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My Jersey street cred here is that I was born and raised in Monmouth County - 3rd generation. I’m a Rutgers grad. I commuted from Red Bank by train and Atlantic Highlands by boat to work in Lower Manhattan in my early 20s. I lived in Camden County for about 2 years and in Philadelphia for 10 years.GeographyThe answer is in the question. There are no two cities in North America that are as large and as close together - 98 miles by car - as Philadelphia is to New York City.The combined megapolitan region of New York and Philadelphia is around 30 million people.Los Angeles and San Diego - around 120 miles apart - come in at around 22 million people.Chicago and Milwaukee - 93 miles - have about 11.3 million peopleBaltimore and Washington, DC are less than 40 miles apart but combined those regions number around 9.8 million.The San Francisco Bay Area also has Oakland and San Jose in it and none of those cities are more than 50 miles apart but together they “only” add up to 9.7 million people.So the simple answer is that New York and Philly are just too big to have another large city between them. Cities exist as they do because of the services they support and there’s a well developed theory around this called the “Central Place Theory”. If you really want to nerd out on that you can also check out Common power laws for cities and spatial fractal structures and A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities.But if you don’t feel like reading all of that theory, it basically says that there’s no need for a highly specialized medical industry or financial services in Princeton, for example, because the people who live there already have access to those services in both NYC and Philly. Moving those services to Princeton would simply be cannibalizing the talent and the customer base from the existing locations - in other words decentralizing it. Most people understand that intuitively. They just don’t spend much time thinking about it.As we can see, the only part of NJ that is not within 60 miles of either New York or Philly is the southeastern edge of Cape May County. It’s also an interesting map because that’s pretty close to being the Venn diagram that explains Central Jersey. I digress.So for mid-tier shopping, medical services, or a smaller airport people in Cape May might head to Atlantic City. For anything more they would travel to Philadelphia. There just aren’t enough people down there to warrant anything more and most of the people who live there like Cape May just the way it is.As others have mentioned, it’s not that NJ doesn’t have cities. Newark is, in its own right, a large city and were it not in the shadow of NYC it would be much more prominent. It’s home to a large, international airport, has major universities in and just outside of the city, is a major transit hub on the Northeast Corridor, and until recently had both an NHL and an NBA franchise. Some have argued that the only way to both break the dominance of the Yankees in MLB and bring baseball back to Montreal is to add a 3rd team to New York - which was the case when the Giants were in Manhattan and the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Newark or nearby Jersey City would be great locations. Caple: Expand the league, not the wild cardsTopographyThe geography, the reason our Central Places are precisely where they are, is because of the topography. The French made their Louisiana claim to the entire Mississippi drainage basin. Similarly, the Dutch settled both sides of the Hudson but after the English takeover the colony was quickly divided. It was easy to make colonial boundaries along major rivers as there was no questioning the precise location of the boundary and the English seemed to be a fan of doing just that. But the reason that New York City is on one side of the Hudson and not the other is only partly rooted in that political history.Most of the reason that the city wound up east of the Hudson comes down to the lay of the land. The NJ side of the river wasn’t a practical place to grow a city. Much of the NJ side of the river has tall cliffs that run parallel to the Hudson. These are known as “the Palisades” and only turn slightly inland as they continue south through Jersey City. The problem colonial settlers faced is clearly visible here in this photo looking towards Manhattan from Union City, NJ. Look down over that railing at the street below and then imagine having to offload goods from a ship then get them up that cliff face.Manhattan was an easier place to defend from attack and also had better farmland. It sloped gently towards the river and had rolling hills in its northern reaches. It was also more easily accessible by ship from Long Island and other cities in New England.During the railroad era New Jersey began to “catch up” to Manhattan in terms of development. Once there were reliable mechanical means to get heavy things up big hills, development became a lot easier. But at the same time this part of NJ was also becoming a shipping hub. The railroads from everywhere in the US west of the Hudson River either terminated in Hoboken or had to go north to Albany to cross the river. If you didn’t want to waste +6 hours of travel time going up to Albany then back down you took the train to Hoboken and transferred to a ferry. You can still do that today if you feel so inclined. That Hoboken transfer remained the only practical way to get to Manhattan via rail from anywhere west of the Hudson until 1906 when the North River Tunnels were built.A very similar thing happened with Oakland in California. The transcontinental railroad terminated in Oakland and one had to transfer to a boat to get to San Francisco. Even though most goods and services had to stop in Oakland first, it still plays second fiddle to SF. As ships grew larger, especially after containerization, NJ developed an advantage here as well. NJ was better connected to the continental freight rail and highway networks and could host a deeper port than what the East River had been home to. By the 1970s almost all shipping was in and out of Port Elizabeth and the immediately adjacent Port Newark. But none of this mattered much. By the mid-1800s New York’s primacy was all but guaranteed and the technological advancements of the late 1800s (internal combustion engine, electricity, elevators, etc) cemented it.Down at the other end of NJ, Philadelphia was chosen as the site for Penn’s city because, like New York, it was between two rivers.One river could be relied upon for drinking and irrigation and the other river for shipping. Penn’s site was also located at a bend in the Delaware River. This meant that the river was nice and deep on the Pennsylvania side (erosion) and shallow and marshy (deposition) on the New Jersey side. It turns out “Somewhere in the Swamps of Jersey” is an adage much older than Lifetime.In terms of land close to the rivers at either end of the state there wasn’t much goldilocks land. It was either