The One Minute Geographer: 3 Factors about New Jersey’s Cities and Density

Bergenline Avenue in Union City, the 2nd most densely populated city in the United States . Photo by Tamara Beckwith of NY Post on jerseydigs.com

We’re going to look at a couple of New Jersey cities in detail (Newark and Paterson), as we did Atlantic City, but first let’s look at three factors about New Jersey’s cities and population in general.

1) Small Legal Cities

First, given New Jersey’s population of 9.3 million, the 11th largest state, and with its population density the highest of the 50 states, New Jersey has surprisingly few large cities. We’re talking about legal cities — the population that can vote for mayor, not metropolitan areas.

We know that New Jersey has several large metropolitan areas, most notably Newark (right outside New York) with 2.2 million people and Camden (across the river from Philadelphia) with 1.1 million. But Newark, the largest legal city in the state, only has 312,000 people. Only seven New Jersey cities (three of which are officially towns) have more than 100,000 people. Here’s the list:

Compiled by the author from data on Census Bureau’s QuickFacts

All seven cities above are in New York’s ‘orbit’ and all but one have grown faster than New Jersey as a whole (5% from 2010–2020).