Cape May, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding right at Cape May, NJ?
Nothing alarming measured right at Cape May, NJ: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
Cape May, NJ is the nearest named place, 0.2 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 38.94, -74.90. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 96 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 55% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.8 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.13 ft/yr, would place it 597 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Stone Harbor, NJ, 11 miles away, ranks 1069 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.73 ft/yr. 2.3 miles away, West Cape May, NJ is the nearest other measured stretch: moderate erosion at 2.03 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Cape May itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.