15. Demographics, Ownership and Equity

Method and a warning about the data

Everything in this section comes from the U.S. Census Bureau: the 2000, 2010 and 2020 Decennial Censuses and the American Community Survey (ACS) 2020–2024 5-year estimates, with the 2015–2019 and 2019–2023 vintages used where a before-and-after comparison is the point. Geography is Ridgewood village (place FIPS 34-63000), compared to Bergen County (34-003) and New Jersey (34).

Two cautions. First, the ACS is a sample survey. For a place of 26,000 people the margins of error on housing subgroups run 5 to 15 percent, and they are printed below. Second, the ACS “value” of a home is what the owner thinks it is worth, averaged over five years. It is not a sale price and it lags the market. The gap between the ACS figure and what Section 3 reports from closed sales is discussed under “Contradictions” at the end of this file, because it is large.

Population

Ridgewood’s population was flat for a decade and then grew about 4 percent between 2010 and 2020. Bergen County’s ACS population is 962,316; New Jersey’s is 9,343,809 [4].

Households

Ridgewood households are larger than the county’s and the state’s, and 43.6 percent of them include a child under 18, against 32.1 percent countywide. Median age is in line with the county.

Age distribution (Ridgewood, ACS B01001, n = 26,308)

Source: ACS B01001 [9]. Individual five-year bands carry margins of ±100 to ±400 persons.

The 25-to-34 band is 7.1 percent of residents. The 45-to-54 band is 18.8 percent. Ridgewood has more than twice as many residents in their late forties and early fifties as in their late twenties and early thirties.

Income

Source: ACS B19013 [10]. Table S1901 reports the same median with the income distribution. Ridgewood’s median household income is 1.67 times the county’s and 2.01 times the state’s. Note the ±$17,735 margin: the true Ridgewood median lies somewhere between about $190,000 and $226,000.

Home values as owners report them

Source: ACS B25077, 2024 and 2023 vintages [11][12].

Distribution of owner-reported value (ACS B25075) [13]

The 651 units under $500,000 include 107 reported under $10,000 and 81 between $40,000 and $50,000. Those are almost certainly response errors or non-standard units, and the sub-$500,000 band should be read as roughly 8 to 9 percent, not parsed further.

Section 3 of this report puts the 2026 year-to-date median sale price at $1,460,088. The ACS median of $891,200 is a five-year average of self-reported estimates ending in 2024, and owners who have not transacted recently anchor on older prices. The two numbers measure different things and the gap between them is itself information: a large share of Ridgewood owners are carrying a mental value of their home that is materially below what a buyer would pay today. That matters for the revaluation discussion in Section 2, because the assessor will use sales, not owner opinion.

Tenure

Source: ACS B25003 [14]. Ridgewood’s owner-occupancy rate is 17 points above the county’s.

Housing stock: what kind of buildings

Units in structure (ACS B25024, all housing units) [15]

Four of every five Ridgewood housing units are detached single-family houses. Buildings of five or more units are 11.2 percent of the stock, half the county share of 22.4 percent. This is the structural reason the Village’s affordable-housing obligations (Section 11) translate into multifamily proposals that stand out: there is little existing multifamily to absorb them.

Year structure built (ACS B25034) [16]

Three-quarters of Ridgewood’s housing (74.4 percent) predates 1960, against 50.7 percent countywide and 37.7 percent statewide. More than a third predates 1940. Only 4.7 percent was built in the last fifteen years. The practical consequences (lead paint disclosure on pre-1978 housing, underground oil tanks, knob-and-tube and cloth wiring, cast-iron drains, asbestos, undersized electrical service) belong in Section 12 and are the norm here rather than the exception. The median Ridgewood house is 76 years old.

Vacancy

Of 9,191 housing units, 288 ±160 were vacant (3.1 percent): 98 for rent, 36 for sale, 88 sold but not yet occupied, 20 seasonal or occasional use, 46 “other vacant.” The rental vacancy rate computes to 5.9 percent (98 of 1,654) and the homeowner vacancy rate to 0.5 percent (36 of 7,383), but the margins on these counts are as large as the counts themselves and they should be read as “very low” and nothing more precise. Source: ACS B25002, B25004 [18][19].

