Thanks for the response.
You pretty much confirmed what I was afraid of. NJ has become a gigantic suburb. I wouldn't even call it a suburb -- it's more like an urban area. Just driving down Rte 9 on a Saturday afternoon, or anywhere between 3-5 pm on a weekday gives me a terrifying vision of what could happen here if everyone's trying to GTFO.
Worse yet, I have a son living in NYC...
Some SF novels talk about a "mega-city" that extends from oh, Boston down past DC. I think from what I've seen that we're already well on the way to having that.
I was afraid that much of it was already moving west into PA. Not sure what I'm going to do. I was thinking perhaps somewhere a bit northeast of Harrisburg, though I don't want anything to do with the Poconos. There must be pockets somewhere that are not in the direct path of developments, especially now that the sub-prime mortgage market has taken the wind out of the development insanity. PA's a big state. Any thoughts on where to go to research the various areas?
NE of Hbg? I don't see anything to recommend that area in particular. Heck, I landed in Berks County when I moved to PA. There are an awful lot of other folks "moving out" of major urban areas, a lot of hispanics and others in all sorts of places around here (Lebanon, Reading, etc.) and who are driving the costs of housing up.
They have a pretty active tourist promotion industry going on. This means visitor centers well stocked with all sorts of literature, lots of free maps, etc. and I would imagine that most of that stuff is online. There's also a fair amount online about state parks and forests, and other things. Getting a hold of a bunch of that info and using it in reverse, to rule stuff out, might be one way to deal with it.
Bear in mind that not only is the development spreading out from Philly in all directions, it's also spreading out from Pittsburgh, too, though not to the same extent (yet?).
PA also has a very strong authoritarian tradition that's rubbed me the wrong way since I moved here. School districts are a separate taxing entity besides the local, municipal, county, and state stuff, and then there's all this nuisance stuff like "occupation privilege tax" which gets sucked out of your first paycheck if you can't prove to them that you've already paid it that year. Used to be minimal, like $10-15, but this year it was $54 and I sure as hell couldn't afford it.
The local and school taxes are on a per capita basis, but that's only where you live. Own property and there are also local and school taxes on _it_, too.
Some places get into other weird stuff. York County, for example, had some sort of a tax on "valuables" where if you owned any stocks, gold, jewelry, etc. you were supposed to let them know and pay tax on that too.
Lancaster folks (some of them) decided that they wanted a hotel and convention center. So there was this basically abandoned empty place right downtown that was an old department store they picked for it. To finance that they levied a "room tax" on all of the hotels and motels in the county -- basicaly those folks being forced to finance their competition!
I could probably go on at length about this but am gonna stop here...
