By Joshua Burd
Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop is serving his last term in a post he has held for nearly a decade, he announced Tuesday, in a tenure that has seen the city’s development boom continue in earnest and spread increasingly to neighborhoods beyond the Hudson waterfront.
Fulop, a Democrat, said he won’t seek re-election as mayor in 2025 despite Jersey City having no term limits. He did not detail or hint at his plans beyond city hall, although he did run for governor ahead of the 2017 election before stepping aside and supporting rival Phil Murphy, who would go on to win the race and is now serving his second and final term.
“We have done so much together to move Jersey City forward,” Fulop said Tuesday in an email to residents. “Our city has become a national model on so many fronts and truly one of the best renaissance stories in the country. I know that three terms is a substantial amount of time to leave a city better than the way it was when we started and I believe we did that.”
After taking public office in 2005, as a councilman in Jersey City’s Ward E, Fulop won his first mayoral election in 2013 when he defeated incumbent Jerramiah Healy. He has since played a high-profile role in guiding development in the city, with a focus on scaling back lucrative tax abatements for projects in the waterfront and downtown neighborhoods, while promoting investment in less-heralded areas such as Journal Square and Bergen-Lafayette.
The city has remained a top destination for apartment builders and now has multibillion-dollar pipelines in multiple neighborhoods. According to a city representative, the planning and zoning boards have approved more than 17,400 units since 2013, while the municipality has approved another 15,500 residential certificates of occupancy during the same period.
Fulop alluded to the city’s ongoing development boom, among other accomplishments, in a video accompanying his Tuesday announcement.
“We’ve led on development and for the first time have attracted growth away from the waterfront,” he said. “Jersey City has been a leader in building affordable housing, and we’ve built more than any city in the state. We’re a leader on creating open space, a leader on the arts, on workforce development, on social services issues, on environmental issues, on transportation issues and so much more.”