wetlands or rocky uplands. On the Camden side of the Delaware River it was mostly wetlands. Still to this day, the Cooper River and Newton Creek are mostly surrounded by parks. The State and County have gone to great lengths to increase the amount of park space around these water bodies by knocking down old warehouses and tearing out parking lots because flooding is still a problem. This photo below looks like it was taken from the Cuthbert Blvd Bridge over the Cooper - connecting Collingswood and Westmont to Cherry Hill - but it should be clear how flat the area is and how much of the floodplain of the Delaware River is actually on the NJ side of the river.Away from the rivers, NJ was great for timber and then for farming. There’s a reason we still call it the Garden State. But away from the river isn’t a great place for shipping and 200 years ago there were no big cities that weren’t near a navigable body of water. Even today, 185 years out from the beginning of the railroad era, only 6 of the 25 largest metro areas and 13 of the 50 largest aren’t near the ocean and/or a big river.The first railroad across the Delaware River was in 1834 from Morrisville, PA into Trenton. The Delaware River gets gradually wider as one goes south from Trenton. There wasn’t enough outside of farming on the South Jersey side of the Delaware to justify the cost of a rail or road crossings until the end of the 19th century. The Delair Bridge from Philly to Camden (technically Pennsauken) wasn’t operational until 1896. South Jersey just wasn’t economically important enough to build multiple bridges to. It was between nothing and on the way to nowhere. There was no major industry outside of the Camden waterfront and that was already connected to Philly by a robust ferry and barge network. It was also already connected to North Jersey/the Raritan Bay via the Camden and Amboy Railroad, and down to Atlantic City and Cape May by rail.PoliticsFinally, almost no one moves to New Jersey because they want to be in a big city. The state owes most of its population to people leaving New York or Philadelphia for a quiet slice of the countryside. Anyone in NJ who wants to experience the big city doesn’t have to travel very far. This was as true 150 years ago as it is today. By the 1890s the NJ suburbs were booming but were largely without municipal services. This put them at odds with local farmers. Why should farmers pay for road paving, street lighting, and city sewer and water when they had no need for it?While suburban, NJ voters were demanding municipal services they were also concerned about urban creep and the machine politics that they had chosen to move away from. No one in the suburbs wanted to be annexed by Newark or Patterson. This sparked a “fever” that’s been called boroughitis.* Hundreds of boroughs were incorporated across the state that prevented larger cities like Newark, Camden, Trenton, New Brunswick, Patterson, etc from growing beyond their then boundaries. So, going back to our Central Place Theory for a moment, perhaps in a different timeline where boroughitis never happened, a city like Trenton could’ve grown larger. But it only would’ve been annexing the people and services who are already there in our timeline. Maybe downtown Trenton is bigger than it is now but that only gets achieved by pulling the office space off the Route 1 corridor. We don’t actually wind up with more goods and services in Mercer County.Boroughitis didn’t just prevent cities from growing geographically. It also prevented them from growing economically. It forced them all to compete for the same population/tax base to pay for services while also delivering the same, high level of services to ensure that they didn’t lose population or business to their neighbors. It was a race to the top that just about bankrupted everyone.That process also really doomed the larger, industrial cities in the state when deindustrialization took hold. There was no vacant land left in the cities where new industries could set up shop. The contamination of the industrial age made redevelopment of old industrial sites risky for a long time (until Superfund in the 80s). There was also no way for those cities to annex new industries and new subdivisions in the suburbs to keep their budget in the black.Compare Newark, hemmed in on all sides by other towns, to a city like Charlotte or Phoenix, both of which have annexed large parts of the counties that they’re in and are nowhere near done annexing. Phoenix was 17 square miles in 1953. Today it’s over 500 square miles and not done. The 24 square miles of Newark is the same today as it was in 1929. New York and Philly had similar problems in terms of being geographically constrained but both cities were already large in land area and still had vacant land in the 1950s. New subdivisions were going up in Queens into the early 50s and in Staten Island and Northeast Philly into the early 80s. Both cities still had big problems in the 1980s but they had enough room from some growth to bridge the gap to the Superfund era. Newark was built out by the 1920s and had no chance.And in the end what we still have is counties with 40 school districts, 40 police departments, and 40 public works departments and almost always at least one of those towns was a dumping ground for all the stuff that no one else wanted. That redundancy alone explains most of the insanely high property taxes in the state.** The town I grew up in was 3 square miles with around 5,000 residents. 3 of the neighboring towns were almost identical in size and population and no one visiting us from out of state could ever tell where one town ended and the other began. Imagine being a kid with good friends who lived down the street who you play street hockey or skateboard with. They always go to a different school from you (even though the school you to go is closer for all of you) because they live in a different town. Swap out those kids with where you work, where you shop, where you go to church, etc. and that’s NJ in a nutshell. It’s also why, given my career field, I don’t live there. It’s not because I don’t want to. There’s just (quite ironically) not enough work.If you’ve made it this far - here’s a parting gift:6 Reasons Cities Are Located Where They Are*Only the scale of boroughitis is unique to NJ. Similar things happened in suburban Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston, and even San Francisco.** There’s a bit of a cottage industry that has grown up around insisting that municipal consolidation doesn’t save money. Almost all of it ignores that most municipal mergers that have occurred in the past have done so for the purpose of spending money on infrastructure (e.g., a new sewer system) or services (e.g., professional fire). Things they would have paid a lot more for had they not merged. When you account for these things and especially when you account for inflation and the savings in pension and healthcare costs over the long term the savings are unquestionable.

