The Garden State crams 8.7 million people into 566 towns, and we’re crazy enough to try to rank them. To be fair, we asked Monmouth University’s Polling Institute to do the heavy lifting. After the numbers were crunched, the little town of Roosevelt, founded during the Depression as a utopian community in the state’s agrarian belly, came out on top.
Roosevelt might not look like the sort of place that would top a list of best towns. It has no real Main Street, no industry, not much in the way of nightlife. But for the mostly European Jewish immigrants who built the town during the Depression, and for the subsequent generations who nurtured the ideals on which Roosevelt was founded, therein lies the appeal.
“When I moved here, it felt like a combination of graduate school and summer camp,” says Ralph Seligman, a resident since 1951. “There were a lot of very smart people around. It was very communal, the way summer camp becomes. If you had your light on, someone would stop by to talk, and that would last until ten or eleven o’clock.”
Roosevelt scored high marks on most of our ranking factors. Its population of 930 is essentially unchanged since 2000, property taxes are below average, the selling price of homes has jumped significantly since 2000, and crime is essentially nonexistent. “Roosevelt just has that mix that brings it right to the top,” says Monmouth University institute director Patrick Murray.
Created under the New Deal, the borough was designed as a planned community, with a garment factory at its center and a farm at its edge. Several hundred houses were built, mostly one-story concrete homes with flat roofs and floor-to-ceiling windows. Originally called Jersey Homesteads, the town was renamed in 1945 for the President who had made it all possible.
From time to time the town’s “communality,” as Seligman calls it, is tested, such as when Rooseveltians recalled their mayor in February. At issue was the mayor’s support of a plan to run a private Orthodox Jewish High School at the local synagogue, Roosevelt’s only house of worship. “In a way,” Seligman says, “this vote against the mayor was the expression of that communality. This business against the mayor was led by secular Jews—old-timers. We have co-existed and we have welcomed everybody.”