Revitalization through Light Rail?

Hoboken, New Jersey, a mile-square city located along the west bank of the Hudson River directly across from midtown Manhattan, has undergone many changes through its long history. In the early 1800s, Hoboken was largely the private estate of John Stevens, a colonel in the Revolutionary War. With the introduction of a ferry connection to the booming economy of mid-19th-century New York City, Hoboken evolved into a shipping and industrial center from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. The transportation system for getting into and out of Hoboken changed as train tunnels and eventually automobile tunnels replaced ferry routes.

With the departure of industry in the 1960s, a new Hoboken began to take form that solidified as a bedroom community for New York City in the 1980s. As white-collar workers replaced blue-collar workers, Hoboken’s mass transportation network remained viable, carrying labor into and out of the city.

Today, a new system of transporting labor has emerged. A planned 20.5-mile Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system will consist of one line starting in Bayonne, winding north through Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, North Bergen, and terminating in Ridgefield. When complete, this $1.3 billion, 32-station project will, for the first time, tie this region into the mass transit system of the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) and the NJ Transit commuter trains.

NJ Transit contracted the infrastructure consortium, 21st Century Rail, based in Jersey City, to design, build, operate, and maintain the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail system during its first 15 years of operation. The light-rail system eventually will link to the Hoboken Erie-Lackawanna Station (which includes PATH trains to New York) and will continue a milelong course doubling back and running along the formerly industrial western side of Hoboken.

Unlike the east side of Hoboken, some parts of the west side are as far as one mile from a stop on a mass transit system. The east side currently has access to the ferries on the north and south parts of town, the NJ Transit commuter train station, and the NJ Transit bus lines that run along Washington Street-the “main street” of Hoboken.

The city’s hope is that light rail will bring the western “frontier” of Hoboken into the mainstream and attract the kind of investment that the east side already has. Planners that support modern light-rail systems operate on the premise that light rail brings growth to areas around new stations and attracts resident commuters who want to live near the train. This notion has brought many politicians to view light-rail systems as a guaranteed way to stimulate growth in urban communities.

The light-rail systems in place in Baltimore and Seattle have seen some early success, and the hope is that this success can be replicated in the inner-urban areas of Hudson County, especially Bayonne, Jersey City-and western Hoboken. However, some early problematic issues with the light rail in Bayonne and Jersey City may be a harbinger of things to come when rail arrives on Hoboken’s west side.

The residents of the affluent Paulus Hook waterfront neighborhood of Jersey City have lodged complaints about the noise and aesthetics of light rail. They have cited the screech of the 90-foot-long trains and the low-decibel din of the wires that propel them as particular nuisances to those living near the route. The fear of property owners and developers is that the value of the property in areas adjacent to the light-rail system will decrease. The long-term health of Hoboken’s housing prices historically has been linked to the city’s easy access to Manhattan. Although light rail can be intrusive in dense urban areas, Hoboken is banking on its benefits outweighing any potential problems.

Joshua D. Kahr, a senior director, and Mark D. Perry, an associate director, with GVA Williams in New York City, a full service real estate brokerage and management firm