David Genova, Principal at Greenwood Development

0:00 Speaker 1 Good morning. This is Mike Stola for the Stolar Real Estate Report. Montclair, New Jersey. What is Montclair, New Jersey? Where is it located, what type of people live there? What kind of development is taking place? So today I have a native born and bred Montclair, New Jersey resident, David Genova, who is the founder and CEO of Greenwood Development.

0:22 So you were born in Montclair and you’ve been there your entire life I have, So tell me a little bit about Montclair. People always say it’s a wonderful section in New Jersey.

0:33 Speaker 2 We always say all roads lead to Montclair. Montclair is a culturally rich community with a national reputation for inclusion, civic responsibilities, civic engagement, the arts. We have great restaurants. Cities motto is where the city meets the suburbs. I think that’s a pretty accurate representation of Montclair. Tree lined streets in certain neighborhoods and urban higher density additional neighborhoods.

1:03 Speaker 1 Does it have adequate housing them to meet the needs? Today?

1:07 Speaker 3 Not today? No, not today today.

1:10 Speaker 2 We’re kind of living in a paradox. We speak about equity, we speak about progressive values in Montclair, but we treat density like it’s a virus and there are there’s a fundamental pole push and pull going.

1:27 Speaker 3 On in town.

1:28 Speaker 1 Explain to me what you mean by this.

1:31 Speaker 2 There longtime residents see Montclair as a place. They see it as a somewhat of a museum and not a living, breathing community. They assign the value that they assign the reason that they moved here in the demand to single family homes, large plots of land, a much more suburban environment.

1:54 While younger families are really struggling.

1:57 Speaker 1 To where kind of a younger person the older person isn’t selling the house, How could they get residents in Montclair?

2:05 Speaker 2 It’s very difficult. There’s a real shortage of rental apartments. There’s almost no condominium inventory at all, starter homes or a million plus. It’s becoming a very exclusive community and that’s not historically what Montclair has been about.

2:21 Speaker 1 What about the transit oriented developments in Montclair? I mean, the train is near the city, so it’s a great trail commute.

2:30 Speaker 2 We have five train stations in Montclair, which is the most of any on the Montclair Booton line in Montclair proper. Three of them are in our one single family residential areas where no development has taken place despite having a direct train to Montclair, and two of them are in some of the denser, more commercial areas of town, and

2:50 that’s where the development over the last twenty years has been focused. But in the last twenty years, we’ve built less than eight hundred units and we’ve had a population of more than four thousand people.

3:02 Speaker 1 So where are people living. They’re going to Clifton, They’re going to the towns.

3:07 Speaker 3 They’re going to Bloomfield, They’re going to Clifton.

3:09 Speaker 2 There’s some competition west of us with the Chatham Madison, Westfield Summit markets. Some people see those as being comps. We favor Montclair, but you know, if you’re willing to be thirty minutes further from New York, those are definitely open.

3:25 Speaker 1 What about office? Where are people in the office? Business?

3:29 Speaker 2 Office is very focused on Summit and Morristown. Those are your I mean Jersey City as well, but those are your two more suburban office markets. Montclair has a lot of mom and pop office. We focus a lot on office in town, but it’s not large scale, class A office.

3:46 This is boutique office, adaptive reuse of old industrial spaces. Twenty five hundred to four thousand square foot tenants, startups, tech companies, and we’ve had great success with that over the last twenty years. A lot of folks live in Montclair and want to work in Montclair. It’s got an amenity based restaurants, barbershops, all these things happening, you know,

4:09 adjacent to your office building. Couldn’t be a better place to work, But there is no zoning and no land to build you know, office in any real quantity.

4:19 Speaker 1 What about affordable housing? I mean, we need affordable housing for the city to grow in the state of New Jersey to grow. How do you handle that?

4:29 Speaker 2 Montclair has an inclusionary zoning ordinance that’s strong. It’s twenty percent of any new units built over five units, any new project over five units, twenty percent of the new units have to be designated deed restricted affordable.

4:43 Speaker 3 That’s a good thing policy wise.

4:45 Speaker 1 And what is what’s the affordable component? Eighty percent of am I what’s the affordability?

4:51 Speaker 2 The affordability is it mirrors the co standards in New Jersey. It doesn’t relate to what we’re exempt from the actual affording affordable housing doctrine because we’re an urban aid municipality. But we wrote our ordinance to mirror the state’s ordinance.

5:07 So yes, it’s very low, low, moderate, and workforce or all defined terms, and they have different different approaches.

5:14 Speaker 1 To What about retail.

5:16 Speaker 2 We have two point one million square feet of retail in Montclair, which dwarfs any any town, you know, any town of its size in New Jersey. I’m fairly certain. A lot of restaurants, a lot of service retail, some entertainment, you know, your typical mom and pops up to New York City concepts coming in. That’s a new, a new

5:40 thing and has kind of.

