November 4, 2025 is election day. Jersey City voters will go to the polls to elect a new governor, mayor, city council, and members for the Board of Education. The Better Blocks voter guide is split into two posts. This is the post focuses on the mayoral race and evaluates candidates on their support for housing, transit, safe streets, and public parks and plazas.

If no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote on November 4, then a run-off election will be held in December. To that end, Better Blocks NJ has a mix of outright endorsements of candidates we would like to see win a majority of votes, candidates we want to see in a run-off election, and a few candidates whom we believe voters should actively vote against even if Better Blocks has no particular recommended candidate to vote for instead.

City Hall has a lot of power to shape public policy in Jersey City but there are many things that are under state or county control and require collaboration with those entities. The mayor can be a powerful advocate but has no direct control over the PATH, the light rail, or NJ Transit’s buses, but the mayor and city council can redesign our streets to make bus service better, biking safer, and walking more pleasant. The Turnpike Extension divides our city, pollutes our air, and makes our streets unsafe – but is under the control of the governor and state legislature of NJ. Liberty State Park – the largest greenspace in the county – is wholly within the control of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The area where Jersey City’s next mayor and city council can be most helpful or harmful is on land use policy. To that end, you will read that we have put a lot of emphasis on that in making our recommendations. In full disclosure, BBNJ board members have met with all the major mayoral candidates to discuss elements of their housing policy so we have additional insights that color how we view their written responses to our questionnaire.

We started Better Blocks because we are Jersey City residents who love this city. We want to see Jersey City continue to be a welcoming, growing, and dynamic place where everyone who wants to live here can find a place to call home. The worst-case scenario, in our minds, is if Jersey City were to become another exclusionary city like San Francisco or Boston where housing costs and rents are sky high, and only the very wealthy and a lucky few housing lottery winners can enjoy the benefits of walkable neighborhoods, good transit, and well-paying jobs. Immigrants, students, and working families rely on there being enough housing to accommodate them, but even life-long residents sometimes need to find a new place to live to accommodate changes in health, family size, or jobs. We want to make sure all can find that place in Jersey City.

Ensuring Jersey City keeps adding enough housing supply to keep up with the demand of everyone who wants to call Jersey City home means the fruits of better transit, safer streets, and vibrant public places can be enjoyed by people from all backgrounds and walks of life.

Our Endorsement for Mayor

Bill O’Dea is the mayoral candidate we would like to see as Jersey City’s next mayor. On the issues Better Blocks New Jersey focuses on, especially housing, he is the least likely to implement harmful policies that would drive up rents and property taxes citywide. He is also among the most likely to expand housing options — both affordable and market-rate — and support the construction of new schools in Jersey City’s transit-rich and opportunity-rich downtown. O’Dea’s housing plan is more practical and he understands the intricacies of housing policy better than all the other candidates.

Where our reviewers thought he fell short was around what the city can do on transit issues. While the purview of our group is championing housing, transit, safe streets, and parks, we believe that housing in particular has major ramifications for issues as central as the city’s fiscal health, street safety, and transit. We urge voters to look at all the candidates’ records on other issues and to vote accordingly but Bill O’Dea has our support for mayor.

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Other Highlights

We believe Mussab Ali also merits consideration by voters who list housing supply as their top issue as he is running on the most explicitly pro-housing platform but we have reservations about his transit plan and commitment to Vision Zero.

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Read more for our guide to the candidates

Editor’s Note: Candidates are listed in alphabetical order by last name. Order of appearance does not mean level of support.

Mussab Ali

On housing, Ali might be the most “YIMBY” and “abundance-minded” candidate in the race, calling for R-1 zoning to be replaced with R-2. While seemingly bold and visionary, this might not be as transformative as he thinks because Jersey City already allows considerable flexibility around development in the R-1 zones that cover much of the city’s land area. In forums, Ali has correctly mentioned that Jersey City’s fiscal health depends on continued growth. Ali was also the first mayoral candidate to champion mixed-income housing and school space at 150-156 Bay Street. We also note that Ali is thinking about housing as it is tied to transit, which is directionally right but we would have liked to have seen more how he would incentivize affordable housing units with access to transit. 

On transit, Ali received mixed marks. He was one of the few mayoral candidates to actually call for one-way pairs on Summit and Baldwin to create bus lanes. The part of his transit policy where Ali got dinged the most was his plan to reduce Via and switch to fare-free city-run buses. The instinct to provide more transit is a good one, but Via is in fact a cost-effective and popular service especially for transit deserts in Jersey City. Lower frequency local NJ Transit buses serving relative transit deserts subsidize riders for around $20 per rider while Via’s subsidy is efficient at only around $10, and whereas buses struggle to electrify, Via’s fleet will be converted to be fully electric. Additionally, paid public transit is not a bad thing as transit fares support more of what riders want most – service quality. Transit should focus on frequency and reliability rather than offering everyone a free ride on infrequent service. 

