New Details about Jersey City Housing Authority's 'Transformative' Plan for Holland Gardens
Existing tenants will not be displaced; dilapidated public housing will be reimagined as a new 719-unit mixed-income community with a library and community space
In 2023, Jersey City announced that the 3.31-acre site of the ‘outdated’ 192-unit Holland Gardens complex would be “reinvented with innovative approaches to increase affordability, create homeownership opportunities, and add critical on-site services for historically underserved residents.”
Now, nearly two years later, those plans have made substantial progress toward coming to fruition. Several of the details appear to break new ground for Jersey City.
On January 22, the Jersey City Housing Authority (JCHA) and developer WinnCompanies signed a Master Developer Agreement that stipulates the details of the redevelopment. JCHA also held community meetings with existing Holland Gardens tenants on December 3, 2024 and February 18, 2025 where they detailed the plans and answered questions from residents. Several new renderings were shown at these meetings illustrating how the buildings will look at street level and from other vantage points (renderings are at the bottom of this post).
Among the details discussed at these meetings:
Tenants of all existing public housing units will have the right to return to the site, to live in brand-new units.
In addition to the one-to-one replacement of all existing 192 public housing units, 74 senior income-restricted units, 28 income-restricted for-sale condo units, 9 work-force units, and 430 market-rate units will be built.
An 5-story, 18,100 sq. ft. community space will be built that will be Jersey City’s first mass-timber building, with:
a public library
a rooftop enclosed playground for children (!)
an office for JCHA’s Resident Empowerment and Community Engagement Department
33,700 sq. ft. of commercial/retail space — this is a lot of retail, about the size of 3 C-Towns or 3/4 the size of the Target coming to Journal Sq.
The development will consist of two towers and three low-rise buildings:
an 18-story tower fronting Erie Street
a 23-story tower fronting Jersey Avenue
two 8-story buildings along 15th Street
the library along 15th street in between the 8-story buildings
Fifteenth Street will be reconnected from Jersey Ave to Erie St, restoring the city’s original street grid through the site
387 parking spaces and 375 bike rack spaces will be included
No timeline was included in the presentation, but at the December presentation the redevelopment team noted that voluntary temporary tenant relocations have already begun, with 55 tenants voluntarily relocated to temporary homes until completion of the redevelopment.
The parking ratio being contemplated for the development is much higher than for similar private developments proposed nearby within the Jersey Ave Light Rail Redevelopment Plan: five recent proposals all provide fewer than 0.37 parking spaces per unit; some provide none at all. Based on differences in unit and parking counts between the December and February presentations, the JCHA seems to have mandated that the developer add one parking space per two market-rate units.
Parking substantially increases the cost of buildings as well as taking up space that could be occupied by housing, so it is worth asking if the city could have added more income-restricted units if they had lowered the parking ratio to the average of what’s seen in nearby private development proposals. Even if they had just matched the highest-parked nearby proposal, they could have saved a whopping $4.6 million that could’ve gone toward subsidizing more low-income housing, going by a cost per space of $38,093 for NYC-area structured parking spots.
Still, this is a proposal that not only gives existing tenants brand new, quality housing to replace their existing homes, but substantially grows the pie in terms of housing at all income levels. That’s nothing to sneeze at when nearby municipalities such as Hoboken are limiting the scale of their plans to replace existing public housing, and sacrificing an opportunity to expand low-income housing in the process.
