For most of the last century, the 111 acres along Jersey City’s Garfield Avenue were something residents learned to look past: a chromium-contaminated brownfield, fenced off and idle, the byproduct of an industrial era that left the Bergen-Lafayette neighborhood with pollution instead of prosperity. Cleaning it up took decades. Turning it into a neighborhood is taking a financing structure that is far less understood than it should be.
That structure is now at the center of a public debate over Canal Crossing, the redevelopment set to deliver its first 508 homes on the site. The debate has generated more heat than light, much of it centered on a single number pulled out of context. The facts underneath it tell a more useful story about how mid-sized cities actually build affordable housing on difficult land.
What the project delivers
Canal Crossing’s first phase includes 508 homes, of which 102, about 20%, are income-restricted affordable units. Every one of those 102 units is set at or below 50% of Area Median Income, which for a family of four is roughly $65,000 a year. Thirteen of them, reserved for households at or below 30% of AMI, will rent for under $1,000 a month. The whole affordable set-aside skews deep, toward working and low-income households, rather than the “moderate income” tiers that often pad affordability counts.
The plan also includes a new 33,000-square-foot public park, roughly 18,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space geared toward local businesses, and a 100% union-labor construction requirement. It sits directly at the Garfield Avenue light rail station, making it transit-oriented by design rather than by marketing.
Canal Crossing also predates the current administration. The concept dates to the Healy administration; the site’s urban design and zoning were set under Mayor Fulop, and public filings show the 20% affordable commitment was already in place in 2024. The project has outlasted three mayors because the underlying logic has not changed.
How the money works
Most of the confusion is about how the financing works. Canal Crossing is financed through a 30-year PILOT, a payment in lieu of taxes. Under a PILOT, a project does not stop paying the city. It pays differently: instead of a conventional property tax assessed on land value, it pays the city a negotiated percentage of the building’s gross revenue. Canal Crossing’s agreement is set at 10% of gross revenue.
That payment is projected at about $1.9 million in the first year of operations. The vacant, contaminated site generates roughly $65,000 today. An independent nonprofit policy group, Better Blocks New Jersey, examined the deal and concluded that the city actually nets more revenue under the PILOT than it would collect under conventional taxation of the same finished project. The agreement also directs 10% of that PILOT revenue to the Jersey City public schools.
On a clean, high-value site, a developer might build without a PILOT at all. On an 111-acre brownfield with almost no sewer, stormwater, roads, or utilities, someone has to pay to put in the basics, estimated at $10 million or more, before a single apartment is leased. The PILOT is what makes that infrastructure pencil out and the deeply affordable units possible. Remove it, and the project most likely does not get built at all, and the site stays fenced off.
The number worth remembering
The figure that has traveled fastest in the debate, that only 13 apartments will rent for under $1,000, is accurate but incomplete. Those 13 units are the very lowest-income tier of a 102-unit affordable commitment in which every single unit is deeply affordable. Judging the project by its smallest tier is like judging a scholarship program by its single largest award. The honest measure is 102 affordable homes, a public park, union jobs, and a school-funding contribution, delivered on land that produced none of those things for fifty years.
Reasonable people can debate whether PILOTs should be used as widely as some policymakers propose. That is a real conversation about scale and precedent. But on the narrow question of Canal Crossing itself, even a skeptical independent analysis landed in the same place: a net benefit for Jersey City, and the only realistic way this particular site becomes a neighborhood. The chromium is gone. The financing is how the rest gets built.
