One of the largest development projects in downtown New Brunswick has secured more than $100 million in financing from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
The state EDA recently announced that it has agreed to provide resources for the development of Nokia Bell Lab’s new R&D tower at the former site of the city’s Ferren Mall. The agency will provide $104 million in gap financing for the project, which is the second phase of the city’s HELIX NJ project, which commenced construction almost seven years ago.
The building is on a 2.5-acre site across from the city’s NJ Transit station. According to a report in RE-NJ, Nokia will occupy a new 370,000-square-foot lab and office facility being developed by real estate firms SJP Properties and North Haven Net REIT and master developer New Brunswick Development Corp.
Jersey Digs reported that city officials commemorated the first phase of the project topping out in September. That phase of HELIX NJ consists of a new 12-story building that will span 574,000 square feet and will house the New Jersey Innovation Hub, the Rutgers School of Medicine and Rutgers Translational Research.
The Nokia building will have a smaller footprint than what the developers originally intended. As reported in Jersey Digs in June 2023, SJP and the development corporation planned on building a second tower that spanned 600,000 square feet. Construction is projected to take over two years to wrap up. Nokia, which leased the building for 20 years, will relocate approximately 1,000 scientists from its campus in the Murray Hill section of Union County.
The latest award for the Nokia building is the second time that the state EDA agrees to provide an incentive towards the HELIX NJ development. Two years ago, the project secured a tax credit for $271 million for the first phase of the project.
Despite construction of the first phase of the project taking almost seven years to conclude, the report in RE-NJ said that the city development corporation intends to build another 42-story building at the site that will house 250 apartments and 240,000 square feet of lab and office space.
According to a report from 2017 in MyCentralJersey.com, the site of the HELIX NJ project, formerly the site of the Ferren Mall, included a parking deck that had been erected in the 1950s and expanded in the 1980s. City officials announced the demolition of the defunct mall and parking deck in March 2017 after the New Brunswick Parking Authority made an agreement with the development corporation and Middlesex County to redevelop the area.
NJBIZ reported one year later that the board of the state EDA agreed to provide financing towards the redevelopment of the site, which would yield 4 million square feet of new commercial space. However, it was not until October 2021 that city and state officials broke ground on the first $175 million tower.