5:41 Speaker 3 Increased in frequency.

5:43 Speaker 2 But the retail, we have two point eight percent vacancy in our downtown on retail, which is the best it’s been in my career.

5:50 Speaker 3 So there’s high demand.

5:52 Speaker 1 What about rents? What are rents for retail and what are rents for residential? You were saying to me in the day that residential rents.

6:00 Speaker 2 Residential rents have topped four dollars a foot. That’s post pandemic. Pre pandemic, they were probably between three and three thirty a foot. So there’s been a substantial demand increase and a lot of people applying for apartments, and we list an apartment. We get thirteen to fifteen applicants in seventy two hours for that apartment. On retail, retail, there’s so

6:28 many different retail zones in Montclair. It’s not concentrated like most towns in one downtown or community area.

6:35 Speaker 3 It’s spread throughout the town.

6:36 Speaker 2 So there’s retail in residential zones, there’s retail and commercial zones ranges from the mid thirties to I mean, I just saw listing at seventy dollars plus for retail triplenet in town.

6:50 Speaker 1 What about the entertainment. I know you have been involved with entertainment in Montclair.

6:56 Speaker 2 Yeah, I’m a partner in the Welmont Theater, which is a concert venue in downtown Montclair. Entertainment and the arts have always been a draw to the town. The entertainment offerings have certainly ramped up. Jazz House Kids, which is a nationally recognized jazz nonprofit in Montclair, puts on a jazz festival that last year twenty six thousand people attend.

7:20 Out Montclair puts on a pride festival that had ten or fifteen thousand people attend. There’s been other community events of that sort too. But if you could track the new retail and the hot retail in town. It’s mostly experiential.

7:37 You’ve seen golf simulators opening. We had an announcement that one of our old movie theaters is reopening in the near future with new management. The Welmont Theater continues to bring about two hundred thousand people downtown every year for nationally touring concerts and a big part of the draw of into Montclairs. You don’t need plans until you get there.

8:03 You can kind of park, walk around and find your way.

8:05 Speaker 1 Now where are what about people working from home or are they going to the office in Montclair? What’s the status on that.

8:13 Speaker 2 They’re clearly working from home because most of our new legislation post pandemic seems to be around noise and quality of life and single family, single family zones. We banned gas leaf blowers last year, which I think was a major push from people working from home who were on zooms and on conference calls and annoyed by the sound outside.

8:33 Plus some environmentalist groups in town push that. But you know, Montclair is a lot of writers, a lot of you know, I think half the New York Times editorial board, you know, lives in Montclair, A lot of people in film and television, and a lot of those roles I think are able to be done at least somewhat remotely, And so there

8:54 is that. You’d be shocked at how many people are walking around on the streets on a weekday afternoon, which is a new phenomenon, not something that’s happened.

9:00 Speaker 3 It used to be a commuter only to me.

9:02 Speaker 1 What about the conversion of retail malls into other uses.

9:07 Speaker 2 So we actually we have a retail mall, about one hundred and fifty thousand square foot retail mall in town that was an old train station converted in the early eighties. It’s gone through a development or redevelopment process that’s taken the better part of eleven years and two owners, and most recently they activated the mall for the first time

9:29 in eleven years. As this redevelopment process powers on, and it’s been met with tremendous nostalgia and enjoy seeing this kind of relic of an old train station be converted into an event space and art space. There’s an organic market that opened up in there, a burger joint. They’re having Montclair Flee in there. So I think people wrote

9:52 it off about ten years ago and said, well, it has to be something else. We’re not going to invest in one hundred and fifty thousand square foot indoor mall in Mongo Claire. Malls are dying, and the reality is is there seems to be a lot.

10:04 Speaker 1 Of demand for I think Montclair is growing. I think the big problem that you brought up before is that the older people don’t want this redevelopment to take place in the community.

10:16 Speaker 2 It isn’t necessarily just older people. It’s longtime residents. Even my peers who grew up with me. We struggle a lot when we talk about what the future of Montclair is and who gets to shape it and who can afford to live in it? Uh, and who’s who were protecting it?

10:32 Speaker 1 From answer of what you just said, who’s protecting it? What’s happening?

10:40 Speaker 2 I don’t know that it needs as much protections as people people want to want to posture it does. It’s it’s a living, breathing place. It’s never been a museum. The people complaining about density now tend to live in seers kit houses that were built in time when they were probably considered the highest density development neighborhood it’s always evolved,

11:02 it’s always grown, it’s nowhere near its max.

11:04 Speaker 1 I’d like to thank David Genova for being here and giving us really a lot of information about a great community monthly in New Jersey.

11:12 Speaker 3 Thanks Michael, appreciate it.