The Jersey City Planning Board voted at its meeting on Tuesday to recommend the Journal Square Redevelopment Plan for final adoption by the City Council.
The plan is meant to revitalize the Journal Square area of town, adding 10,000 to 15,000 new residential units including two towers next to the existing bus/train station.
The plan calls for a 244-acre area to be redeveloped covering Vroom Street to the south, Tonnelle Avenue to the west, State Highway 139 to the north and Baldwin Avenue to the east. The plan is known as the Journal Square Center City Plan or “Jerramiah T. Healy’s Vision for Journal Square.” It is currently posted on the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency’s website (www.jcra.org).
Within the area, the city envisions thousands of square feet of commercial and retail space and 9 acres of park space. As part of the plan, the existing Journal Square transportation station might be replaced with a newer model. Implementing the plan is estimated to take upwards of 50 years and billions of dollars.
The centerpiece of the plan is the two $400 million towers (68 and 50 stories) to be privately built on land adjacent to the Journal Square Transportation Center by longtime Journal Square businessman Lowell Harwood and Washington D.C.-based pension firm MEPT. That project is expected to break ground this spring.
In November, the City Council approved a resolution declaring Journal Square an “area in need of rehabilitation”, a necessary step before any adoption of a comprehensive redevelopment plan, which calls for improvements to properties by their owners.
Now that the Planning Board approved the plan, the council may vote for final approval within a month’s time.
Watching closely
A truncated version of the plan was presented to the board by veteran urban planner Anton Nelessen, who along with Hoboken architect Dean Marchetto was commissioned by the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency earlier this year to develop a plan based on input from city officials, and from community meetings that were held since July. Longer presentations on the plan were given last fall.
In those community meetings, there has been both praise and opposition from people living in the Journal Square area. At Tuesday’s Planning Board meeting, there was a little of both from longtime Journal Square resident Richard Boggiano, a former Jersey City police officer and president of the Hilltop Neighborhood Association.
Boggiano said he did not object to the plan but wanted the city to make improvements to infrastructure and city services, which will be impacted by future Journal Square development. He also does want any large-scale parking garage or skyscrapers built in the vicinity of his block of Magnolia Avenue, both concepts which were proposed in the plan.
“We have one of the last neighborhoods in Jersey City … we are a tight neighborhood and we will be watching,” Boggiano said.
‘A model’
Mayor Jerramiah Healy. Healy, as expected, touted the plan.
“We think it is a great plan and it is a great vision,” Healy said, “and we really think it’s going to be a model for the United States.”
But Healy admitted that the financing is not readily available to fulfill many of the goals set out in the plan. The city is currently exploring the idea of designating the Journal Square Rehabilitation Area as a revenue allocation district (RAD) where the revenues generated in that district is dedicated to capital improvements within the district and/or retiring debt incurred due to redevelopment within the RAD. But the city has to wait for the state Legislature to pass a pending bill that would also allow RADs in an “area in need of rehabilitation” not just in “an area in need of redevelopment.”
After Healy’s speech and some other business, the audience was treated to a slide show containing numerous images of Journal Square at the present time, with its wide-lane roads, surface parking lots, and lack of greenery. Then images were shown of a future Journal Square, with narrower roads, more pedestrian walk space, and an abundance of trees.
Nelessen also talked about the other transportation elements of the plan, including the Hudson-Bergen light rail running through Journal Square, and buses that stop in the Square rather than inside a station.