Affordable Senior Housing Breaks Ground in Hoboken

• 1033 Willow Avenue, Hoboken: six stories, 36 units for residents 55 and older.
• Hoboken's first 100% affordable senior development in more than 30 years.
• Community Investment Strategies and the City of Hoboken broke ground May 7, six years after the RFP.
• The site held a tenement that burned in a 1973 fire that killed 11 people, then sat as a city parking lot for decades.

Hoboken just broke ground on the first fully affordable senior building it has built in three decades, on a lot that spent the last several decades as city-owned parking.

The Building: 36 Units, Six Stories, All Deed-Restricted

The Willow rises at the southeast corner of Willow Avenue and 11th Street, a six-story, 100% affordable building for residents 55 and up. The unit mix is three studios, 28 one-bedrooms, and five two-bedrooms, roughly half reserved for households at or below 50% of area median income, about 13% at 30% AMI, and the rest up to 80% AMI. KNTM Architects designed the building, which will carry a ground-floor community room, a fifth-floor library, on-site laundry, and Energy Star and Zero Energy Ready Home certifications. Community Investment Strategies (CIS), the Lawrenceville-based affordable housing developer with more than 4,000 units across New Jersey under its "Heritage Village" brand, is building it on city-owned land under a ground lease with Hoboken.

The Money: Six Sources, One 36-Unit Deal

Getting a fully affordable deal to pencil took a stack, not a single check. The city put in $500,000 from its Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Hudson County added $2 million, secured by County Executive Craig Guy and the Board of Commissioners through the county's HOME Investment Partnership Program. The New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency is providing construction and permanent financing, Enterprise Community Partners is supplying Low-Income Housing Tax Credit equity, and Citizens Bank rounds out the capital stack. Even with all of that, the project only became financeable once the city grew it from an initial 25 units to 36, the unit count that finally cleared the state's Affordable Housing Trust Fund Program threshold.

The Long Runway: RFP to Groundbreaking Took Six Years

Hoboken issued its RFP for the site in August 2020, selected CIS as developer, and didn't get final approvals until 2024. The city council was still amending the ground lease as recently as this February, and pushed to get shovels in the dirt by the end of March after construction had already slipped from an original 2025 target. It's the kind of timeline that shows up across CIS's other public-land deals in the state, its $20 million Heritage Village at Bloomfield took a similar mix of NJHMFA, LIHTC, and disaster-recovery funds to close, and its 82-unit Moorestown project needed a dedicated $9 million HMFA award before it could break ground. Fully affordable senior housing in New Jersey rarely happens fast or on one funding source; it happens when a municipality, a county, a state agency, and a specialist developer all show up for the same site.

The site itself carries weight beyond the financing. A tenement building at the address burned in 1973, killing 11 residents, before the lot became a surface parking lot. "Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of a tragic fire on this site, this fully affordable senior housing complex will rise, sustain and nourish our seniors who live on fixed incomes," said 5th Ward Councilman Phil Cohen at the groundbreaking.

What's Next

Construction is expected to wrap in fall 2027. CIS is mid-build on similar Heritage Village projects elsewhere in the state, including an 86-unit preservation deal in Lambertville and the Moorestown development, giving Hoboken's 36 units a template that's already been tested and financed at a larger scale.