From Business Insider:
NYC and its suburbs won’t build new housing, so New Yorkers are flooding into Jersey City and driving up prices
New Yorkers have been taking notice of Jersey City real estate for years, and its popularity as an alternative to the ever-less-affordable housing market in the city is growing. These days, fans call it the sixth borough, largely thanks to Jersey City’s efforts to build a ton of new housing — and at a much faster rate than the actual five boroughs.
Between 2010 and 2018, Hudson County, which includes Jersey City, built housing at more than twice the rate that New York City did. Jersey City’s population grew by nearly 60% from 2010 to 2020. Many of the old rail yards and factories on the city’s waterfront have been replaced with luxury high-rises.
But amid the city’s home-construction boom — a “renaissance,” as the city’s mayor, Steven Fulop, previously described it to Insider — rents are rising fast. The rental platform Zumper lists Jersey City as the second-most-expensive US city to rent an apartment, and rents for a two-bedroom apartment are up 25% year over year.
Typically, a big increase in housing supply would be expected to push prices down, but the sheer magnitude of the New York metro area’s housing deficit has kept Jersey City from experiencing that. As the region suffers a severe housing-affordability crisis, North New Jersey is “carrying the entire tristate area’s housing-supply burden,” said Alex Armlovich, the senior housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank.
“Jersey City is unique. It’s one of the YIMBY-ist cities in the country in terms of actual building permits per person,” Armlovich told Insider. “They’re one of the only reasons that New York, generally as a region, is not more unaffordable than it is.”