On safe streets, we are most disappointed to see Ali deny that there has been progress on safer streets, invalidating eight years of nationally recognized work on road diets and traffic calming, a vastly expanded protected bike lane network, innovations like the raised intersection at the newly renovated Bergen Square, and real decreases in serious injury and fatal crashes under the current administration.  We are also disappointed to see Ali was the only candidate to flatly refuse to lower the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, a proven and effective traffic calming tactic. Ali explains his opposition is due to a perception of lack of enforcement of the current 25 mile per hour speed limit. While enforcement is crucial, lowering the speed limit by itself can still lower overall speeds as some drivers will slow down and bring overall traffic speeds down, and moreover, enforcement efforts can be enhanced as speeding violations will become more obvious. 

We appreciated Ali’s willingness to use development to fund new public parks and plazas as well as space for school recreation. 

Ali is clearly innovative. In some respects, he has embraced the left “YIMBY” lane that we would have expected his mayoral rival James Solomon to take while also championing broad progressive causes that are beyond the scope of Better Blocks’ interest areas. Ali has some dynamic and interesting ideas but we – and many voters – do wonder how Ali would govern such a large city with entrenched issues and special interests given his limited past experience. While Ali’s transit and safe streets views give us strong pause, we cheer Ali’s innovative and pro-abundance policies for housing affordability to keep Jersey City an inclusive city.

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Christina Freeman

While perhaps well-intentioned, any outright freeze or reduction in housing supply would have disastrous consequences on affordability, resulting in more displacement and long-term budgetary problems. On this alone, we would not recommend her for mayor. 

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James McGreevey

McGreevey would not be our first choice for mayor based on his previous record in office, but he has shown a capacity for adaptation and growth over the course of this campaign. Early on, he spent a lot of time concerned about losing parking spots; we’ve noticed that rhetoric has become less frequent as election day approaches. More recently, McGreevey’s campaign website as well as Team McGreevey candidate Ryan Baylock have mentioned dynamic pricing of parking; it is widely recognized by economists and the most effective and proven solution for parking shortages.

Better Blocks volunteers who reviewed the candidate answers noted that many of McGreevey’s answers to the questionnaire – especially on housing – seemed contradictory. As a case in point, McGreevey said he would prohibit auxiliary dwelling units (“ADUs”), commonly known as in-law suites, in one answer yet lauded them as critical to his plan in another. Other proposed solutions that he mentioned are already practiced in Jersey City. 

On transit, we were pleased to see that Governor McGreevey committed to working with the county on implementing dedicated bus rapid transit on JFK Blvd. Yet in a contradiction, he punted on similar initiatives on city-controlled streets, the domain that would actually be within the purview of his office and the city council. We were surprised to read McGreevey’s assertion that the Turnpike expansion might not be advancing. This is certainly welcome news to us, and we would like more information. While we are pleased to see his commitment to litigation, at the same time, he has — to our knowledge — never registered public comment in opposition to the widening scheme and has kept a quiet profile on this issue otherwise.

We were also pleased to see the governor make a broad commitment to Vision Zero and the expansion of alternative transportation methods, but our reviewers were concerned about McGreevey’s non-committal answer as to whether he would keep even basic no brainers like  Barrow Street portion of the Newark Pedestrian Plaza closed to car traffic. In his policy plans, he gives heavy emphasis on enforcement including on speed and red light cameras which are not currently legal in the state of NJ, and we are concerned that a reliance on enforcement rhetoric can avoid the hard choices of making needed street redesign changes. Moreover, he is one of the only candidates to not endorse increasing funding for the Department of Infrastructure where a severe shortage of staff currently bottlenecks even obvious safety improvements.

Per our reviewers, McGreevey’s answers were neither the worst nor the best in any category. Occasionally contradictory and often non-committal on key questions, McGreevey is clearly hardworking and relies on outside experts for advice but it is difficult for us to envision how he will actually govern the city as mayor. He has one of the longest track records of anyone in the race but the city and state have changed greatly since he last held elected office nearly 21 years ago. 

