Are they still proceeding with this plan? Hopefully they can gentrify that area. It needs it.

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Hoboken Heights?
Jersey City East?
Hoboken City?

As per any other project in Jersey City, anyone care to guess how much over budget and how much longer it will take to finish the project than anticipated?

This town makes me a pessimist...

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I thought it was Hoboken West.......

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The spot has been undergoing soil remediation. I used to call on the chocolate plant while working for an industrial supply company. It made the area around Christ hospital smell like chocolate.

There's a sad irony about this. This new project is along the path of the pipeline. There's the blast radius map below. You think people interested in green living are going to want to live next to a natural gas pipeline? And, oh right, a metering station is planned to be a block away.
View Spectra Pipeline Blast Radius in a larger map

wow, looks like a bomb went off on that side of town

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Good point.

I have a friend in PA who had a geothermal system installed along with 8 solar panels for a one family, 2000 square foot dwelling. It wasn't cheap... Geothermal pump was $9000 dollars and the total with solar panels was about $45,000.

However, he receives a 90 - 120 dollar check a month from the utilities that he sells back. I wonder how this works in a four hundred unit complex?

Without the subsidies, how long would it take for the added energy savings to pay for the added costs of the geothermal system, solar panels, etc?

That's "Downtown"?

View Larger Map 'Green' building approved for Downtown Monday, November 01, 2010 By AMY SARA CLARK JOURNAL STAFF WRITER A pioneering environmentally-friendly development in Downtown Jersey City is one step closer to fruition after the Jersey City Planning Board approved the final site plan on Tuesday. Van Leer Place will use 90 percent less energy than conventional buildings and emit fewer carbon emissions through geothermal and solar energy as well as other green technologies, said Daniel Gans who is developing the property with his partner George Vallone of the Hoboken Brownstone Co. Gans and Vallone have developed more than a dozen properties in Hoboken. For this project they are planning to redevelop the former Van Leer Chocolate Factory at 110 Hoboken Ave. The site, previously home to a pesticide plant, is a brownfield industrial site that is being remediated. Van Leer Place will consist of 400 units in two six-story buildings - a rental building on the north side of Hoboken Avenue and condos on the south - 7,500 square feet of retail space, a rooftop garden and a 1.5-acre public park that includes a dog run. It will be linked to the Hoboken Second Street Light Rail by a walkway. The project was kept to six stories so it would not block the views from The Heights, said Michael A. Ryan, the planning board's chairman. The green technology is so unique that the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities designated it one of the first "Urban Energy Technology Demonstration" projects and gave it a $3.6 million alternative energy grant. The complex will use "heat exchangers" buried 500 feet deep below ground. The equipment harnesses the constant 55-degree temperature to cool the building in the summer and heat it in winter. Roofs will be covered with solar panels to generate electricity, and solar water heaters will heat water tanks. The development is also using "autoclaved" concrete made with air pockets that will make the walls particularly well insulated. According to Gans, construction will begin by the end of the year. He said he expects to complete the rental building by the end of 2012.