North Jersey Real Estate News

Morristown Green development approved

The Morristown Planning Board gave the green light last night to a residential-retail development that will dramatically change the downtown streetscape facing the historic Green.

The unanimous vote on a proposal first announced in September 2003 paves the way for the demolition of the vacant Epstein's department store, which for 90 years has overlooked the Green on West Park Place.

With Epstein's and adjacent properties reduced to rubble, some 246 luxury condominium and apartment units will be built along with 72,000 square feet of retail space split up among ground-floor shops in three new buildings.

Transit village eyed for J&J tract

The Johnson & Johnson property on Route 1 is full of empty warehouses and barren parking lots, but what North Brunswick officials see is potential commerical growth.
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Last night, in the first of many planned public meetings, the property's buyer tried to convince officials and residents that housing should be built on the sprawling 220-acre tract. Municipal officials, however, seemed unreceptive.
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Even a real-estate agent at the meeting seemed against new housing.

"We're all scared to death of housing from that concept," Realtor and township resident Pete Maimone said. "There's absolutely no need for it. We have sufficient housing already."

Kearny resident feels New Jersey's 'affordability crisis'

Since moving to New Jersey from her native Puerto Rico two decades ago, Delia Andaluz has lived in some rough spots. She started in Newark's housing projects, then worked her way through a series of run-down apartments in the city's North Ward. Last summer, the 36-year-old single mother of two decided it was time to buy a house.

Easier said than done.

Andaluz eventually managed to purchase a three-family house in Kearny, but her inexperience in the daunting world of real estate left her with a $4,000 monthly mortgage. Despite rent checks from tenants and help from her fiancé, she is struggling to make ends meet on her $38,000 salary as a counselor at a local nonprofit organization.

County purchases 14 acres of open space in Clark

The Union County Board of Chosen Freeholders announced last week that the county has preserved 14 acres of open space in Clark. County officials say the move will prevent the land from being developed into a residential subdivision site of 30 single-family houses.

The freeholder board voted Feb. 16 to authorize the county's purchase of the property from the Hazelwood Cemetery for $6.25 million through the Open Space, Recreation and Historic Preservation Trust Fund.

Mortgage brokerage pulls vanishing act

They drove brand new luxury cars and were rarely seen without their staple accessories: cigarettes and cellphone earpieces.

But the men behind AMG Mortgage suddenly vanished one weekend in early November, just two months after moving into a Palisades Park office building. They left behind furniture, paintings, even half-empty coffee cups.
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The FBI has said AMG helped Korean-Americans in North Jersey secure as much as $100 million in fraudulent loans. With AMG's assistance, a homeowner would collect multiple loans on a single property, fooling each bank into thinking it was the only home equity lender, the FBI said.

At the corner of Grinn and Barret

Paul Eisenstein barely made it home for Thanksgiving last year. On his way from Pleasant Ridge, Mich., to his mom’s place in New York City, a street sign made him laugh so hard he nearly veered off the highway: Fangboner Road.
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Eisenstein’s personal contest favorite is New Jersey’s Shades of Death Road, which runs through Allamuchy in Warren County. Although there are several theories on the name’s origin, the contestants submitted their own belief — that the Lenni-Lenape people who once occupied the area suffered from malaria and tuberculosis, and were slaughtered at the hands of an Iroquois tribe.