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William “Bill” O’Dea

Bill O’Dea knows the details of real estate finance and the costs of funding affordable housing better than any other candidate in the race. O’Dea came out strongly in favor of the need to add more housing supply to address the high costs of housing. He supports upzoning to allow more density and car-free living near transit in exchange for affordable housing and other community givebacks like schools. As an example of that support, O’Dea was one of the first mayoral candidates to publicly support a plan to add space for a school, 150 affordable housing units, and 100 additional workforce housing units to 150-156 Bay Street. He has a wealth of other quite creative ideas to maximize availability of affordable housing, including encouraging garage ADU conversions into affordable housing, increasing density on downtown parcels like Villa Borinquen, and making more efficient use of affordable housing subsidies via off-site arrangements that are best practices in most progressive US cities.

The biggest difference between O’Dea and some of his competitors is that, rather than mandating below-market-rate units in all new development, he would require developers to offer at least 20% affordable housing to qualify for a PILOT agreement. While O’Dea has stated that he would allow housing development to proceed without a universal affordable housing mandate, he has stated that he would try to extract the most affordable housing or community givebacks possible. This may perhaps be red meat to voters who are upset by glass towers and luxury apartments, but a bespoke approach to each development would run the risk of slowing down development, which might drive up market-rate rents as each project becomes bogged down in negotiations between the city and developers. A better approach, which we hope O’Dea considers, is a broader strategy of expanding some elements of redevelopment plans downtown and in Journal Square by granting “bonus” floors to housing developments in exchange for more affordable housing. This upzoning in return for building more income-restricted housing has been highly-effective in Journal Square and is set to add thousands of additional market rate and affordable units to Jersey City, providing much needed housing.

While O’Dea ranked highly for his housing policy, our reviewers were more mixed on his transit and Vision Zero plan. 

O’Dea was a leader in bringing one-way roads and protected bike lanes to Lincoln Park, some of the first protected bike lanes in Jersey City and has a long history of supporting and engaging with safe-streets advocates as County Commissioner, helping facilitate the County’s adoption of its own Vision Zero plan. While we were impressed that O’Dea’s “grand vision” is “to move the city towards a more walkable, bikeable Jersey; expand a more affordable mass transit with rapid transit,” we were disappointed he did not offer more specifics about how and where he would implement that vision for Jersey City. Like other candidates, O’Dea punted on what he would do on city-owned streets and put the focus on improvements to the county-owned JFK Blvd. During O’Dea’s time as County Commissioner, JFK has seen some safety and traffic improvements but it is still a dangerous stretch of road. Just this past November, a pedestrian was struck and killed. 

Regarding parks and public plazas, O’Dea’s support for maintaining (and potentially expanding) the Newark Ave pedestrian plaza and resolving to support the development of a sister plaza in Journal Square was encouraging. Reviewers also noted his focus on improving equitable access to pedestrian spaces and parks for Greenville as much needed. We are unsure how he would accomplish that as one thing that takes up street space is the city’s large amounts of subsidized on-street parking. O’Dea had not seemed to consider increasing on-street parking fees or implementing some form of dynamic pricing for parking (as Hoboken recently did) in areas of downtown where parking is scarce and transit plentiful to help fund some of the infrastructure improvements needed to improve services for the 44% of Jersey City residents who do not own a car. 

We are under no illusions that O’Dea is a perfect choice for mayor but he would be our choice based on his unparalleled understanding of development and its impact on the municipal budgets. We do worry that some development might get mired down in tit-for-tat negotiations over affordable housing and other community givebacks. O’Dea thinks more in terms of transactions between the city and developers rather than in the comprehensive terms of a broad housing shortage. While not our ideal approach to housing policy, we are less worried by O’Dea’s plans than what we have heard from many of the other candidates about housing in this race. We do hope that, if elected mayor, O’Dea would take some risks on investing in bus lanes just as he took risks by investing in the first protected bike lanes in Jersey City. It is our hope that O’Dea is one of the top two candidates coming out of the general election in November. 

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James Solomon

Solomon is a self-described policy wonk who claims he is bringing a fresh and innovative perspective on public policy to Jersey City to balance the budget and bring affordability to current residents of the city. But his housing policies are neither new nor particularly innovative and, in any event, they are deeply misguided. 

Solomon’s proposed universal 20% inclusionary zoning ordinance is an even stricter rehash of the unfunded affordable housing mandates that drove up rents and extirpated middle and working-class families from Boston and San Francisco by strangling the supply of new housing. Boston and San Francisco have larger populations and higher rents than Jersey City yet build much less housing due to those mandates.

