Last Wednesday, the New York Times published an article about the Edgewater Square development project in the New Jersey town where I currently live ("Shops Claim a Once-Gritty Waterfront"). The article discusses the other major retail shopping centers in Edgewater so I thought it would be useful to create a map indicating where these centers are in town and in relation to each other.
The article focuses on the positive aspects of the growth of Edgewater in the last 10 years and how it has created a market for new and upscale retail shopping areas. An entirely separate article could be written about the explosion in residential development that has been seen over that time with even greater intensity in the last 5 years. Numerous condominiums were still being completed as the bottom of the real estate market fell out. It will be interesting to see how once these are completed if there will be empty units. If so this could put further downward pressure on the local housing market.
The main downside of both the retail and residential surge is traffic. Edgewater has just one thoroughfare, River Road, along which all condos and shopping centers lie. On Saturdays the traffic is already painful. There's little that can be done to alleviate this as Edgewater and River Rd are bound tightly by the Palisade cliffs and the Hudson River. I shudder to think what the Edgewater Square will do to worsen traffic.
Though it clearly focused only on the positive, I was glad to see such a nice piece about where I live in the Times. Not all my neighbors agree, as you can read in the local online message board, 07020.com. It has this thread about the article, where there is some frustration about the exclusion of the "costs of development" in the article.
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