JERSEY CITY: MODEL OF URBAN FUTURE?

 

By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

April, 2007

 

JERSEY CITY — Once, this was a city of browns and grays. Railroads owned a third of the land, and trains rumbled night and day to the cacophonous riverfront. Factories belched fumes and leaked chemicals. "Nobody cared," says Bob Leach, born here in 1937. "Smoke meant jobs."

And those were the good years. Then, in the 1960s, the railroads went broke. Rail yards were abandoned, piers rotted, factories closed. In the 1970s alone, the city lost 14% of its population and about 9% of its jobs.

Now Jersey City has come back as its own antithesis: clean, green and growing — an example, urban planners say, of how the nation can accommodate some of the additional 100 million Americans expected by 2040 without paving over every farm, forest and meadow.

Jersey City, a model of smart growth? Even Robert Cotter, the city's planning director, says he was surprised by the notion. But because so many people here live in apartments or attached houses located near shops, offices and mass transit, they require less land, gasoline, heating oil, water, sewer pipe and other finite resources.

Smart Growth America, an advocacy group that ranks the largest metro areas by sprawl, says Jersey City is the second "least sprawling," trailing only New York City.

It's part of a remarkable demographic and economic U-turn. In a region where many cities are shrinking, Jersey City in the last quarter-century has gained about 30,000 residents, 27,000 jobs and 18 million square feet of prime office space — more than all such space in downtown Atlanta, Phoenix or Miami.

Another 8,000 housing units are being built, and permits have been issued for 10,000 more. With tens of thousands more homes planned over the next 25 years, Jersey City — given up for dead 30 years ago — could pass its 1930 population peak of 316,700.

Once written off by the rest of the nation as another Rust Belt failure, Jersey City is now seen as instructional.

Robert Lang, director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, says the city "won't be a model for the whole country, but it will be an important model for parts of it" — especially satellite cities near bigger, more dynamic ones: Long Beach near Los Angeles, Oakland near San Francisco, Chelsea near Boston.

"Areas that have been blighted are beds for redevelopment," says Ben Jogodnik, a vice president of Toll Brothers, a leading national home builder that just finished a 12-story condo tower here. "Decay is incredibly fertile for regrowth."

Toll Brothers is known for building big houses on big suburban plots. But it formed a division to focus on locales such as Jersey City, Jogodnik says, "because that's where our customers are going."

How is Jersey City doing it? Observers such as Lang, Jogodnik and James Hughes, dean of Rutgers University's school of planning, identify several elements in the city's reversal of fortune:

•Proximity to New York. Hughes calls Jersey City "almost a sixth borough of New York." Mayor Jeremiah Healy calls the waterfront "Wall Street West." The city is a short trip across the Hudson River from Manhattan, but its building and real estate costs are one-half to one-third of Manhattan's. This has attracted companies such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, and thousands of residents who cross the Hudson to work.

•Redevelopment and infill. Because Jersey City had built on almost all of its land more than 50 years ago, it has to reuse, reclaim and redevelop land, including so-called brownfields (once-polluted industrial sites) and grayfields (parking lots, old strip malls).

After the Hudson riverfront's industrial economy collapsed in the 1970s, Jersey City lucked out: The land was abandoned. No one was living there to object to the construction of offices, apartments and stores on old rail yards and piers.

Similarly, the city has created the Powerhouse Arts District around an imposing but abandoned early 20th-century subway power station. Plans call for a mix of loft-style residential condos and rental units, restaurants, clubs, galleries, theaters and artists' spaces in an area just west of the waterfront.

Also, several former industrial sites contaminated with chromium have been cleaned up. Tons of soil have been removed from a former Honeywell plant on the west side and replaced with clean soil.

•Politics. For most of the 20th century, Jersey City's politics were reliably Democratic — and reliably corrupt. But in 1980, Democratic Mayor Gerald McCann endorsed Ronald Reagan, whose administration later gave the city a $40 million grant for infrastructure improvements along the still-undeveloped waterfront.

In 1992, even though only 6% of the electorate was registered Republican, conservative Republican Bret Schundler, a Harvard graduate who had worked on Wall Street, was elected mayor. Corporations were lured to the city in part by Schundler's reforms and by his reputation for honesty.

Hughes, the Rutgers professor, says publicly traded national companies no longer are automatically leery of doing business in Jersey City.

•Mass transit and infrastructure. Unlike Sun Belt cities that must build new transportation and water lines to accommodate growth, Jersey City is rich in basic infrastructure that was designed when the city was more populous than it is now.

