Smart-Growth Challenge: Can an obsolete public housing site be transformed into a vibrant neighborhood that meets a range of community needs?

Jersey City’s Montgomery Street corridor runs west to east down the Palisades, connecting the McGinley Square neighborhood at the top of the hill with neighborhoods closer to the waterfront at the bottom. The space between the two neighborhoods is bordered to the east by the Route 78/New Jersey Turnpike overpass and contains large, poorly connected blocks that include Montgomery Gardens, the last family high-rise public-housing site in the city. As with many urban areas, the Montgomery corridor neighborhood has seen the effects of a generation of disinvestment: high vacancy rates, high unemployment, high poverty, high crime. The Montgomery Corridor Choice Neighborhoods Plan is an ambitious effort to re-imagine the area by integrating all the hallmarks of a thriving neighborhood: good transportation, high-quality housing, and access to education, employment opportunities, healthcare and amenities.

The plan is built on a comprehensive neighborhood plan done in 2004, and the process began in earnest in 2011 with the receipt of a federal Choice Neighborhoods planning grant. The new plan calls for 887 units of housing – both market and affordable, both townhouses and a high-rise condominium building – resulting in a 20% increase in average household income in the neighborhood; a new supermarket; a charter school with a pre-kindergarten center; a health center; the replacement of an out-of-scale superblock with walkable streets, community spaces, parks and new connections to Montgomery Street; and many green elements. All the public housing units in the former Montgomery Gardens will be replaced, with priority given to re-housing relocated public-housing residents.