Page 36 - RE-NJ

34 JANUARY 2024
From left: Josh Burd, editor of Real Estate NJ; Paul Profeta, publisher of Real Estate NJ; Wasseem Boraie, partner with Boraie Development; Mark Manigan, CEO and president of RWJBarnabas Health; Chris Paladino, president of New Brunswick Development Corp.; and Tony Coscia, partner with Windels Marx, discuss New Brunswick’s revival during a panel discussion on Nov. 13 at the Heldrich Hotel & Conference Center.
Manigan, CEO and president of RWJBarnabas Health, said the freestanding cancer center is “a pretty pure example of our strategy to create a statewide system of care and reimagine where that
care is being provided.” Expanding its physical footprint will help
fill several needs for the system, including the creation of the state’s first standalone cancer hospital and doubling down on oncology research.
The same goes for RWJBarnabas’ other facilities in the city, from a new medical arts building to its flagship Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.
“This is the flywheel we’re trying
to create, where we’re bringing together real estate development that is sexy and appealing to the clinicians you want to have working at your clinics, training your doctors, innovating and inventing,” Manigan said. “When they come into town and they see what we’re doing, the investments we’re making and the success we’ve had in growing and attracting talent, that’s what we’re doing here.”
He added: “Having a state-of-the- art real estate program is essential to that and that’s why we were
comfortable making a significant investment.”
The HELIX and the cancer center are among the latest projects
by Devco, a development entity established by Johnson & Johnson in the mid-1970s. Typically, its projects involve an eclectic layering of funding sources from government, private capital and everything in between — from obscure federal tax credits and parking authority bonds to bank loans and state incentive programs — creating a formula that has supported its $3.5 billion in completed development over the past three decades.
That has included transformative projects such as a mixed-use, $172 million performing arts complex that opened in 2019 and the $143 million Gateway transit village, which brought 192 residential units and a new Barnes & Noble Rutgers University bookstore to the heart of the downtown in 2011.
“All of these are ways of trying to fund a project that on its own isn’t really viable economically, but has a very broad public purpose that could be served by completing
it,” said Coscia, a partner with Windels Marx and Devco’s longtime
counsel. “So all of these different programs are used to piece together a transaction that takes a project that in and of itself might not be economically viable and making it viable.”
Coscia added that, “as complicated as these transactions have been
and as creative as we’ve had to
be, execution is impossible unless you have the people who are there that can actually execute.” He said Paladino “deserves an enormous amount of credit for the painstaking work of executing on things that are complicated,” while adding
that New Brunswick Mayor James Cahill has brought consistency and practicality to the process during 30-plus years in office.
“The fact that New Brunswick
has the kind of leadership on the governmental level that makes
it that kind of partner is a world
of difference,” Coscia said. “Jim Cahill is an urban mayor like very few urban mayors. He gets it, he’s smart ... it’s not about who gets to be out front, meaning who gets the credit, but who takes the time to understand it.
“The combination of Chris and the mayor (is) really why these things get built.”
The city’s development pipeline remains full. Boraie’s apartment tower at 11 Spring St. is among several private-sector projects that could go vertical in the coming years, while SJP and Devco are now slated to build a 350,000-square-foot research and office tower at the HELIX for Nokia Bell Labs, under a deal announced in early December.
The latter, which is slated to open in 2028, will highlight a continued need for housing in New Brunswick as so many large projects come online.
“We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of people coming to H-2,” Paladino said, referring to HELIX phase two. “They’ve got to live somewhere.”
That’s not to mention the estimated 1,600 jobs that the project’s first phase will produce and the roughly 600 people that will work at the new cancer hospital starting in spring 2025.
“This may be one of the strange microcosms that is countercyclical to the rest of the state,” Paladino said. “We need to build housing, because I’d say that most of the housing is filled here in New Brunswick.” RE