Call to Action: Please see the bottom of the post for a call to action to email the City Council before Wednesday!

Ever since the bird-safe glass ordinance was introduced in 2025, Better Blocks has worked hard to make it a better, more targeted ordinance [Jersey City Times]. Our goal is to reduce bird strikes in high-risk areas without worsening the housing affordability crisis by adding onerous and costly regulations on all new construction, additions, and rehabilitations on residential and commercial buildings citywide. We have offered proactive solutions based on currently enacted legislation (including ordinances on the recommended list of the American Bird Conservancy (“ABC Birds”)). 

At the same time, we have diligently pointed out very real and well-researched costs. We have also offered to meet with JC Birds to discuss multiple times. Despite these efforts, JC Birds, led by Lorraine Freeney, has decided to dismiss any criticism and rebuff any efforts to make a better ordinance that would achieve both our groups’ goals. 

This is not a simple misunderstanding; JC Birds is actively misleading the Jersey City Planning Division, the Jersey City Council, and, ultimately, the public on the costs and tradeoffs of this ordinance as written.

There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of Ms. Freeney’s claims about Better Blocks and our work to make this ordinance better. If there are no costs and no impact on development, why does she (falsely) accuse us of seeking to protect developers when our stated goal has always been broader housing affordability?

First, there is no doubt that bird-safe glass is more expensive than regular glass. We have gotten quotes from ABC Birds-approved vendors and spoken with architects, affordable housing developers, contractors, and glass suppliers to gather our estimates. Even ABC Birds’ own website has articles that acknowledge the issue of construction costs [ABC Birds]. All the reliable evidence points to the same reality: compliance has costs, adding hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to projects depending on building size and the window-to-wall ratio (“WWR”). 

Exterior stickers cost $5-$12 per square foot and have to be professionally installed. UV films cost $30-$40 per running foot. Fritted glass (visible dots on the windows, commonly used in commercial buildings) costs around $15 per square foot more and UV glass (commonly used in residential buildings in New York because it is visible to birds but invisible to humans) can cost a staggering $30 per square foot more than standard curtain wall. These materials have real impacts on the costs to build or rehabilitate housing (see chart below for estimates).

Bird-Safe Glass and Materials Construction Cost Summary Table

Building Type	Window-to-Wall Ratio	Ordinance Height Standard	Compliance Cost Ranges	% Additional Dev. Cost
Low-rise (3–5 stories, smaller footprint)	High WWR (67%) — absorb premium	75 ft. (full building)	$351,500–$381,500	2.6%–5.8%
Low-rise (3–5 stories, smaller footprint)	Reduced WWR (45%) — respond to cost	75 ft. (full building)	$199,500–$219,500	1.5%–1.6%
Mid-rise (5–12 stories)	High WWR (75%) — absorb premium	75 ft. standard	$859,300–$1,909,300	1.4%–4.5%
Mid-rise (5–12 stories)	Reduced WWR (45%) — respond to cost	75 ft. standard	$414,500–$444,500	0.68%–1.73%
Mid-rise (5–12 stories)	High WWR (75%) — absorb premium	100 ft. standard	$1,112,500–$2,187,500	1.8%–5.0%
Mid-rise (5–12 stories)	Reduced WWR (45%) — respond to cost	100 ft. standard	$532,500–$562,500	0.88%–1.93%
High-rise (12-50 stories)	High WWR — absorb premium	100 ft. standard	$1,000,00- $2,000,000 (UV)	0.5%–2.6%

Human beings, like birds, it turns out, like natural light. Even brick buildings must have windows and those windows will cost more under this ordinance. While we agree Jersey City generally has a good Planning Division, they did not take into account that there are more tradeoffs between opaque brick façades and window curtainwall beyond just material costs. For high-rises and mid-rise construction, an extensive use of brick often comes at the expense of increased labor costs, lengthened construction time, and complex changes in the financing and valuation of projects. This oversight was likely due to the rushed reintroduction of the ordinance (a choice, we have been told, that was made without the involvement of the planners), leaving the Planning Division with little time to prepare. 

Ms. Freeney tries to make the argument that bird glass legislation has not impeded development in New York. This shows her fundamental misunderstanding of housing economics and policy tradeoffs. New York City is notoriously one of the most expensive and difficult cities to build in. It has some of the highest rents and home costs in the country yet enough people want to live in it (or near enough to it) that a large segment of Jersey City’s population has moved here due to our lower housing costs and our ability to build new homes. Making Jersey City more expensive like New York is not the appealing argument she thinks it is.

