Quick Notes: Trends & Talk About Town

By Dennis Quick

Between the ages of 5 and 9, I lived in Moorestown, N.J. That is south Jersey. I last saw the place when I was 18 during a Thanksgiving visit.

Don’t quiz me on Moorestown. All I can tell you is that it is about 20 minutes from Philadelphia, maybe 90 minutes from New York City, and that my buddies and I used to walk at least a mile to George C. Baker Elementary School and pay 25 cents to catch horror flicks at the movie theater on Main Street.

Back in the day, Radio Corporation of America, better known as RCA in nearby Camden, employed my father and many other Moorestown residents.

What else about Moorestown? When its shopping mall opened in the early 1960s, we thought it a magical place, almost as cool as the mall in neighboring Cherry Hill, whose enclosed mall was the first in the Eastern United States.

Also, to name-drop: During a 1966 visit to Moorestown (my family and I had moved to Rochester, N.Y., the previous year), I watched Rancocas Valley High School football star Franco Harris stomp the Quakers of Moorestown High in a game. Rancocas won by some obscene score. Harris rushed for several miles that game before heading to Penn State and then to the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers and finally to the NFL Hall of Fame.

Moorestown seemed to me like Anytown, USA; there wasn’t anything too special about it. So I was blown away when Moorestown finished first in CNN/Money magazine’s recent rating of the 100 best places to live in the United States.

And I was blown away when the Charleston area failed to make the list. In fact, no city in the state made it. South Carolina and Louisiana were the only Southeastern states to not have cities in the Top 100.

Mississippi, if you can believe it, got two cities in the Top 100—Olive Branch (ranked 38), with a population of 34,974, a median household income of $61,263 and a median home price of $147,870, and Madison (ranked 55), with a population of 33,499, a median household income of $78,480 and a median home cost of $154,387. Olive Branch is located near Memphis, Tenn.; Madison near Jackson, Miss.

It seems most of the top-ranked cities had small populations with high household incomes. Moorestown’s population is 20,662; its median household income $86,613. Its median home price is a whopping $367,412. (My eyeballs nearly popped out at that one. Back in 1960, my father paid something like $19,000 for our four-bedroom Moorestown home.) Major employers in the area include Lockhead Martin’s radar-systems division, Computer Science Corp. and PNC Bank.

So why didn’t the Charleston-North Charleston metro area make the cut?

The biggest reason could be that even though we’re strong in the quality-of-life department, we’re weak in the high-paying jobs department. We sell our quality-of-life attribute like crazy, and ours definitely is a beautiful place to live. However, we need to pitch something more than great weather, nice beaches and beautiful architecture and scenery if we don’t want to sound like we’re pitching strictly to the retirement industry.

As for high-paying jobs, the Lowcountry’s average annual salary is under $32,000, and the median household income is $40,442. We don’t have enough high-tech, knowledge-based, innovative industry to push those numbers upward. Meanwhile, the average sales price for a Lowcountry home is nearly $268,000. The mismatch between wages and housing costs is troublesome.

Having said all that, I realize people continue to move here in hordes, survey be damned. So maybe the CNN/Money survey means nothing. Maybe we can sneeze at it and go on about our business.

Still, I’m in a survey mood, so let’s move on to another. Forbes.com recently did one concerning the Top 40 U.S. cities for singles.

The survey listed the best cities offering single folks decent-paying jobs, potential job growth, a reasonable cost of living, lots of fun and great opportunities to meet other singles. The Denver-Boulder, Colo., area finished first while Greensboro, N.C., finished last. We didn’t finish at all. Again, no South Carolina cities made the list.

Why did we get snubbed? Apparently, despite our horn blowing, singles from around the nation don’t find our economy all that attractive. Families and couples seem to move here while singles head elsewhere.

Even our own homegrown singles, fresh out of our local colleges, often find they must leave the Lowcountry to get their hands on a handsome paycheck.

The surveys might not amount to a hill of beans, but taken together, they should give us at least a little indigestion and something to think about.

Dennis Quick is the senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@charlestonbusiness.com.

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