns, Hamilton has its share of good and bad.
Yet, many of us who were raised here and remained in adulthood have developed a something of a provincial attitude about our town. Hamilton was good enough for us—it’s important to who we are—so we don’t like it when people take digs at our hometown, especially if you aren’t from around here.
It was with this filter I first viewed the “Best Towns For Families” list released by New Jersey Family magazine in April. The publication’s editorial staff adapted “an algorithm” from a spreadsheet created by New Jersey Family editorial director Liz Zack when she moved to New Jersey six years ago. They plugged in data like public safety stats, school rankings, tax rates and average home sale prices, and their formula spit out a ranking.
It placed Hamilton 452 out of 512 municipalities in New Jersey, behind Paterson, Camden, Atlantic City, Millville and Trenton. Those five, by the way, appear on another important list Hamilton doesn’t: the 10 Most Dangerous Places in New Jersey.
With that paradox looping through my brain, I spent a lot of time in April trying to understand New Jersey Family’s list. How could Pennington rank No. 1 and Hopewell Borough 15th but surrounding Hopewell Township fall all the way to 278? Why are our neighbors Bordentown, Ewing and Lawrence—all townships similar to Hamilton—firmly in the middle of the pack, but Hamilton’s not? And, if Hamilton’s really worse than Trenton for families, why haven’t we seen everyone in the township moving back to Chambersburg?
Still, I gave New Jersey Family the benefit of the doubt at first. Something in the formula very well could have sabotaged Hamilton’s ranking. The results didn’t make sense, but maybe there was something in the formula that had skewed Hamilton’s final ranking. So, I called Zack.
She was very nice and professional, more so than I would be to someone questioning my work. But she wouldn’t give me specifics.
I understood, though, that Zack wouldn’t want to give away her secret formula. So, I started looking for answers on my own, pulling apart what I knew of the algorithm, piece by piece. Lucky for me, New Jersey Family published where its staff drew its data, and I followed the breadcrumbs to a website called GreatSchools.org—the kind of site parents use when they want to ensure they move to a school district that will guarantee their Kindergartner will attend Harvard in 12 years.
Sure enough, Hamilton’s schools did not fare well individually. But it was the district-wide rating that interested me the most. You see, that’s the number New Jersey Family used for its schools data—and Hamilton Township, Mercer County wasn’t ranked at all. A link for our school district brings up the GreatSchools.org ranking for Hamilton Township, Atlantic County: 4 out of 10.
Now, the possibility exists that our schools would have fared worse and that this case of mistaken identity actually helped our Hamilton. But, either way, the fact remained that our ranking really wasn’t ours. A mistrial!
Being a Good Samaritan (and an instigator), I notified Zack about the error, and asked if they had noticed it or any other cases of mistaken identity. No, she said, they hadn’t found any errors, and the only instances where there was missing data for a town was when it was served by another municipality’s or a regional school district. It was a nice explanation, but one I just proved to be—you know—not accurate.
I should’ve let it go there. But I kept staring at the list—and that’s when I realized why Hamilton had sunk so low.
“We didn’t want to have a list of the most expensive towns,” Zack told me in our first interview.
But that’s exactly what the top of the list is: a collection of towns that are small and wealthy. Frontrunners like Mendham Township ($17,679), Demarest ($17,127) and Mountain Lakes ($18,681) all had an average tax bill in 2013 three times higher than Hamilton’s ($5,501). Only one town in the top 10—Frelinghuysen—had an average tax bill under $12,000. Only one had a population higher than 10,000 people. And at 12,171, New Providence has seven times fewer residents than Hamilton.
We never had a chance—Hamilton has many things, but it doesn’t have what New Jersey Family valued. And, after a few deep breaths, I realized that’s fine by me.
At one point in our conversations, Zack told me there was nothing subjective about her publication’s list. That’s not totally true—her staff influenced the results by the very act of selecting and weighting the data. But that aside, her explanation neglects that choosing a place to live isn’t done with complete objectivity. It’s done as much by touch and sight and smell as it is by number crunching.
Even Zack herself has followed that in real life; her hometown of South Orange ranked No. 300 on the New Jersey Family list. But she loves the feel of the town, its proximity to New York City, its schools. She’s happy in her village. Regardless of what her own publication says, she knows South Orange is right for her family.
The same goes for the thousands of parents who have settled in Hamilton, raised their children here and shaped what this town is. They know the truth more than an algorithm does—many times, experience reveals what numbers can’t. To them, Hamilton is the best town for their families.
And they don’t need a spreadsheet to prove it.
Follow Post editor Rob Anthes at twitter.com/RobAnthes.
