My wife says she thinks Hoboken has a piano in the lobby.

What a sweet idea! If you need to borrow a portable electric, we have a decent quality one in a closet unused since my daughter quit lessons years ago. My wife works at Hoboken Hospital, I'll ask if there's an appropriate place there. There's also the 'Atrium At Hamilton Park' assisted living facility on 9th st, they have a common room with a piano IIRC.

Yes, my number is correct, but so is yours. The union set this up to reward seniority at the expense of new hires, then use the newcomers low income numbers as a cudgel to complain about how poorly paid they are!

Go to the State education website, they have income statistics on every public employee. You can actually burrow down and do the same calculation I did to see the median income. And I excluded admin.

Lots of good advice so far, Being in Hamilton Park for 25 years of course I'll recommend it, but I'd like to address the outdoors portion of your ask. It varies. With a car, there's mountains within 1-2 hrs to the N and NW, and nice more suburban parks closer. Even without a car you can take a train to Harriman State Park in NY, in addition to our city parks and Liberty State Park on the Harbor.

My outdoor thing is kayaking, and we live on a peninsula! There's all sorts of interesting places to paddle within a 20 minute drive, from the NY harbor and Statue of Liberty, to winding tidal creeks and reed mazes on the Hackensack River.

Lastly, about the 'is it worth it?'. That's up to what you make of it. There's people here who never go see theater, museums and music, whether in NYC or one of our great local venues and theater companies. Sad but true.

Pretty much our experience with a few exceptions. We knew one family that moved when their eldest didn't get into one of the magnet high schools.

We have zero regrets about staying in Jersey City. Our kids were extremely well prepared for college and had multicultural experience that cannot be replicated elsewhere. In fact one of my few regrets is my kids as teens did not take advantage of the proximity to New York City to the extent that I had hoped! My son would hop on a train to Harriman instead of a train into The Village!

You need a wider circle of acquaintances. I raised my kids here, they went to LCCS & McNair and got fantastic educations.

Yes. There's a whole of of JC that's not Downtown, where a 2br can be had for under $2500. Do you really think they can live for less than that in the suburbs? The median JC teacher makes $95k.

Shoulda asked for onion on the burger and you'd have that covered.

EDIT: whoops, its crispy chicken. Like me a Popeyes spicy chicken sandwich....

There's plenty of homes in JC comparable to what they be spending in the suburbs.

The horror!

Actually, my favorite part of the article was that he still owns a house with his wife down the shore, but claims residence in an apartment with a roommate in JC. Sure. Someone needs to surveill that place and see how many nights he spends there.

Too many of our public servants are not part of our community, and just view Jersey City as a tit to suck on. This supposed residency thing is a recurring theme, Michael Yun supposedly slept in his Central avenue apartment while owning a house in the suburbs with his wife. These stories go on and on.

FYI, Zillow, Trulia & Hotpads are one company with 3 websites that share their listings. Apartments.com is a hot mess as far as this landlord is concerned. They make listing a huge PITA compared to Zillow.

If you have multiple properties you don't even need to rekey, just move them around. If a key is 'fallow' for a year or 3 it's unlikely a sketchy tenant will then turn up at another location and see if their key works! Of course the best plan is don't rent to sketchy tenants.

Many landlords simply have a drawer full of locksets and swap them out when a tenant leaves. Paying hundreds for a locksmith visit is wasteful.

I have regular 50gal wheeled containers sprayed with the type of recycling and address. One went missing for days, I finally found it at a neighboring rental building filled with regular trash. Even if the collectors left it in front of them WTF is wrong with these people that not only do they not see someone else's address but they don't even see it says GLASS METAL & PLASTICS in 6 inch letters?

This is what credit is for, not for buying sprees. You can't get a cash advance of a few hundred bucks to get you through this?

FWIW, by New Jersey law they cannot refuse to renew your lease for one time late, as opposed to a pattern of lateness. They can however raise the rent up to the point at which a judge would call it "unconscionable". Search for and read the New Jersey pamphlet "truth in renting".

I'm also assuming that you're renting from some big management company, not a human who you can talk to and explain your predicament.

Wow, if the stakes weren't so low, I'd think this was a soft ball question to a shill!

If rekeying is what the OP wanted, then of course you're right. They didn't really specify with "change the condo entrance door". If it's a new or renovated small building, it could easily be a cylindrical latch instead of mortise.

Ever rekey DIY? It's a fun way to go insane chasing tiny parts! I took the Kwikset SmartKey Kool-aid a while back for my rental doors. So, so easy to rekey, but not very secure. However if a burglar is informed enough on how to force them they'll likely be able to defeat most low end door locks. Most burglars around here aren't very bright and use brute force anyway!

Yup, all fattened up for winter. Every raccoon I've seen around here is sluggish, they're not afraid of us, nowhere to be in a hurry. Once we were having a large BBQ out back and one came walking along the top of the 10' fence to munch some grapes. Not a care in the world.

Weren't they the bad guys in a season of The Walking Dead?

I find myself saying this a lot, but the 'handymen' around would probably be a lot cheaper for this basic maintenance stuff than an actual locksmith, as with any of the 'DIY grade' maintenance for people who just don't have the skills themselves.

That said, my favorite local locksmiths to visit their stores are NJ Locksmiths & SW Locksmiths, both on Kennedy in N Bergen & Union City respectively. Their customer service is SO much better than Monaco Downtown.

Isn't it fun to be able to walk into the kitchen waving your snake and say to your wife "I just saved us $200"!

Not that it's totally legal IMO, but I'd hire one of the "handyman" guys who are around for this kind of minor work. This isn't rocket science, and the contractors have bigger fish to fry, which is why you don't get a call back.

Honestly, if you're a homeowner, investing a little time in understanding how to do minor electric like switches, lights, outlets and such as this would save you a lot of time, money and aggravation. Youtube is your friend...

Please explain the justification for NJ tolls N-S but not E-W on 78 & 80. PA tolls E-W on their tpk, and NY tolls E-W and N-S on their Thruway. IMO the whole system is an inconsistent mess.

When I was a teen in the 70s there was a $0.10 toll on the Southern State pkwy on LI. They raised it to $0.25, and there was a such a shitshow, with people taking local roads to avoid it, that they got rid of the tolls entirely. And the world kept turning!

You seem utterly impervious to the fact that an underground subway line is so prohibitively expensive it will never happen in a million years. There's no surface right of ways to use like they did with the HBLR, and an elevated line is also stupid expensive. Your desire for it doesn't make it any more practical than the often raised idiotic idea for a Hudson pedestrian bridge or tunnel.

There's zero reason to think building subway would be cheaper in Hudson county than in NY.

The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html