Selling the Gold Coast: Neoliberalism in Jersey City’s Waterfront Development (1979-1991)

Abstract

In charting the historically changing drivers of gentrification, the socio-economic rise of a neighborhood, leading urban scholars have found that the local government and policy makers began playing a central role in urban change starting in “second wave” gentrification, which spans throughout the 1970’s and 80’s; it wasn’t until 1990s, during “third wave” gentrification, when the local government began working with the private sector in driving gentrification (Hyra et al., 2020). However, Jersey City’s third wave came about a decade early in 1980, when local officials essentially turned several hundred acres of its northern Hudson River waterfront over to three developers—this approximately six-hundred acre, mixed-use development would come to be known as Newport. The project transformed the skyline of the Gold Coast: A sprawling shopping mall along with several residential towers and office buildings rose from the land that was only recently covered in abandoned rail yards. This thesis takes a historic approach in understanding how Newport became a watershed moment in Jersey City’s urban development and how it transformed the Gold Coast from a city struggling to recover from post-World War II deindustrialization to one experiencing a development boom.