Editor's note, Part 2: Over nine days, NJ Advance Media is taking a closer look at Lakewood, one of New Jersey's fastest-growing and most complex towns. Lakewood is home to a huge Orthodox Jewish community and the rapid growth has engulfed the town, igniting tensions between the religious and secular societies on many levels. Each day, we will explore some of the major issues in the community, including the welfare fraud investigation, housing problems and the strains on the education system.
By Stephen Stirling | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Lakewood is an anomaly among anomalies.
During the last three decades, what was a sleepy, semi-rural municipality has grown into one of the 10 largest in New Jersey, bucking every demographic trend along the way.
It's growing explosively as New Jersey stagnates. It's becoming whiter as the state races toward a minority majority. And while the Garden State's birth rate bottoms out at its lowest level in more than half a century, Lakewood's is among the top on the planet.
Lakewood Total Population 1900 to 2016
One yeshiva starts a revolution
The sea change can be pinned to one event: The founding of the Beth Medrash Govoha yeshiva in the mid-20th century. The Orthodox Jewish community has set down roots en masse around the religious school, which is now the largest yeshiva in North America.
Lakewood has been growing rapidly since its founding in 1948, but the population exploded after 1990, with the town more than tripling its size in just 30 years. As of 2016, it became the sixth town in New Jersey to reach a population of more than 100,000.
30 years of explosive growth
That growth has changed the physical face of the community as well. Satellite imagery starting in the 1980s shows major construction as the town's population surges upward, with farmland disappearing and some single-home neighborhoods transformed by large apartment complexes.
According to building permit data, Lakewood approved $189 million in construction within the township in 2015 alone.
Diverse but segregated
While Lakewood is majority white, in part due to the growth of the Jewish population, it remains a diverse community. Census data mapped to show the location of each person by race shows it is also a fairly segregated community.
The blue dots represent white residents, clustered primarily on the north and west of the town. The Hispanic and African American communities, in purple and red, respectively, are largely clustered in the southern half of Lakewood.
Lakewood Population by Select Groups
Shifting against the tide
Unlike much of New Jersey, in Lakewood, the white population has been surging with the arrival of the Orthodox Jewish community. But the municipality also boasts a sizable Hispanic community, which is also growing and now accounts for about 17 percent of those who live there.
Lakewood once had a large black community as well, but thousands of African Americans have left since 2000. Only 4 percent of Lakewood today is black.
An abundance of children
The most stark change in Lakewood is the age of its residents. More than 32 percent of the town's population is under 10 years old. The median age in Lakewood is now just 19 years old, less than half the median age of New Jersey as a whole.
A world-beating birth rate
The age imbalance in Lakewood can be tied directly to the importance of children in the Orthodox Jewish faith. Lakewood's birth rate is more than four times higher than the rates in both New Jersey and the United States.
In fact, the birth rate of 45 per 1,000 residents is only a few points lower than Niger in Africa, which has the highest birth rate in the world at 49 per 1,000. In Niger, the astronomical birth rate has become a crisis, with the country's infrastructure unable to keep up with its burgeoning population.
In Lakewood, the birth rate has already led to its share of growing pains.
A powerful force at the polls
The chief source of conflict in Lakewood in recent years has been the operation of the school system. The Orthodox Jewish community's more than 30,000 children largely do not attend the public school system even though their families are among the property owners paying taxes in support of the system.
The Jewish community has made their voices heard in a big way at the polls. Members of the Orthodox community make up the majority of the school board.
School elections ten or 15 years ago only brought out a few thousand residents to vote. In 2016, more than 25,000 cast ballots, including a large portion of the Orthodox Jewish community.
Major spending shifts at schools
Public school bus transportation for members of the Orthodox community has been one of the thorniest issues in school budget negotiations in recent years.
In 2012, the Lakewood School District began spending more on transportation for students than it does for standard K-12 classroom instruction. Much of the transportation funding is spent on the busing of Orthodox children to private schools.
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Public money to private education
Special education spending has also undergone a seismic shift.
Lakewood has a high number of children classified as special needs students.
Unlike many other districts, Lakewood pays to send a high number of its special needs students to private Jewish schools.
Lakewood spends more private-school tuition for special education students than almost any other district of its size in the state.
Growing pains lead to friction
Friction arises as a result of change. In Lakewood, this means the town leads the state in a less enviable category:hate crimes.
While the police department says there is no issue with hate crimes in Lakewood, the Ocean County community has recorded hundreds of bias crimes against religious or racial groups since the turn of the century, more than anywhere else in New Jersey.
Read more about Lakewood
A guide to the crisis in Lakewood
How Lakewood became a destination for Orthodox Jews
Lakewood rabbi, couples arrested on fraud charges
11 things to know about Lakewood
Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @sstirling. Find him on Facebook.
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