Just what did East Orange order?

From the New York Times:

Just What a City Ordered

ONCE a place of higher learning, later a place of less-lofty activities, a 21-acre site here is about to be transformed into a slice of the good life, say city officials and the developers chosen to do the job.

It is to be a new upper-middle-class neighborhood called Woodlands at Upsala, composed of 51 three-, four- and five-bedroom homes and a row of 17 attached town homes. A model home has opened to sell the houses, whose prices start in the low $400,000’s. They will be located throughout the rolling property on lots of at least a quarter acre each. Many of the huge trees that grace the site, formerly the Upsala College campus, will remain.

The college went bankrupt and shut down in 1995 after 81 years in operation, giving its 40-acre property just west of the Garden State Parkway to the City of East Orange and its Board of Education.
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The western campus was declared a site in need of redevelopment by the city in 1997. The Alpert Group of Fort Lee and the Applied Development Company of Hoboken were named several years ago as co-developers of the project. The college buildings were demolished last summer, and a company recently put some of those buildings’ architectural elements up for sale online, at www.recyclingthepast.com.

But it is only now that construction of the $17 million project is under way, beginning with the single-family homes.
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“Some people have been priced out of Montclair and South Orange and Manhattan,” Mr. Slaughter noted, because “you can’t find a house in those places for less than $700,000 or $800,000, or more in the case of New York.”

In East Orange, Mr. Slaughter said, the average home price is $300,000 or more. There are homes priced up to $500,000 in the area around Woodland Avenue and in a nearby neighborhood known as the “Presidents’ Section,” where streets are named for former occupants of the White House.