Jersey City’s building boom is a poorly-kept secret at this point, but a new study shows that both the construction volume and the scale of development have increased significantly over the past decade.
CoStar recently released an analysis of multifamily construction across the county and found that more than 10,000 apartments are currently being built in Jersey City’s Journal Square and Waterfront districts. The numbers make the city one of the nation’s most active multifamily development hubs, even as apartment construction slows nationwide.
According to the research, these Journal Square and the Waterfront account for nearly 51,000 apartment units as a result of a building boom that started in the 2000s. The Jersey City Waterfront alone has more than 6,600 units in the pipeline, representing a 28% increase over the existing inventory and giving the neighborhood the highest construction-to-inventory ratio among the New York area’s 52 multifamily submarkets.
One of the most notable trends highlighted in a graphic released by CoStar, with the student, was that Jersey City’s apartment buildings are getting larger. Projects built in the 2020s average 381 units and 22 stories, compared with 260 units and 13 stories at properties built before 2000.
While the Waterfront has always had taller structures since the turn of the century, the shift in Journal Square is much more pronounced. Nearly half of all apartment buildings under construction in the area have more than 50 units, and several other notable high-rises have approvals in place.
The Waterfront’s new heights are even more pronounced, as projects under construction there average 42 stories and more than 800 units.
The findings come at a time when multifamily development activity is declining nationally, making Jersey City’s construction pipeline a notable outlier. Jersey City has consistently been at the forefront of building new homes in the greater New York City region, regularly ranking highly nationwide for producing a large number of new housing units per resident.
