Well, I guess I'll add my 2 cents, given that this is where I was born and bred...not sure where I was buttered (sorry, I couldn't resist that old Redd Foxx joke; actually, my "buttering" occurred in NJ too). Truth is, I don't have any strong feelings about the state one way or another (if I had the money to live wherever I wanted, I'd live somewhere in New England). On a positive note, I will say that there is a surprising amount of diversity in NJ, given its image. The area around Somerset County is one of the wealthiest in the country (parts of Bergen County too). Western and the Northern-most parts of NJ are very rural, and quite lovely. South Jersey has the Pine Barrens, the Jersey Devil, cranberry bogs, and the Jersey Shore culture, if that's your thing (not mine; I'm not a Springsteen fan and too much of the shore has become over-crowded, over-developed and seedy). Being the mob buff that I am, the state does have a rich mob history (Vito Genovese, who lived in Atlantic Highlands before he was sent to prison for what amounted to a life sentence; Longy Zwillman, who controlled Newark and was as tough as any Italian mobster; Ruggiero "Ritchie the Boot" Boiardo who lived in a Livingston castle complete with an incinerator for his many victims, and his son Anthony aka Tony Boy, supposedly the prototype for Tony Soprano; Willie Moretti, who was Frank Sinatra's Goombah and who employed the father of one of my childhood friends as muscle; the Campisi Gang of Newark; Tony Bananas of Newark, Marco Reginelli of Camden; Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo of Hoboken; etc.). Now onto the negative-- the cities are dangerous, depressing, and serve as an indictment for all that's wrong in America. I was born in Newark, grew up around Paterson, and I've never had any problems, but as I've gotten older, I avoid them more and more. A few years ago, I visited a Jersey City (where my mother grew up) cemetery during the middle of the day and asked a grave-digger for directions. He looked at me for a few minutes and said, "You're not from around here, obviously. Look, ah, you really don't want to spend any more time around here than you have to. Take some good advice." And this was in the middle of the day. My biological father's cousin often works in Jersey City and carries a hammer around with him; the purpose of the hammer is not to nail boards together with. Parts of the city, supposedly, have become gentrified, as Hoboken was. Indeed, I heard some townhouses there were selling for over a million dollars, but you couldn't pay me to live there. Paterson remains one of the more fascinating cities I've ever been too-- it once had a thriving anarchist community, Italians and Syrians once worked its still-standing but now decrepid silk mills, and the city, which Alexander Hamilton supposedly "discovered", even has its own waterfall, where some of "The Sopranos" was filmed and where my friends and I used to drink back in the day. The small towns can be as bigoted, bumpkin-ish, and benighted as any Southern backwater. The industrial areas abutting the NJ Turnpike contain some of the bleakest, ugliest, and most polluted terrain anywhere in the U.S. If that's all you've ever seen of NJ, I can understand the disgust. And the pollution is really bad. For decades, NJ was a dumping ground for toxic waste...the area around Middlesex County was once known as "Cancer Alley" due to the high percentage of cancer deaths. If I die someday prematurely of cancer, it ain't gonna be because of cigarette smoking. Way back when, they used to pump raw sewage out into the waters of the Jersey Shore where people swam, and fished. Traffic? It's horrible, and only gets worse. The highways are a nightmare, although how much worse they are from other congested areas (I remember that traffic in Boston used to be a nightmare) I'm not really qualified to say, and "aggressive" drivers (a euphemism for sociopathic assholes) are ubiquitous. Hoboken is, in some ways, a cultural center (in my grandmother's day, it was just another slum), but just try to get a parking spot there, or an apartment. Good luck, pal. So, overall, it's a mixed bag. I don't love NJ; I don't loathe it. I don't know that those living in Ohio have it any better, or in Michigan, but I guess it is what it is. Maybe in the next life, I'll be lucky enough to be born in Vermont.