Mortgage status: the public equity proxy

The Census does not measure equity. The closest public proxy is whether an owner has any mortgage at all.

Source: ACS B25081 [20]. Category labels for the second-mortgage/home-equity subrows changed in the 2024 table layout; the with-mortgage and no-mortgage totals are unaffected.†

Ridgewood has a lower free-and-clear share than the county or the state, despite older housing and higher incomes. Two things push that way: the price of entry means recent buyers carry large mortgages, and the 1990s–2010s cohort (described below) is still inside a 30-year amortization. It does not mean Ridgewood owners have less equity. A 2015 buyer at $850,000 with a $680,000 mortgage is sitting on roughly $1 million of equity at 2026 prices while still counting as “with a mortgage” here.

†

How long owners have been in place

Year householder moved into unit (ACS B25038) [21]

Half of Ridgewood’s owners have been in their house for more than fifteen years. The largest single cohort, 38.8 percent, arrived between 2010 and 2017, buying at prices that Section 3 shows were roughly 40 to 60 percent below today’s. Only 1.3 percent of owners moved in during 2021 or later, which is consistent with the collapse in sales volume reported in Section 3 (sales fell from 355 in 2021 to about 227 a year in 2024–2025). These figures cover 2020–2024 survey responses and understate 2025–2026 arrivals.

†

What I tell my buyers: the seller across the table from you has, more often than not, owned the house since Obama’s first term, has a mortgage balance that is a fraction of your offer, and is not under pressure to accept anything. That is why Section 4’s percentages look the way they do. Ridgewood sellers can wait. Price your offer for a seller who does not need you.

Monthly owner costs and cost burden

Source: ACS B25088 [22]. The Census top-codes these medians at $4,000 and $1,500. Ridgewood exceeds both caps, so the true medians cannot be read from ACS. The “without a mortgage” figure is mostly property tax, insurance and utilities; Section 6 gives the actual median tax bill.

Owner cost burden, monthly owner costs as a share of household income (ACS B25091) [23]

Denominators exclude households for which the ratio could not be computed (26 with a mortgage, 14 without). Ridgewood’s burden rates for mortgaged owners are close to the county’s. The one figure that stands apart is the share of unmortgaged owners paying half or more of income in housing costs: 14.0 percent, against 11.2 percent countywide. With no mortgage in the picture, that is property tax against a fixed or retirement income. Section 2’s revaluation will land on that group first.

Education, labor force and how people get to work

Educational attainment, population 25 and over (ACS B15003) [24]

Labor force (ACS B23025) [25]: population 16 and over 20,127; in labor force 13,597 (67.6 percent); employed 13,131; unemployed 463 (3.4 percent of the civilian labor force, ±1.1 points).

Means of transportation to work, workers 16 and over (ACS B08301) [26][27]

Mean travel time: 301,810 aggregate minutes (ACS B08013) over 8,718 workers who did not work from home computes to 34.6 minutes [28].†

This is the largest change in any table in this section. Between the 2015–2019 and 2020–2024 survey windows, the share of Ridgewood workers working from home nearly tripled, from 11.1 to 32.1 percent, and the count of commuter-rail riders fell by almost half, from 1,408 to 758. Ridgewood’s work-from-home share is now 13.6 points above the county’s. Its rail-commuter share, at 5.9 percent, is still more than three times the county’s 1.8 percent, so the station remains a distinguishing feature of the Village, but the 2020–2024 figure describes a town where roughly one worker in three does not commute at all. Section 13 covers NJ Transit service levels; the ridership side of that story is here.

Census tracts

Ridgewood is covered by five 2020 census tracts. Tract-level figures below feed Section 14 and are reproduced there with joins.

† Figures marked with a dagger are best-effort research, so verify them with the issuing office (the Village of Ridgewood, the school district, the county, the state or the utility) before making judgment calls or decisions on them.