Over the last decade, from building more housing to Vision Zero, many good ideas on how to build better cities have taken hold across New Jersey. Dario Gutierrez and I started Better Blocks New Jersey because we’re worried that progress is under threat. Better Blocks channels our deep and personal interest in the availability of housing, transit, safe streets, and public parks into political advocacy.
Dario and I were both born and raised in New Jersey. We’re long-time Jersey City residents whose families have made this city home. We care deeply about making this city and state the best possible place to live. We both have a background in economics and an interest in making sure our elected leaders implement smart, effective, outcome-oriented policies.
We want to be upfront with our future collaborators and supporters. While we will write about larger issues facing New Jersey, the majority of our content and advocacy will focus on Jersey City and Hudson County because that is what we know well. We invite our friends in other parts of the state to contribute and use Better Blocks as a platform.
While the problems we face both locally and statewide are immense, they are also exciting opportunities for growth, investment, and reinvention.
Housing
New Jersey’s population has reached an all-time high, with 9.5 million people calling the Garden State home. Unfortunately, new housing production hasn’t kept up, which has driven up home costs and rents for millions of households. Home prices in New Jersey have grown 62% in the last 5 years and 89% in the last 10, far higher than the price of inflation.
Jersey City has led the region in new housing production, expanding its housing supply by 24% since 2010, but even it cannot keep up with demand for new housing, as the city’s population has breached 300,000 for the first time in almost a century. Despite the surging demand, there are strong indications that Jersey City has been able to preserve some level of affordability.
Developing more housing in cities with good transit infrastructure like Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, and Elizabeth offers the chance not only to improve housing affordability but to grow the state’s economy significantly and to address climate change and greenhouse gas emissions. Transit-oriented housing development can also resolve one of our state’s largest, costliest, and most-frustrating issues to New Jerseyans — road congestion.
Transit
Unfortunately, transit policy is where New Jersey’s current governor Phil Murphy has most gone astray. Instead of investing in expanding and improving New Jersey Transit, the Murphy administration has embarked on a counterproductive and eye-wateringly expensive $24 billion highway expansion program in north and south Jersey. This plan is three times the previous Turnpike capital plan and proceeds even while NJ Transit is objectively broken.
The $11 billion Turnpike widening between Essex and Hudson is the most troubling. Widening the Turnpike across Newark Bay and into Jersey City not only threatens to increase congestion in the densest, most transit-connected city in the state but it will worsen air pollution and further cut off Downtown from Bergen-Lafayette and Greenville from Liberty State Park. The Turnpike Authority has already increased tolls by 36% to pay off the billions the agency needs to borrow to finance the project; the rest will need to be paid off by increasing traffic on the Turnpike extension.
To make matters worse, the Turnpike widening is just wasteful. Traffic on the Turnpike hasn’t increased in over a decade despite Jersey City’s population growing by over 20% in that period of time. In recent months, congestion pricing has done more to relieve rush hour traffic on the Turnpike extension than any highway widening. Even the Port Authority is getting ready to reduce lanes at the 12th Street approach to the Holland Tunnel. Why is the Turnpike Authority widening lanes when everyone else is removing them?
For the total cost of expected highway-widening expenditures, New Jersey could build up to 200 miles of new light rail, more than enough to create new connections that stretch from Paterson to Elizabeth through Newark and finally complete the Bergen part of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail and the Glassboro-Camden Line in south Jersey.
Beyond rail, the state’s bus network is woefully underfunded, infrequent, and unreliable. Commonsense solutions like bus rapid transit (“BRT”) on county roads like JFK Boulevard in Hudson County remain unexamined. It is a perplexing failure in a county where 34% of households don’t own cars. Relatively small investments in transit infrastructure like BRT lanes could help the 900,000 New Jerseyans who don’t own cars get around more easily.
Safe Streets
New Jersey has a long way to go on traffic safety. Pedestrian deaths hit a 30-year high in 2024 and each year, preventable traffic accidents kill nearly 700 New Jerseyans annually, ripping away more of our friends, family members, and neighbors each year. We would all move heaven and earth to seek justice if a loved one were murdered yet the people we care about are more than twice as likely to die in a traffic-related accident in New Jersey. Instead of bringing more law and order to our state’s roads, New Jersey’s leaders continue to invest in making some of our roads even more dangerous with reckless abandon.
We have a solution. Adopting Vision Zero programs and redesigning our streets for safety instead of speed has been proven to save lives effectively. At the local level, some cities like Jersey City have taken great strides to reduce deaths on city roads by redesigning intersections with curb extensions, right-sizing lane widths, and building out an extensive protected bike lane network. Hoboken has seen no zero traffic deaths in the last eight years through its model efforts at improving road safety, particularly through prioritizing pedestrians, universal daylighting, and a 20 mile per hour speed limit. The evidence is clear that protected bike lanes keep bikers, pedestrians, and motorists safe. Unfortunately, municipalities can only control local roads and, in Hudson County, the deadliest roads are run by the county or state.
Safer streets are coming thanks to the efforts of local advocates across the state. It is our hope to partner will more safe street organizations to promote their work and advocate for leaders who will make street safety for all road users a political priority.
Parks and Public Spaces
Finally, parks and good public spaces are essential to urban vitality. Residents crave greenspace, trees, and places for social recreation or quiet relaxation.
Sadly, there have been attempts to take urban parkland away from the people of New Jersey. There have been multiple attempts to privatize or commercialize Liberty State Park. Protecting our parkland requires constant vigilance and we need to start holding the politicians who are willing to sell off our state and city parkland accountable.
We also need to fight for long-promised investments like the Sixth Street Embankment. There are many park projects that are continually delayed by long, drawn-out court fights. Even little investments in public places go a long way. A new playground on Jersey City’s Barrow Street would convert a little corner of the Newark Pedestrian Plaza into a family-oriented stretch where parents can relax while their kids play, safe from the worries of car traffic.
As part of our investment in Better Blocks, we want to keep fighting for beautiful, livable cities where there is abundant housing, efficient transportation, safe streets, and plentiful park access. We will write and explain more about all these topics, but we wanted to let you know what motivated us to start Better Blocks first. As we grow, we hope to host meetups and candidate forums so these pressing issues are always front of mind for our elected leaders.
Hope to see you around the block.