When Jason Tsay and Michael Suchocki left artsy Chelsea for sleepy Bayonne, they thought the New Jersey city was on the cusp of a real estate renaissance.
Turns out they were a decade early. The couple moved in 2004, but it’s only now that the southernmost area of New Jersey’s Gold Coast is gearing up for thousands of new apartments and game-changing developments.
The modest town (pop. 65,000) at the bottom of the Hudson Waterfront — the stretch of Jersey areas across from Manhattan and Brooklyn that starts in the north with Englewood Cliffs, across the George Washington Bridge, and passes through Hoboken and Jersey City on down to Bayonne — has long held loads of potential.
A harborfront location and city views, easy access to Manhattan via Light Rail and the PATH, an abundant supply of developable land parcels: Bayonne has all the scaffolding for a construction boom. But legal battles, lackluster efforts and economic downturns have hampered its progress, even as neighbors like Jersey City and Hoboken have seen their fortunes soar.
Now, some 13 years after Tsay and Suchocki relocated there, there are signs that Bayonne’s time has at last arrived. The city is in the midst of a dramatic redevelopment of its Military Ocean Terminal, taken out of service in 1999, that will result in a massive rental complex along with retailers like Costco.
Meanwhile, smaller projects are proliferating around the town’s 22nd Street Light Rail stop, which connects residents to points up the Gold Coast and PATH trains running to Manhattan.
In all, Bayonne will see work start on around 1,000 residential units this year, says Joe DeMarco, the city’s business administrator. It expects to add another 2,000 to 3,000 apartments over the next five to six years.
“For a small little city, it’s humming,” DeMarco says.
To fill all those new pads, Bayonne is banking on the same factors that drew Tsay and Suchocki years before — proximity to New York City (about an hour on public transportation) and lower prices. Buyers can find single-family homes in Bayonne for around $400,000, significantly less than the $800,000 or more they’ll pay in Jersey City, according to Weichert Realtors agent Janice Hall. Bayonne rentals hover around $1,800 for a one-bedroom and between $2,200 and $3,000 for a two-bedroom. Similar units in Jersey City go for around $2,500 and $3,500, respectively.
“Having Manhattan right outside our door wasn’t as important to us as having a nice home and a good cost of living,” says Tsay of their move. The couple, who first bought a townhouse, sold it after losing their jobs during the 2008 financial crisis and moved to a rental in an older walk-up. Then, in 2014, Tsay came across Silk Lofts, a then-new 85-unit conversion of the city’s defunct Maidenform bra factory by developer Doug Stern. (Current rents range from $1,600 for a studio to $3,200 for a two-bedroom.)
“It’s a restored building with the original brick and all the beams and high ceilings,” Tsay adds. “There was nothing like it in Bayonne. It was like Brooklyn or Hoboken living.”
The development is a two-minute walk from the 22nd Street Light Rail stop, which, combined with a transfer to the PATH, gets 39-year-old Tsay to his job at a Manhattan architecture firm in about 60 minutes. Suchocki, 53, is a CPR instructor.
Since Silk Lofts opened, other projects have begun to pop up in the area. Developer Ingerman is building a 138-rental building named 19 East nearby on Broadway, Bayonne’s main drag. 19 East is slated to open in summer 2018 with amenities like a yoga studio, a game room and two roof decks. Prices will run from around $1,500 for a studio to $2,200 for a two-bedroom, says Geoffrey Long, development principal at Ingerman.
For its part, Skye Development is currently finishing its 38-unit Hudson Flats rental building (one-bedrooms from $1,695) at 304 Broadway and recently broke ground on its 90-unit Skye Lofts South rental building (one-bedrooms from $1,995) at 250 Ave. E. A third building, Skye Lofts North, is in the pipeline. It’s expected to bring 100 additional units to a site at 262 Ave. E.
“Hoboken and Jersey City got saturated,” says Skye president Mitchell Burakovsky, explaining Bayonne’s recent uptick in development. “Investors are looking for a new market.”
Builders are bullish that Bayonne can, in fact, follow the precedent set by its northern neighbors.
“It’s reminiscent of Jersey City maybe 10 years ago, when there was more opportunity,” adds Long, noting that 19 East marks his company’s first foray into Bayonne. “It’s gotten tougher or more expensive to build elsewhere, and we wanted to look for opportunities and places that are on the rise. Bayonne definitely fits that.”
A key area to watch is the Military Ocean Terminal. Once used as a base by both the Navy and the Army, it’s a man-made peninsula spanning some 130 acres that stretches into Upper New York Bay. It also offers dramatic views of New York Harbor and the Manhattan skyline. In 2010, the city of Bayonne, desperate to shore up its finances, sold it to the Port Authority for $235 million. That halted a development plan that had called for 6,700 residential units on the site.
Soon it will be dormant no more. JMF Properties will break ground this year on a project comprising several hundred rental units along with some 250,000 square feet of retail. Negotiations with Costco to open a store on the long-overlooked site are ongoing, according to JMF president Joe Forgione.
Kushner Real Estate Group, meanwhile, will begin construction in the next four months on a 625-unit rental development there, part of an overall project that will feature 825 apartments and 12,000 square feet of retail. Additionally, Atlantic Realty is set to develop 525 garden apartments on the terminal site, which the city plans to connect to the 34th Street Light Rail station via a pedestrian bridge over Route 440.
Bayonne is also in talks with the Port Authority to establish ferry service from the Military Ocean Terminal to Staten Island and Manhattan.
Its forthcoming projects will likely draw “young renters who want to save a few bucks compared to [what they’d pay] in Jersey City and spend a few more bucks than they would in Newark or Harrison,” says Kushner Real Estate president Jonathan Kushner. Plus, don’t discount those who will relocate within Bayonneor already have a connection.
“It’s a very well established town,” he adds. “We think we’re going to see a lot of people who grew up in Bayonne who want to be back close to their families and living there.”
The area’s older housing stock, Forgione says, is a turnoff for people interested in newer apartments who might otherwise have considered Bayonne.
“What has been missing in Bayonne is new modern development,” Forgione says, “and that is what we are bringing.”
Longtime residents such as Tsay and his husband are hoping more real estate means more grocery stores and eateries. “We want the town to change more and be more progressive,” Tsay says. “We want a Trader Joe’s, we want a Whole Foods, we want a Starbucks. There are none of those right now.”
On the frappuccino front, at least, he might be in luck.
At the Military Ocean Terminal site, Forgione says, “We’ve had interest from all the coffee shops.”