Page 16 - RE-NJ

14 MARCH 2025
“New Brunswick, thanks to the
longstanding leadership of Mayor
Cahill, is entering a new renaissance
period,” said Wasseem Boraie,
principal of Boraie Development.
“The new construction by Rutgers
Medical School
and Cancer
Institute, with
Nokia on deck,
will add well
over 1 million
square feet of
commercial
tenancy to our
Wasseem Boraie
downtown.
Like Monday follows Sunday, the
residential development will be there
to soak up this new demand.”
The city is well known for its arts
and culture, as well as the academic,
health care and government
institutions that have anchored its
economy for decades. But Weiss, who
also cited Cahill’s role in revitalizing
the city, said the billions of dollars
in new investment “is what led us
to really get going on The LIV as a
complement to this surge, because
we’re a piece of this puzzle.” And
the expected infl ux of high-income
professionals who can afford luxury
apartments will help developers
justify the cost of high-rise steel and
concrete construction, Weiss said,
which has often been elusive in the
past.
“You can build this all day long,
but you need the rents to support
it,” he said, later adding: “We know
the market is there. This market is
coming, and this is not a projection,
because when we want to know
when, we just have to walk out to the
HELIX and see how far along they
are.”
The need for those projects is
increasingly clear.
“Over the next seven years, about half
of the workforce of Nokia is retiring,
and they’ll be hiring young engineers
and mathematicians and physicists,
which they believe will want to live in
the city,” Paladino said. “So those are
the conversations we have.”
Notably, the city’s development
pipeline includes hundreds of new
affordable housing units, either
from standalone projects or as a
percentage of the larger projects,
that will add to the existing stock
of roughly 1,500 homes for low- to
moderate-income renters. That’s
critical, Cahill said, given the broad
workforces that the new projects will
employ.
“We’re under no obligation from
the state to continue to build
affordable housing, unlike a lot of our
neighboring municipalities, but we
still push that,” Cahill said. “We still
fi nd, because of New Brunswick and
its diversity, that affordable is what
we need to do, because we’re diverse
in so many ways, and one way we’re
diverse is income levels.”
The mayor and other stakeholders
point to the importance of a nearly
$50 million upgrade of the New
Brunswick train station, which
he said will address long-overdue
repairs while modernizing parts of
the facility. The city is pushing for
funding for additional renovations,
Cahill added, so that “we will have a
train station that will mirror all that’s
going on” in the surrounding blocks.
In the meantime, local offi cials
are taking a holistic approach to
support the new development on the
horizon. Supporting and adding to
New Brunswick’s acclaimed arts and
cultural scene is “one area that we
always have to be focused on, looking
for opportunities to grow,” Cahill
said. The city is also in the midst of
a sweeping plan to update or replace
many of its 17 parks in the years to
come, while construction is underway
on a new one-acre park at a former
parking deck property on Neilson
Street.
Beyond that, Cahill said the
municipality is spending $87 million
on water utility improvements — to
increase output while replacing water
lines and treatment facilities — as
part of a broader, ongoing effort to
address its infrastructure.
“A lot of municipalities don’t worry
about those things,” Cahill said. “It’s
underground, nobody sees it, but
it becomes noticeable when it’s a
problem. We are trying to stay ahead
of the curve and are not afraid to
spend money to save money down
the road.” RE