Take mass transit. Although the city is served by a new, $2.2 billion state and federally financed light-rail system, it has long had subway, bus and ferry lines to Manhattan. About 40% of commuters use mass transit — second only to New York among the nation's 100 largest cities — and 9% walk to work.

•Immigrants. Thirty-seven percent of Jersey City residents are foreign-born, compared with 12% of all Americans. From 1970 to 1980, foreign-born residents jumped 45%, an increase nine times the city's population growth rate. Dozens of different languages are spoken here, and the city is home to one of the largest Arab Muslim communities in the nation.

Immigrants include wealthy Asian émigrés who are snapping up apartments at the still-rising Trump Plaza tower, which will be New Jersey's tallest residential building, Indian business owners who have established a "Little Bombay," and low-income Central Americans who work as domestics and manual laborers.

•Density. Cotter, the planning director, half jokes that Jersey City has earned its green reputation largely "by piling people on top of each other."

Among the largest U.S. cities, only New York has a higher population density than Jersey City. Nationally, 64% of homes are free-standing, single-family houses; in Jersey City, the figure is only 8%.

Jersey City's repopulation fits the state's policy of fighting sprawl and preserving open space. "We really have stemmed sprawl and forced development into some of the older urban areas," Hughes says.

And he says it's not just New Jersey: "In the whole Northeast now, part of the political culture is to slow down growth." As Sun Belt boom states such as North Carolina continue to grow — to get more "Jersified," as Hughes puts it — they'll come around, too, he says.

The Beacon on the hill

Last year, Caitlin Coan and Scott Young, who rent in a tower on Jersey City's waterfront, took a walk west — under an elevated highway, past a vocational high school and public housing project. They wanted to check out what Coan calls "that crazy hospital on the hill."

This was the former Jersey City Medical Center, a cluster of Art Deco buildings on a rise in the center of the city, far from the booming waterfront.

Now the medical center was becoming The Beacon condominium complex, one of the nation's largest historic renovation projects.

Most of it was built during the Great Depression. In 1932, Jersey City's most famous mayor, Frank Hague, helped elect Franklin Roosevelt president. In return, he got federal money to help build the hospital complex.

Hague, the history of Jersey City clearly documents, was a master of vote fraud, extortion and intimidation who told city workers how much to kick back to his political machine, whom to vote for and what newspaper to buy. He once had his police dump Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas on a Manhattan sidewalk after he tried to lead a rally in Jersey City.

The medical center symbolized his power. It could be seen for miles —The Saturday Evening Post wrote that it rose "like a beautiful mirage … up from the municipal rubble which is Jersey City." Its eight buildings had marble walls, terrazzo floors, etched glass, decorative moldings and glittering chandeliers.

Overbuilt and overstaffed, the center drained city finances for years. In 1988, four decades after Hague's retirement, the hospital declared bankruptcy. In 2004 it moved to a new building, leaving behind one of the biggest white elephants in America.

The city got it declared a state and national landmark and sold it to a developer for $9.5 million and a promise to spend $350 million to turn its huge buildings into 1,200 condos. This summer, Coan and Young will move into The Beacon, where they've purchased a one-bedroom unit.

Their willingness to move inland to find an affordable home is crucial to the city's plan to repopulate and upgrade its traditional center. The couple acknowledges they're taking a risk on an unfashionable neighborhood. "This is still an up-and-coming area," Young says. "If it doesn't get better, we'll be stuck."

In many ways, Jersey City still is two cities: waterside and inland, new and old, rich and poor.

"We see buildings going up, but it doesn't do us any good," says Walter Williams, 64, an unemployed security guard who lives near The Beacon. About 19% of Jersey City residents live below the poverty line, compared with 9% statewide and 12% nationally. Crime remains a problem despite the hiring of more police. The troubled schools are under state control.

George Filopoulos of Metrovest, The Beacon's developer, says 85% of the apartments in the first two buildings have been sold, mostly to residents of the waterfront or New York, or empty-nesters from the suburbs. Studios sell in the mid-$300,000s; a penthouse went for $2.3 million.

The legend of Hague, softened by the years, is part of the sales pitch. "The ghost of Frank Hague will be happy," Leach says. "In his own way, he always wanted to make this a world-class city."

Cotter says The Beacon is a test of whether Jersey City can grow out beyond its golden waterfront: "This is how we're growing, and in the future it's where a lot of U.S. cities are going."