newark's real estate market pretty much crashed right now, while downtown jersey city is still relatively healthy. What a difference a few stops on the path train makes.

Selling Cities Despite Bad Images

By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
New York Times
August 22, 2008

PLACES like Newark, Trenton and even parts of Jersey City still carry the weight of reputations that soured long ago and never really recovered. Through boom times and bust and housing market highs and lows, and even as developers began seeing potential in urban locales as commuter hubs, the rap on such cities as less-than-savory places to live defied erasure, like graffiti in a hard-to-reach spot.

PERSUASION Creators of Eleven80, a luxury rental in Newark, worked against the odds and softened Newark?s hard edges in getting 85 percent of the building?s units rented in a year.

?People get ingrained perceptions,? said Arthur Stern, whose Cogswell Realty Group created housing in Newark last year, overcoming fierce skepticism from many ? including his project?s financiers. The result was the first upscale residential development to open downtown since the riots of 1968.

?We realized at the start? of developing the rental tower, Eleven80, at 1180 Raymond Boulevard, ?that there was a large percentage of the population that wouldn?t consider Newark, no matter what,? he said. ?The trick for us was to try to figure out how to get through that.?

They got through it by using every stigma-fading technique they could think of. One was to put cheery pro-Newark ads on thousands of coffee cup sleeves for commuters between the Pennsylvania Stations in Manhattan and Newark; another was to install $800,000 worth of safety-enhancing new lighting on the exterior of Eleven80, a converted Art Deco office structure.

The efforts seem to have paid off: 85 percent of the units, which rent for $1,650 to $3,895, were leased during the first year.

About 80 percent of the tenants work in Manhattan, Mr. Stern said. And 35 percent are single women ? which the developer called a strong showing from ?a group that might have been expected to be wary.?

He quickly added that the battle against negative perceptions was continuing. Cogswell proposes to create 3,500 more apartments in Newark, starting with 300 more rentals and 300 condominiums in the Hahne Griffith building downtown, and he said his company would have to keep searching for new ways to ?sell Newark, right along with our projects.?

In Trenton, Michael Goldstein of HHG Development Associates labors at the same two-pronged task, by means of his Hidden Trenton Web site. Mr. Goldstein established hiddentrenton.com in 2006, just as he and partners were proposing a renovation project in the Ferry District, one of the city?s more-or-less-defunct neighborhoods.

Writing virtually all the material himself, Mr. Goldstein, a former technology company executive, posts items about Trenton?s restaurants, recreation and ambience. (Representative headlines from the site include ?Divine Guatemalan Dive? and ?North Trenton Brewskis.?)

?I doubt that the Web site draws people to Trenton to look at our apartments,? Mr. Goldstein said, adding, ?Typically the scenario goes like this: people are looking for a certain type of house ? usually a loft ? with a price point in mind, and they have discovered they can?t get it anywhere else. The Web site becomes very important when they are trying to decide, ?Can I really live in Trenton?? ?

The city has no Starbucks or strip malls, he added, and the bistros are few and far between.

?It?s a gritty, postindustrial area, not Park Slope,? he added. ?But if people look on the Web site, they tend to understand, ?If I look, there are amazing things, at amazingly cheap prices, here.? ?

HHG is marketing 18 condos that it created out of a rehabilitated Victorian factory building, backed by a federal development subsidy, at prices ranging from $129,000 to $289,000 for spacious one- and two-bedroom units.

Lunch is nearly as much of a bargain, according to Hidden Trenton: $7.50, tops, for good Spanish, Indian or deli food.

?Because Trenton gets such a bad rap,? Mr. Goldstein said, ?even 90 percent of the people living in Mercer County will drive to Princeton or New Brunswick for food they could find cheaper and better here.?

Union City, whose reputation is not as poor as those of some other older cities, is virgin territory for big developers enticed by its location. Last spring, brokers there introduced the Thread Building, billed as the city?s first ?luxury? high-rise ever, at a party at the Park Avenue Bar and Grill. The idea was to reveal to those who might know nothing about Union City ? except for an overall impression of its being poor and shabby ? that there were ?cool places to go, hang out, and shop,? said Kelly Marzullo, the lead broker for the Thread.

?You have to draw people in, get them to ?taste the taste,? you might say, so they can understand what Union City is,? she said. ?People don?t know about the historic buildings here, the charming scale and interesting people, and the incredibly short commute into Manhattan.?

In Jersey City, whose waterfront area already has upscale housing, the push is on to do the same inland, and developers of the huge Canco Lofts project are trying to clean up their neighborhood?s image ? literally. Canco is being created at the former American Can Company site, which long moldered, empty and abandoned, underneath the highway overpasses southeast of Journal Square.

?There?s a nice little blue-collar neighborhood already here,? said Marco Tartaglia, director of sales for Canco, ?a great Indian restaurant, a fabulous bakery, and little convenience shops along the way to Journal Square and the PATH station ? but the factory property was neglected, and there is still a lot of graffiti on the streets around it, and litter.?

The Canco developer, Coalco New York, has ?deputized? employees as graffiti removers, Mr. Tartaglia said. ?We also fixed up the beat-up basketball court on St. Paul?s Avenue,? he added. ?These are things that matter to people when they come to a neighborhood and look it over. Whatever they?ve heard, or might remember about the area in its darker days, we want them to get a picture in their minds about its best side now.?