Walkable Urban Living in Central New Jersey (Princeton area)?

Suggest that you pay a visit to my hometown of Somerville, NJ, "http://www.findsomerville.com/," approximately 20 miles north of Princeton. http://www.somervillenj.org/content/582/default.aspx has retained, and revitalized, it's old-fashioned Main Street - now lined with restaurants, coffee shops, and retail boutiques featuring antiques, collectibles, used book stores, and vintage shops. The Main Street area is thoroughly walkable. Downtown also sports a near-new ShopRite grocery store. The train station is also conveniently located downtown, offering a train connection into NYC when you need a fully urban experience. Housing stock runs the full range, from single family & multi-family homes, mixed-use buildings on Main (retail 1st floor, apartments above), garden apartment complexes, and new and older "high-rise" style apartments and condos. Your budget is adequate to generous, depending on your standards. Somerville has a very good parks system for a mid-size town, with a pearl-string of parkland running through the town flanking alongside Peter's Brook. (The parkland also serves as a buffer against occasional spring flooding.) For convenience, there is big-box retail along Rt. 22, and the Bridgewater Commons shopping mall, just north of Somerville. There are many "Main-street" style towns in central NJ, each falling somewhere on the upscale/gentrified - to - downscale/on-hard-times spectrum. Personally I think Somerville is one of the best - but I grew up there, so I am obviously biased. Others (that I know of) include: Bound Brook, the Plainfields, the Brunswicks, Raritan, Manville, Hillsborough. I'm not much familiar with points south of Princeton. You'd be hard pressed to find a true "urban" experience in central NJ - for that you need to head to NYC or Philadelphia (or their grittier satellites, Newark and Trenton).

Somerville might indeed be the place for you. I commute to Princeton from about twenty minutes north of there, so I think the car commute for you would probably be about 30-40 minutes depending on traffic. I haven't spent much time there myself, but my impression is definitely of a happy, interesting main street with a ton of restaurants. Note: if you're looking at places in the Somerville-Manville-Raritan area, watch out for low-lying areas near the Raritan River. Bound Brook is the town that really gets nailed by flooding, but a couple of recent large storms have cut off Route 206 around Raritan for at least a day.

From close experience, Philadelphia to Princeton can be a hellish daily commute by car, especially if there are any serious accidents or serious weather. Even Chestnut Hill or another suburb would involve a lot of driving in exchange for at-home quality of life. The Trenton Septa line is okay, but with the transfer in Princeton, that's also a serious time commitment even if your job is close enough to the Princeton station. There are a couple of very small towns like Rocky Hill and Lawrenceville, which at least offer a coffee shop + a couple of restaurants. Rocky Hill is pretty close to a grocery store and the essential Wawa, and if you enjoy walking/biking, it's a very easy area to take long walks down the canal and even to downtown Princeton. There really isn't anything else like Princeton that close to Princeton, and even most parts of Princeton will almost certainly require that you drive to get groceries amongst other things. It is very suburban.

For $2000 you can find a nice place in downtown Princeton. I would not give up on finding an apartment there. I rented from a decent management company there for a few years, I will try to find the link to their website. See if they have anything available. You could also rent in the apartments behind TGI Fridays on Route 1, then ride a bike along the towpath to downtown Princeton. It's in between Forrestal and Princeton so may be a decent compromise for you if you ride a bike. If you have any interest in roommates, a close friend of mine (30s male professional) has a great house in Princeton and he rents out rooms and a studio apartment in the basement. Memail me if you want me to ask him if he has anything available.

http://www.nspapartment.com is the company I rented from. Don't trust the website that there's nothing available; give them a call.

New Jersey has some active bike and walk advocacy groups for towns like you are thinking about. You might want to check out the http://www.newjerseybikewalk.org, https://www.facebook.com/WalkablePrinceton?fref=ts, and north of there http://bikewalkmontclair.org and https://www.facebook.com/BikeWalkTown?ref=tn_tnmn. West Windsor is closer to Princeton has the http://wwbpa.org, which has been pretty active if making it easier to walk to train and stuff. New Brunswick seems like a good place to check and does a https://www.facebook.com/nbciclovia?fref=ts a few times a year where they shut down the streets in part of town for bikes and walking. I'm not really familiar with it, but I did hear the mayor speak once and the town seems pretty committed to making it easier to walk and bike there. If you can afford Princeton, that does seem like the best bet tho.

Thirding Somerville. So many good restaurants! The commute might be a little long, but I believe it's all on a more scenic route than Rt 1.

New Brunswick might be an option, but the closer to downtown you are the morerent will go up. Commute won't be too crazy most days. It's rt1 or 27 all the way down. Maybe check out Kingston, not sure what the rent is like there. Plainsboro is not quite what you're looking for, but in certain areas is walkable.

That's a serious commute to/from New Brunswick, though a mitigating factor is that rush hour goes the opposite way. But thing is, you'll be gobbling miles and miles of trashy soulless US-1 five days a week. How is that not "suburban and auto dependent", regardless of whether you can get a milkshake within a short walk from your apartment? If New Brunswick were some awesome boutique small-urban oasis, maybe I could see it. But it ain't. Even if you find a way to live in downtown Princeton, that's still plenty of driving out to Forrestal. So IMO you need to accept that taking a job well outside urban america means lots of time in your car, and a generally suburban existence. You can't have it both ways, alas. But that's not like being doomed to hell. For example, just 20 mins from Forrestal is the Franklin/Somerset area, which is the very opposite of what you think you like, but is dotted with amazing Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese, and Italian restaurants strewn in shopping strips along low-traffic roads and boasting vast easy parking lots. It's not so bad driving to stuff if 1. the stuff's good, 2. you're not in urban traffic, and 3. there's easy parking. You'll have to be a bit more intrepid to find good stuff. You can't rely on conventional wisdom, as in an urban area where everything's under a magnifying glass. But this makes the hunting that much more enjoyable. Suburbia is studded with jewels for the adventurous and the open-minded.