www.hobokeni.com is a site that twenty and thirtysomethings turn to for everything from the mile square city’s history and happenings to riveting feature columns. One of the site’s most popular attractions, however, is the classified page for people to search for an apartment, a roommate, or both.

But this section expands well beyond properties and room listings within the borders of Sinatra’s hometown. Ads are also available for roommates (commonly known as "shares") in beach communities from the Irish Riviera (Spring Lake) to the home of The Ketch (Long Beach Island). It’s not surprising that some Jersey shore beach towns are otherwise known as Hoboken South.

As any veteran resident of Hoboken will testify, when summer Friday afternoons roll around and the Garden State Parkway Southbound lanes become as crowded as The Peach Pit After Dark in its heyday, Hoboken is left with nothing but tumbleweeds and bored bouncers.

Oftentimes a decent seasonal shore rental ranges from $17,000.00 (the average Long Beach Island price for a 4-bedroom) to $30,000.00 (the basic rate for a similar rental in Spring Lake/Sea Girt). Obviously, a handful of your closest friends will not be able to fill a house and foot the bill alone, unless your Dad’s last name is Grubman and your sister’s name is Lizzie.

When organizing a house one must often resort to outsourcing to find people with similar interests to bring down the cost of the rental. The selection process applied after a response to an ad is a curious hybrid of blind date and Fraternity/Sorority rush week.

To avoid multiple nights of meeting individual groups looking to join in for the summer, Shore House Happy Hours are arranged either in Hoboken or the city. This allows the incumbents (brothers and sisters who pledged in years past and are still organized enough to put a down payment on the rental) to meet the outside ad respondents (the house rushers) that are hoping to be selected to be a proud member of Pi Kappa Parker House.

Like rush parties of years past, drinks are poured—albeit more colorful and expensive than the Busch Light Draft served at college and stories of summers past are revisited.

The next day, a committee of mature, professional singles (the incumbents in the house) decide via email and phone if the other singles that attended (the pledges that they had just gotten to know for all of one hour) are worthy enough to share a property they all have likely never lived in.

As you can see, getting voted off the island is no longer restricted to CBS prime time.

In my limited experience, the unfortunate souls who were voted off our island/house had their torches blown out because they posed the types of inquiries below. (Please note: The answers provided are sardonic and wry retorts that I only wish I had thought of at the time).

Question: Will the food and drinks be clearly labeled according to who brought what down to the house? Fantasy Answer: Yes, George Costanza. And in a related effort, we will even ration the shampoo according to who has the most hair.

Question: Are we allowed to date other shares in the house? Fantasy Answer: Absolutely. I have no doubt that publicly displaying your love for someone you share our overcrowded house with will make it a pleasure for everyone to live in. After all, what’s a shore house without the tension of a relationship based on Corona and lust? …Especially after you eventually come to loathe each other once the thing implodes by July 4th weekend.

You get the idea. And just like the dating scene, if a person or group doesn’t make the cut in our house, house rushers are politely informed of their fate by resorting to the sure-fire, "We met somebody else/It’s not you, it’s me" break-up lines.

Like the Greek system, there’s always room in a house somewhere for all those hell-bent on getting in on one. And once again, our generation’s growing appreciation of the convenience and reach of a web site like Hobokeni.com is clearly exemplified by its bringing together of beach-loving Hobokenites for three months of G-Rated summer fun.

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