A conservative estimate of Solomon’s housing plans, if fully funded via tax abatements or their equivalents, would in the long run raise property taxes by over 20% for current homeowners. Alternatively, he could choose to underfund the plan, which would lead to less of a rise in property taxes, but would then produce fewer market rate units and an even more disappointing number of affordable units. In order to cross-subsidize the affordable units, our analysis estimates market rents would need to rise over 9%. The affordability mandate would price out renters as development slows and market-rate housing costs rise to subsidize the few affordable housing lottery units produced, ultimately still leading to displacement.

Solomon is also proposing several “sustainability” laws that miss the forest for the trees. Nothing reduces greenhouse emissions like building infill housing in dense, transit-rich, walkable neighborhoods. By increasing costs of building and maintaining housing in Jersey City, Solomon’s proposals will divert some of that housing to greenfield suburban development with a much higher carbon footprint and environmental impact on migratory birds. One of the sustainability laws he has proposed parallels a law in New York City that has saddled working-class co-op owners with tens of thousands of dollars tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

In his response to the Better Blocks questionnaire, Solomon claims to recognize that more supply is needed and that downtown Jersey City can handle more density while simultaneously coming out as the only candidate opposed to up-zoning 150-156 Bay Street to support 250 affordable and workforce housing units and space for a new public school. It beggars belief that Solomon bemoans the development Jersey City has undergone over the past quarter century while working to block the kinds of projects he claims he supports. To our reviewers, Solomon gives the game away when he echoes talking points frequently advanced by condo owners in the nearby Powerhouse Arts District who oppose nearby high-rise projects by wanting “density in line” with its surroundings. Just recently, he voted against a PILOT to support 62 affordable units on Grand Street even though he championed the 15% inclusionary zoning ordinance requiring their construction.

While there is further to go, Ward E has seen the most progress on street safety redesigns in the last eight years, whether road diets, protected bike lanes, or intersections with basic infrastructure like curb extensions. In comparison, many other Wards have not seen the same leadership on safe streets and indeed even see regular obstructionism from their local councilperson, resulting in a lack of improvement in physical infrastructure for many other Ward’s residents. Councilman Solomon has also been an ardent opponent of the deeply misguided Turnpike Widening from the beginning, helping canvas and organize opposition. For these reasons, transit and safe streets should have been a runaway category for Councilman Solomon. 

Yet, Solomon also got mixed reviews from our graders. Some gave him high marks for his commitment to Vision Zero where others panned his reasons for not supporting the ambitious city-owned bus lanes proposal as political blame-shifting. Abstracting away from the context of the Better Blocks survey, many of us are concerned that if councilman-turned-mayor Solomon governs the city like he has campaigned for it, then there will be a lot of deference given to local councilpersons including his running mate, Ward F Councilman Frank Gilmore. Councilman Gilmore hosted a community meeting over the summer that saw city staff threatened by attendees over proposed one-way conversions to add bus lanes, car parking, and street safety improvements. The disparities in the quantity and quality of infrastructure improvements between wards would continue to mount.

Even in the parks category, where Solomon scored highest, his approach to housing causes consternation. Solomon plans to put a new pedestrian plaza on Provost Street, a great public space and nice amenity for current residents of the Powerhouse district, while at the same time rejecting a plan for 250 affordable and workforce homes for new residents around the corner at Bay Street. A city that provides amenities only for the wealthy – even if done inadvertently through good intentions – is truly a gentrifying city and not the kind of inclusive city we envision. 

With such a crowded field running for mayor, we cannot predict who will make the runoff in November but Councilman Solomon would not be our choice.  

In full disclosure, Eric Conner  – one of Better Blocks NJ’s founders and the author of this piece – donated to Solomon’s campaign prior to the formation of Better Blocks, the release of Solomon’s housing policy, and Solomon’s continued support of Frank Gilmore after threats against city staff at a Gilmore-run community meeting effectively put an end to the city’s plan for public transit and safe street improvements. Eric Conner will vote for Bill O’Dea on November 4, 2025.

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Joyce Watterman

Watterman was often a deciding vote on approving ambitious land-use reforms and implementing needed but politically difficult street changes when others were too scared to do so. To that end, we were disappointed that her campaign did not lean into her record of governance and suggested deferring to hired external experts. Not only is Council President Watterman an expert in her own right, but the city is staffed with experts already. The infrastructure team is led by incredibly skilled Director Barkha Patel and a whole host of talented civil servants. 

In general, Watterman has felt strangely absent from the campaign. We would have liked to have seen and heard more from her and the candidates running on her slate because she has taken truly bold political stances in the past and shown true leadership as Council President. Unfortunately, we are unable to support her candidacy for mayor despite her successful tenure leading the council. 

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