During the past few weeks I have been researching the community of Asbury Park. This week I was looking through the city's website to see how the town government portrays the community. The website was impressive, I was asking myself how does this town seem so much like New York City, what caught my attention the most was that for a town with only a population of 116,000 it has twelve art galleries, a few music venues, the boardwalk, and so on. But then as you compare this to the town specs such as their income, age bracket, real estate values, reduced priced lunches, and school testing results there is another picture I saw that is not the one portrayed in their website.
The town is basically split into two sections by the train tracks, one is the upper economic part and the other the economically challenged section. All one has to do is cross the train tracks and you can feel like you are in two different places while still being in the same town. In my opinion it seems like the town government is more concerned about catering to visitors, and the more upscale residents that may spend their summers there than on the full time residents. There are twelve galleries in the town but there are no programs when an after school snack is offered without a fee. There seems to be a lot of money being spent on many things pretty, and nice infrastructure but not being invested into education or the full time students.
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