Exchange Place in Jersey City
By Joshua Burd
The special improvement district that has helped beautify, activate and maintain a large stretch of the Hudson waterfront in Jersey City in recent years has just gotten bigger — and a host of downtown property owners are now poised to reap the benefits.
The Exchange Place Alliance, which manages the district, said work is already underway to bring enhanced cleaning, landscaping and other services to an area that includes thousands of apartments and key destinations in the city’s Powerhouse Arts District. That’s not to mention programming for events and public spaces, as well as major capital improvements, all of which follow a vote by the Jersey City Council last month that made the new boundaries official.
A portion of the special improvement district, starting from 2nd Street at the north to Christopher Columbus Drive at the south, now extends an additional two blocks to the west to include properties between Marin Boulevard and Warren Street.
“It was only a few more blocks, but they happen to have a lot of buildings on them,” said Mike DeMarco, president of the Exchange Place Alliance’s board of directors. That means several well-known landlords, residents and local businesses will likely benefit from potential streetscape upgrades, public safety initiatives and functions such as maintenance and snow removal by way of a special assessment on property owners.
“If we do those things, when you come out of your nice apartment building, you walk over and go down the block to eat at a restaurant, if there’s no garbage on the street, you feel better about life,” he added. “(So) at the end of the day, the amount of money that we charge each of these owners is relatively minor compared to what the value of the properties are.”
DeMarco, the onetime CEO and president of the former Mack-Cali Realty Corp., said the Exchange Place Alliance SID performs services that the city “would, should or could (do) if it had the time or the budget to do so.” That’s not practical for a community as large and diverse as Jersey City, he said, which prompted the launch of the SID in 2017 as a partnership of Mack-Cali and neighboring office building owners along the Hudson River, starting just south of LeFrak’s sprawling Newport district.
Early on, that meant simple steps such as buying hundreds of tables and chairs to place along the riverfront walkway and throughout the downtown, DeMarco said. But the alliance has ramped up its efforts over the past three years, revitalizing Exchange Place Plaza by creating a vibrant waterfront destination with an Art Walk, a new playground, seating and other upgrades, while hosting concerts and arts events and planting more trees around the area than any other neighborhood in Jersey City.
“We went out and we had a plan to do things not only on the service side but fundamentally make physical structural improvements so that the area is actually better,” DeMarco said.
The alliance’s newest plans include adding a community center and a children’s park and community garden on Washington Street, as well as dog parks and other initiatives to make downtown even more welcoming.
“We are excited to extend our capital improvement program beyond Exchange Place into neighboring communities to create similar vibrancy and a sense of place,” said Deidre Crockett, the alliance’s executive director. “We thank the councilmembers for sharing our vision for the area to benefit all Jersey City residents.”
The Exchange Place Alliance is all the more notable in that its board is stocked with leading commercial real estate executives from Panepinto Properties, G&S Investors, American Equity Partners and Ironstate Development Co. That’s both deliberate and critical, DeMarco said, because they “are people that have an active interest” in improving the neighborhood and understand the value of the organization’s capital projects.
The district’s recent expansion, which was several months in the making, became official with a vote during the city council’s March 12 meeting.
“I support this proactive decision by the alliance to help support the businesses and residents in communities adjacent to Exchange Place,” said Council President Joyce Watterman, who is also an alliance board member.
