The article quoted the $100,000 range for NE NJ. What's the cost of living like that close to NYC, do you know, ToT? It could be that it's not unreasonable for that area. For where we live it's great, but you can get a nice sized 3 bedroom house for about $100,000 here and I know you can't touch that elsewhere. And I know from friends that live closer to NYC that gas is higher the closer to downstate you live.
In south Jersey (which is much cheaper than Northern NJ) a four bedroom house we bought in 1987 for 119,000 now goes for almost 300,000.
In North New Jersey, you couldn't touch a 4 bedroom house for under 500,000-550.000
That's the way things were in our part of south Jersey about 9 years ago when we bought our house. Now the same homes are going for $200,000 - $300,000. Nowadays, we do know a lot of people pulling in six figures.
What wingnut1971 said (see post 32) is true - NJ consists of a bunch of little fiefdoms. Several years ago, our property taxes soared after our township and the surrounding townships voted to dissolve the school district. Each town assumed control of its own school system. We were promised that our taxes would decrease with the dissolution. What happened was that the taxes DID decrease for the other townships, but increased for our own.