The Hoboken City Council has approved a developer’s agreement that promises to bring 90 units of two- and three-bedroom affordable housing to the city’s rapidly developing northwest area.
Tuesday, local and state officials and involved developers held a press event to announce new state funding, to display renderings of the approved building, and to give a timeline for the project. The project is a joint venture of the publicly-owned Tarragon Reality Investors, Inc., Hoboken-based Ursa Development, and Hoboken developer Frank “Pupie” Raia.
They are building a $50 million development that includes a 90-unit affordable housing building at 1118 Adams St. Adjacent to it, at 1100 Adams St., will be a luxury condominium building.
According to William Friedman, Tarragon’s president and chief executive officer, the project will be completed approximately 15 months from now.
In September of 1999, under the administration of former Mayor Anthony Russo, the City Council created the “Northwest Redevelopment Area” and adopted a Redevelopment Plan for the area to stimulate growth in the blighted region.
Under that plan, Raia was designated to develop several blocks in the area. Work is currently underway at a Shop-Rite supermarket on the corner of 11th and Madison streets. The supermarket is scheduled to open later this year.
In February, the Hoboken City Council approved a request from Raia to transfer a portion Raia’s rights and obligations for two blocks of the developer’s agreement to Tarragon and Ursa, with Raia being a minority partner.
Tarragon Realty of New York City is a real estate investor and developer of housing and rental communities. The company owns approximately 16,000 apartments and 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, valued at over $1 billion, with concentrations in Florida, Connecticut, and Texas, according to the company’s web site.
Ursa Development is a local group based out of Hoboken, headed by Hoboken developers Michael Sciarra and Mark Settembre.
At the event Tuesday, Mayor David Roberts said this is an important project in creating a neighborhood in the city’s northwest quadrant. In fact, while no official name has been given to the neighborhood, some city officials are beginning to refer to the former industrial neighborhood as the new “Upper Grand” residential neighborhood.
“The development of affordable housing for families will maintain the income diversity which is an important part of the Hoboken community,” said Roberts. “The city’s Northwest Redevelopment Plan has taken vacant industrial and brownfields sites and transformed them into a new residential neighborhood.”
The development
According to officials from project’s architectural firm, Gruzen Samton, 1100 Adams St., which will contain 76 luxury, for-sale condominium units, and 1118 Adams St., which will contain 90 affordable, for-rent units, were developed with assistance from the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs, the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, the Hudson County Consortium, and the Department of Community Development of the City of Hoboken.
At Tuesday’s ceremony, Susan Bass Levin, commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA), announced that the New Jersey Housing and Finance Authority, a division of the DCA, is providing some $2.35 million in grants and low-interest loans for the development. She added that the DCA is contributing an additional $2.25 million from its Balanced Housing Program.
“Revitalizing our neighborhoods is a top priority at the Department of Community Affairs and at the Housing and Finance Authority,” said Levin at the ceremony. “I’m very proud that we were able to help make ‘Adams Street’ a reality.”
Friedman added his company looks forward to beginning the project. “Tarragon and the Ursa Development Group promised to include hundreds of units of high-quality affordable rental housing in the new Upper Grand residential neighborhood we are now starting to build in the Northwest Hoboken Redevelopment area,” said Friedman. “We are delighted that with the award of federal tax credits, capital grants, and financing from the Department of Community Affairs, the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency, and the Hudson County Consortium, we will fulfill that promise early in the redevelopment program with construction to begin early next year.”
Both of the projects will be five stories over a ground-floor parking garage. Each will have an internal courtyard, but the buildings will stand as separate structures. The affordable building at 1118 Adams St. will geared towards families, with 62 two-bedroom apartments and 28 three-bedroom apartments. The affordable units will be available to families with incomes of 50 and 60 percent of the median income of Hudson County. Rents are expected to range between $600 and $730 per month.
The other building, 1100 Adams, will be for-sale condos with a mixture of one and two bedroom units. The rent for those building has yet to be decided.
How can you apply?
According to Raia, the management company will place an advertisement in local newspapers and start a waiting list once the units are completed.
Michael Gelfand, Gruzen Samton’s partner-in-charge of the Adams Street development, said the design of the project will take into account the character of the neighborhood. “We are proposing to incorporate some of the character, style and scale associated with the traditional neighborhoods of Hoboken into our plans for this important new development,” said Gelfand. “The exterior of the building has been designed to recall both the traditional low-rise brownstones apparent in many of Hoboken’s residential neighborhoods, interwoven with the development district’s historical industrial roots.”