Setting aside that Ms. Freeney is the one who is mistaken on costs, she makes several more errors in her recent op-ed.

The second major issue stems from several false assumptions about what qualifies as a bird-safe material according to the ordinance. The Planning Division assumed interior curtains and blinds would satisfy compliance (and wrote a memorandum, reproduced below, to the City Council to that effect); if this were the case, then we, too, would be satisfied. Unfortunately, the ordinance as written does not allow for interior curtains and blinds as an acceptable mitigation material; this has been confirmed to us in writing by one of the city’s planners. As a result, the lowest-cost compliance measures are not a part of this ordinance.

While Better Blocks members have reached out to City Council members to include curtains and blinds, Councilwoman Eleana Little confirmed to us that ABC Birds and JC Birds have lobbied against including curtains and blinds as acceptable measures in the ordinance.

This leads to a funny contradiction. Ms. Freeney complains about the city’s artificial lights drawing in migratory birds. She is right. Most migratory bird species travel at night, navigating by the stars, but they are lured off course by the lights of cities and suburbs [American Scientist]. Unfortunately, fritted glass and UV glass are not effective at reducing nighttime and twilight bird strikes for several reasons. Neither fritted nor UV glass block the emission of artificial lights from urban apartments, homes, and offices [U.S. Fish and Wildlife]. Fritted glass is difficult for birds to see in low-light conditions and UV glass relies on ambient ultraviolet radiation to make the patterns visible to birds [ABC Birds]. In other words, at the time of day when most birds migrate, the two most commonly used materials in new construction won’t work yet activists are actively campaigning against low-cost blinds and curtains that do.          

Finally, Ms. Freeney claims no jurisdiction has ever repealed or modified their bird-safe materials legislation. This is simply not true. Just this year, Toronto’s ordinance was preempted by the Ontario provincial government to help reduce housing construction costs and address Canada’s own deep housing crisis. Similarly, Winnipeg heavily modified their ordinance (which was less than a year old), lowering the height to be commensurate with nearby tree canopies and giving home builders greater flexibility in material choices.

In the United States, meanwhile, many jurisdictions reached compromises before enacting legislation. New York City has many exceptions not found in Jersey City’s ordinance, including for rehabs and office conversions. Washington, D.C. exempts affordable housing from its ordinance. Others, like Oakland, limit the ordinance to buildings near waterfronts and parks over one acre. Almost all (aside from New York) have a much lower height threshold of 40 to 60 feet.

Perhaps JC Birds is willing to mislead the public about the costs of their proposals because they would actually prefer it if high prices slowed our city’s growth, out of a misguided sense that cities are less environmentally friendly than suburbs. Maybe they do genuinely believe that only greedy developers or wealthy New York transplants will bear these costs. We have previously shown why both beliefs are misguided [Better Blocks NJ].

Such unfounded beliefs would explain Ms. Freeney’s conspiratorial accusations against Better Blocks as well as her inability to acknowledge the very real costs of this ordinance. Her style of advocacy is right out of the playbook that killed nuclear power in the 1970s and 1980s (leading to more carbon emissions and asthma-causing pollutants from coal power plants) and has raised doubts about offshore wind in the present [ABC Birds]. JC Birds, following the guidance of ABC Birds, is willing to do to urban housing what previous, well-intentioned environmental activists did to your energy bill and our nation’s carbon footprint. As with off-shore wind, this myopic environmentalism disadvantages the most environmentally sustainable solution (dense urban housing) to the benefit of one that causes much more ecological and environmental harm (suburban sprawl).

There is a simple test for voters to find out who is telling the truth. Go out and get a quote to replace the windows in your home or condo with bird-safe materials as if you were doing a renovation or an addition. How much more would a bird-safe option that you’re willing to live with cost you? And if you are one of the many Jersey City residents who live in a home that will now likely be exempted from this ordinance during a future renovation, be sure to thank Better Blocks. We were the ones who pointed out the flaws of this poorly designed ordinance and got the City Council to make changes exempting smaller buildings.

JC Birds insists they trust the Planning Division, but our overworked planners have previously requested time for further study and revisions. Since JC Birds seems unwilling to compromise on the current version of the ordinance, we call on our readers to write to the City Council and ask that your representatives return this ordinance to the Planning Division for further study and revisions before it is reintroduced.