Trump; was born into a life of wealth and privilege and never had to do a hard day’s work in his life. He inherited 443 million dollars from his father, which the New York Times reports was funneled into the family account of Trump; through illegal transfers to avoid income taxes.The great philanthropist then established a tax free charity, which he used as his personal piggy bank. The State of New York closed the “charity” down and has banned the Trumps from participating in another charity for ten years. He sons followed suit and have embezzled funds meant for charity into the Trump accounts.Aside from the illegal money from Russian oligarchs that helped to elect him, the orange man got away with operating a phony university, since shut down and which he or his base, contributed 25 million dollars to a political campaign of an attorney general in Florida to get off the hook.Trump will never get another casino license, having bilked the state of New Jersey out of millions in unpaid taxes. He also left a lot of workers holding the bag and vendors with unpaid bills. Because of his seedy connections with the Russian mob, Las Vegas denied a gaming license for him to operate in that city.There’s nothing secret about Trump dealings. The New York Times references sources for anyone who cares to check it out.

There was this kid in my high school who used to retake classes during the summer every year. He was awful at math and/or any science related topic. He hated reading and all he used to do after school was play Maple Story (video game) for hours. His dad thought that he was a failure and he was extremely disappointed in him.He barely graduated from a Peruvian high school (La Salle De Lima) in 2008 and had to retake math that summer so he could get his diploma. After graduation he did a certification to become a bartender and barista. He was still playing video games and on his free time he started to do some circus and taught himself how to juggle. His father, who is an entrepreneur and an engineer, was very disappointed and ashamed of him.In 2010 he moved to the USA. As soon as he moved to the USA he started working in a supermarket as a cashier. That same year he started attending a community college (Passaic County Community College) to get his English as a Second Language (ESL) certificate. In 2012 he received his ESL certificate and he decided to go back to get a degree; he wanted to study business (at this time he switched jobs and started to work as a server). As a business major, you are required to take algebra. Hence on his first semester he took algebra 101; in there he met a professor who showed him that algebra was not too bad and by the end of that semester he switched to engineering.Before switching he told his dad that he is studying engineering and his dad told him: “you are not gonna make it; you are not smart enough. Pick an easier degree!”He didn’t know what engineering to study, he went from genetics to civil, to robotics to mechanical to aerospace. Finally in 2013 he made up his mind and decided to get a degree in mechanical engineering. That same year he transferred to Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey) to continue with his education; at this time he decided to keep working as a server but part time.In Rutgers he started as a mechanical engineering student, in his first semester he realized that he liked physics a lot so he decided to do a minor in physics. His minor in physics became a second major and in 2016, he graduated with a BS in Mechanical Engineering, a BS in Physics and a concentration in aerospace engineering. His dad was proud.After graduating he got a job as a Nuclear Engineer for the Department of Defense (navy). After working at the navy for 1 year he realized that he hated it there so in 2017 he decided to start a part time masters degree in aerospace engineering at Old Dominion University.During the summer of 2018 he got the opportunity to go to Prague to do research in nuclear fusion for 2 weeks at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Czech Academy of science. When he came back from Europe, he got an interview and a job offer from Raytheon Missile Systems to work as a modeling and simulations engineer.In 2018 he started working at this company and in 2019 he graduated from Old Dominion University with his MS in aerospace engineering.He is still working at Raytheon Missile Systems but he just got an offer (full ride) by the University of Arizona to do a PhD in Aerospace Engineering. He will be quitting Raytheon by the end of the year and starting his PhD. His goal now is to become a professor or a researcher and to move to Europe.This damn kid is me… the reason why I want to become a professor is because I genuinely believe that people can change. Sometimes finding your passion motivates you to pursue your dreams and I hope I can inspire someone to pursue his/her dreams as I was inspired by the professor who taught me algebra back in the community college.Oh did I mention that this kid has ADHD?Update:Thank you very much for the support, delightful comments and encouragement!I have seen a few comments about my ADHD so I will elaborate a bit about it. I was diagnosed with it when I was 6 or 7 years old. I took meds for a few years (2~3) when I was a kid but then I stopped.I didn't start paying attention to it until I was much older and I read more about it. After learning about the challenges of ADHD; I decided to take medications again.I genuinely don’t see my ADHD as a “disability” but I see it as a superpower. The hard thing for me was to learn about it, to understand the challenges that came with it and to learn how to use these challenges to my advantage.