A four-story health care facility may be underway at the heart of the West Side neighborhood in Newark. Saint James Health, a major public clinic system in the city, recently secured site plan approval for a 38,000-square-foot clinic building at 432-446 South Orange Avenue from the city’s Central Planning Board. The project will be Saint James’ first ground-up development, and will serve as a significant expansion of the system’s footprint in the neighborhood, where it has occupied over 6,000 square feet.
Nicole Fields, the CEO of Saint James Health, told Jersey Digs that it would be a “dream to expand” to the site, which spans three adjacent parcels next to West Side High School and is in the heart of the booming West Side Neighborhood, where the clinic system first intended to expand nearly a decade ago.
Officials granted final site plan approvals for the project in August, nearly eight years after Saint James Health first intended to expand to the same three parcels. Jersey Digs reported in November 2018 that an ordinance to approve the sale of the lots was approved by the city’s municipal council. The developer, an LLC based out of the same office as Saint James Health, originally intended to build a mixed-use center with retail and housing for veterans, in addition to the medical space for the clinic system.
Fields said she was not involved in that earlier project and noted that Saint James will occupy the first two floors of the planned building to deliver primary care services. The upper floors will be rented out to private practices, with public plans mentioning that specialists affiliated with RWJ Barnabas will occupy the top two floors of the facility. Fields emphasized that the clinic system does not intend to consolidate its existing facilities in the West Ward, but rather expand services given the high demand for low-cost health care.
The system is part of the Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) program, which aims to deliver primary, dental, and mental health services to underserved communities. Saint James Health has been operating in Newark for 10 years and has three other locations in the city, including its founding location in the Ironbound, a location on South 8th Street in the West Ward, and a location along Clinton Ave in the South Ward.
The redevelopment of the three parcels could serve as a boon for employment and foot traffic to the growing West Side neighborhood. The site is proximal to Springfield Avenue, where a number of developers are currently working to deliver hundreds of units. Jersey Digs reported in August that MCI Collective, one of the development firms behind the NJPAC campus expansion project in downtown Newark, secured approvals for a new four-story building at 508-516 Springfield Avenue.
Another development firm is also slated to build a four-story affordable housing complex at 666-676 South 12th Street, just a few blocks from Queen Latifah’s own Rise Living apartment complex.
