Hmmm, city governments in JC and Newark giving even more benefits to city workers. How progressive and machine politics friendly.

I don't see why city employees with modest incomes should be privileged above other workers with similar incomes.

I can't decide whether they were designed by I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, or Walter Gropius!


Perhaps some GARGOYLES might spruce them up a bit...or flamingoes on the lawn!

But then looks aren't everything because they are in Greenville, one of the finest neighborhoods in the Northeast...and remember LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!
(It's an easy walk to you neigborhood pusher!)

Three of the eight units in Jersey City?s Greenville section are set aside as subsidized.

For People Who Think Price Matters

By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
The New York Times
Published: July 20, 2008

In Jersey City, as in other area cities on the way to revitalizing their downtowns, an explosion of high-priced developments is well under way even as the need for midpriced housing generally expands. And city officials, discerning that their municipal employees are being priced out of living in the community, are increasingly feeling the need to do something about it.

?Our real estate has escalated to such a high value,? said Bob Antonicello, the city redevelopment director, ?that cops starting out at about $43,000, and firemen starting at $41,000, teachers at $38,000 or around that, could not afford to live here ? and we really need and want them to be part of the community 24-7.?

Jersey City has jumped on the issue of ?work-force housing,? as reasonably priced housing is currently being termed in urban-planning circles. Working with new state programs that support low-cost mortgages for those earning somewhat more than the average income for a community, with allowances for two-income couples, the city is aggressively recruiting developers to build new housing that municipal workers can afford.

A prototype development of eight condo units ? three of them set aside as subsidized ? was recently completed in the Greenville section. Built by Eagle Rock Development, the project recently won an award for energy-efficient design from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Work on the full project, with a total of 45 units, is set to begin soon, said Paul DeBellis, Eagle Rock?s principal.

Similarly, in Newark ? another revitalization site that has relatively little midpriced housing ? there is a shortage that at least one developer is setting out to remedy.

?We think there is a crying need for work-force type of housing in Newark,? said the developer, Adam Mermelstein, whose company, TreeTop Development, recently moved its base to Newark and bought about 800 dilapidated rental units, some of them vacant.

TreeTop has begun rehabilitating and upgrading the first group of those apartments, some 293 of them in the Parkwood Place complex in the Forest Hills section, and others in eight buildings along one block of Martin Luther King Boulevard.

?We are looking to provide really nice, quality housing where police and firefighters, teachers, medical workers, municipal employees, and so on, will want to live ? and be able to afford to live,? Mr. Mermelstein said. ?We think this is a part of the Newark renaissance, but it?s not for the upper echelons, but for working people.?

Indeed, the tenants at Parkwood Place ? where exterior fix-up work is in progress and 50 units have already been renovated ? now include 10 police officers, 2 detectives, 2 firefighters, 3 doctors and a housing inspector, said Carmen Lugo, the property manager.

She added that many of those coming in to lease apartments now are students at the nearby Rutgers-Newark and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

The rent for redone apartments is $725 per month for a studio, $950 for a one-bedroom and $1,250 for a two-bedroom unit, Mr. Mermelstein said.

Mr. Mermelstein, whose company previously built two new condominium buildings across the street from Hoboken?s housing projects, said his company was looking to make ?trouble spots into middle-class enclaves.? He noted that while upper-end projects might be put on hold during recessionary times, ?there is always work doing what we do.?

TreeTop will do about $10,000 worth of renovation work on every apartment in its block of Martin Luther King Boulevard buildings.

Elsewhere in that neighborhood, which stretches between University Heights and the Lincoln Park Arts District, about 3,000 units are being built or restored, either as new market-rate town homes or as subsidized housing.

The company is still in the process of buying nine more buildings in north Newark, bordering on Branch Brook Park.

As Mr. Antonicello of Jersey City pointed out, the need for reasonably price housing is likely to escalate in urban areas all over the state, as higher fuel prices and urban revitalization projects spur more people at all income levels to ?repopulate? the cities.