I'm not sure what the point of this article is. You could comfortably fit two Essex counties and most of two Bergen counties inside the footprint of Ocean county and even with that, Bergen has the largest population, followed by Middlesex (whose footprint is not small), with tiny Essex at third. If all 11,000 people migrated to huge Ocean, its population still wouldn't be close to any of the top three. Heck, if 11,000 people moved just from Maplewood to Toms River, we would still have more than half the population remaining.

Yeah, nobody is happy to pay high taxes and high rents in northern New Jersey but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there is any kind of exodus out of northern NJ.