lies, lies and calumny, most of it isn’t even an island!
and what the hell, New England geography is crazy; Massachusetts is tiny, Maine is huge, then New York is giant but barely contains the city of New York, with Long Island sticking out taunting Connecticut, why isn’t New York City part of New Jersey??
Really if you were dividing the states based on economic regions, you’d split New Jersey in two (as it was during colonial times), with the southwestern portion now attached to Philadelphia (which would be split off from much of the rest of Pennsylvania, naturally), and the northeastern portion attached to a newly independent Greater New York City plus western Connecticut. This map of NFL fandoms shows a lot of the cultural variation. The portion of Connecticut filled with Giants fans is very similar to the border of New Haven colony, btw:
This is one of the reasons New Jersey politics are so famously corrupt - the state’s split between two of the most expensive media markets in the country, Philadelphia and New York, so statewide campaigns require you to splash big money into ads most of which will be seen by people ineligible to vote for you
Well that plus two other things: first, an astounding number of independent municipalities – what would be villages with no administrative autonomy in most states – are independent towns with their own governments
(in part cause because of the proximity to two major cities, New Jersey developed in pre-railroad days with arable land dedicated to truck farming supplying fresh fruits and vegetables to the urbanites, this is why it’s “The Garden State”)
Second, it’s legal and common for people to be elected to local and state government simultaneously
So you have a situation where there’s a superfluity of local government positions too numerous for intense oversight where everyone is tied into political machines that span several levels of government with the apex requiring an obscene amount of money to capture
All of what km says is true, but skips over even more historical detail.
In Europe, most agricultural regions are tightly clustered towns, with the acreage of the actual farms spread out and farmers commuting to their land.
In America, the government had free reign to distribute most of the land after the initial colonies. In order to prevent land barons buying up all this land (because of Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer), they passed laws saying you had to live on the land you farmed in most cases. This disrupted the formation of all those bucolic European towns, and led to the sparsely settled, ubiquitous suburbia that American farmland became.
Except in New Jersey which was already a farming basket before any of those laws (well really the land was already distributed.) So it was one of the few states to still have the old European “many, many small, irregular little towns” aesthetic. (The south’s plantation based economy obviously encouraged other development.)
So the corruption those many non-lecorbusien towns encouraged is actually a throwback to European style political economies. Except without all the advancement in democratic technologies that the actual European countries evolved into.
I mean in practice those municipalities are too small to do anything and the any things they could do they had to invent Mount Laurel doctrine to stop them from
That’s why New Jersey is sprawl organized by freeway exits instead of proper town
I grew up just on the PA side of the Delaware, which dealt with this by consolidating 4-5 villages into “townships” named after the one that had a railroad station
In practice after cars were invented the PA townships grew along the roads connecting the villages instead of any coherent town form
