It was a veritable passion play staged at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centeron May 5, with bipartisan actors and concerted hoopla, all meant to stimulate a sense of urgency concerning a longtime plan to build a 44-story residential tower across from the center.
Especially among lenders.
City officials, arts center executives and the developer Carl Dranoff — who built the arts-district Symphony House condominiums in Philadelphia and luxury units on the Camden waterfront — all exhibited a fierce certainty that arts-loving people would want to live in downtown Newark.
Mr. Christie said it had been an “easy choice” to approve $38 million in tax credits over 10 years for the project, which he did shortly after he took office in January, because the revitalization of Newark and other cities was crucial for the health of the state.
But that still leaves roughly $160 million in financing to be secured for the 328-unit tower, which is to have expensive amenities like a pool and fitness center while having 20 percent of its apartments rented below market rates, to artists who qualify.
Despite the stalling of residential projects all around the Northeast for lack of lender confidence, officials are pressing forward with what was described at the news conference as a “game changing” plan, in a neighborhood where no new market-rate housing has been built in 45 years. Their optimism can be ascribed in part to the way arts center events, along with sporting events at the Newark arena, draw huge crowds. “Newark needs middle-class housing,” said Lawrence P. Goldman, the arts center’s chief executive, who helped conceive the overall plan for the acreage around the arts center — including shopping, additional parks and more residential buildings. In an interview before the conference, he said, “We are going to put up a beautiful, slender tower on a site with the ultimate access to the arts, train service, great views — including, for some, the New York skyline — and attract people of means, no question.”
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