Page 24 - RE-NJ

22 SEPTEMBER 2022
BUYING IN
With fast-growing pipeline, Alpine makes
major investment in historic Jersey City neighborhood
Bill Rosato is bullish on Jersey City’s Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood, where his
firm is projecting more than $430 million in residential and commercial development in the next several years.
He notes that his interest in the area goes back nearly a decade, to 2014.
“I drove around the neighborhood and liked what I saw,” said Rosato, managing partner of the Manhattan- based Alpine Residential. “There were a few empty lots and a few missing pieces, but generally the
neighborhood looked ripe for development.”
The veteran developer is now putting that theory into practice. Alpine recently built — and quickly leased — more than 200 luxury apartments in Bergen-Lafayette. The company has plans for another 800 units there — including a high-profile project at the adjacent Liberty Science Center — as well as retail and office space.
“It’s rewarding to find a neighborhood that has potential and see that through,” Rosato said. “We’re going
to be there for a long time going forward. We build them, we lease them and we manage them. Our vision is a 10-year minimum hold.”
Just southwest of Jersey City’s downtown and west of the New Jersey Turnpike extension, the neighborhood adjacent to the 1,200-acre Liberty State Park has generated substantial interest and investment from Alpine and others as it transitions from largely industrial to residential and mixed use. Developers in the last decade have built 3,181 new housing units. An additional
1,461 are under construction and 2,267 more are planned, according to city planning maps.
Most, like the Alpine developments, are luxury market-rate apartments with upscale amenities and ground- floor retail. About 700 apartments of the nearly 7,000 total are designated affordable units, according to the city, which uses zoning prescriptions to incentivize that at least 10 percent of new units meet those guidelines.
“Certainly, it’s the next ring out from downtown that is getting pretty
By Patricia Alex
Photo by Aaron Houston for Real Estate NJ
Led by Managing Partner Bill Rosato, Alpine Residential has invested $100 million to date and is planning another $430 million in development in Jersey City’s Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood. Its completed projects include The Hazel, a 114-unit building at 89 Monitor St. built in partnership with FieldsGrade.