If You're So Smart, Define "South Jersey"

The blog is called South Jersey planner, so let's begin with a classic philosophical exercise: Define the term.

What do we mean by "South Jersey?" There are a number of ways that people and governments define regions, so we'll review a few here and see if it can help us find a definition.

We'll start with the Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA. This type of region is defined by the US Office of Management and Budget and used primarily by the Census Bureau to classify the population clusters around cities. MSAs like the Philadelphia MSA are made up of counties and include core South Jersey counties like Camden, Gloucester, Burlington, and Salem. However, this would leave out decidedly south and in-New Jersey counties like Cumberland (Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton MSA) and Atlantic (Atlantic City-Hammonton MSA), but would include out-of-Jersey counties like Cecil, MD and New Castle, DE. MSAs give us an inkling, but what about border counties like Mercer or Ocean?

Sticking with the idea of regional government, perhaps Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) can give us a better inkling of what constitutes South Jersey. MPOs are mandated under national transportation legislation for urban areas with populations greater than 50,000 and help to coordinate transportation projects that affect multiple states, counties, and municipalities. So surely, the South Jersey Transportation Planning Organization is responsible for planning the region we know as South Jersey? Well, only if that's Salem, Cumberland, Cape May, and Atlantic. Camden, Gloucester, Burlington and, what – Mercer? – are part of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC). But wait! The DVRPC, which plans for Greater Philly, doesn't include those crazy Maryland and Delaware counties that the Greater Philly MSA did! Hmmm... let's try something else.

Sports teams, maybe? Most Flyers and Eagles fans are aware down to the exit number how far north they can go before they're in hostile territory. There's the intuitive idea that you can map out South Jersey vis a vis North by fandom, but big data took it to the next level. Facebook's Data Science Team took the sports team "likes" from over 35 million users and then coupled it with users' geolocation services to break down fandom to a county level. I'm partial to the argument that the parts of New Jersey who like the Eagles are truly South Jersey. However, I am aware that the northern parts of Mercer County are fairly evenly split between Giants and Eagles and southern Ocean County is solidly green. Still, pretty close.

Along the same lines, but less based upon my sports biases, is the research conducted by the fine people at AT&T Labs. They teamed up with MIT and IBM to analyze anonymized call data between callers and recipients. They looked at calls between counties and then normalized it to find the most general regional trends.  Surprise, surprise, New Jersey showed a clear north-south split (also, carefully note the absence of "Central Jersey" in this or the Facebook study. The belief that it doesn't exist is a unifying bond between North and South Jersey).

So after all that, we still have a fuzzy idea of what South Jersey really is. And that's how we'll use it here. Region's like ours kind of exist (at least more than "Central Jersey"), but only to the extent that we reinforce them. There's a good chance that New Castle County, Delaware is more like South Jersey than parts of northern Ocean County. Sorry, that's just the way it is. So based on all of the above, here are the counties I'll do my best to cover:

South Jersey:
Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, Salem, Cumberland, Atlantic, Cape May

South Jerseyish:
Ocean, Mercer, Southwest Monmouth

Not really South Jersey, but we might talk about them:
Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and eastern Lancaster, Berks, and Lehigh (PA)
New Castle (DE)
Cecil (MD)


Phew! Glad I could clear that up!