The era of the suburban office park is waning. Across New Jersey, corporate campuses, which for decades buoyed suburban economies, are being abandoned and repurposed, making way for new housing, warehouses and open space.
In Parsippany, Franklin Lakes, Englewood Cliffs and Roseland, among other towns, redevelopments comprising thousands of housing units are either planned or in progress.
In Berkeley Heights, a 1980s office park is being redeveloped as a high-end, mixed-use development, with public spaces envisioned as New Jersey’s answer to Manhattan’s popular High Line. In Mount Olive, a massive office building, mothballed for close to two decades, has been demolished, to be replaced by a warehouse. And in Morris Township, the 143-acre Honeywell headquarters, already partially redeveloped with 235 town houses, is soon to become the home of a training center for the New York Red Bulls professional soccer team.
“We’re just going through another dimension of reinventing the economic landscape,” just as factories became obsolete when manufacturing moved overseas, says James Hughes, professor of planning at Rutgers University. “It also represents the reinvention of how knowledge-based work takes place, as work-from-home protocols are adopted by many organizations.”
New Jersey’s suburbs attracted corporations decamping from cities beginning in the mid-20th century, but now the trend has reversed. Nokia Bell Labs, for instance, announced late last year that it would leave its historic Murray Hill campus on I-78 for a new tech hub planned for New Brunswick.
In each of the last 10 years, an average of 1.3 million square feet has been removed from the state’s office market, according to the real estate brokerage firm JLL. Close to half of that space—about 48 percent—has been replaced by housing, 18.4 percent by warehouses, and 7.7 percent by medical uses.
In a densely developed state, these sprawling sites—often 20, 50, or even 100 acres or more—are a rare opportunity. “You don’t have raw land to build on, so we have to recycle what we have,” says Stephen Jenco, director of New Jersey office market research for JLL.
The New York Red Bulls, for example, liked the old Honeywell site because it offered the soccer team 80-plus acres, enough for eight fields and a training building, about 25 miles from the team’s stadium in Harrison, says Marc de Grandpre, the team’s president and general manager. “The size was important for us to meet our goal of having our professional team and youth training program all together,” he says.
Linda Byrne and her husband, Bill, live in one of the townhouses built on the old Honeywell site. Nearly 50 years ago, Linda worked as a secretary in an office at the site. When she strolls around the neighborhood, she sometimes visits a pond where, decades ago, she and her coworkers ate lunch on sunny days. The redevelopment allowed the Byrnes to stay in Morris County after downsizing from their Whippany home. “It’s just such a nice location,” she says.
Challenges and opportunities
Redevelopment can be jarring for residents and local officials, who often resist changes to the character of their towns and fear that new uses will lead to more traffic or stress on schools and other municipal services.
Exxon Mobil’s plan to rezone a portion of its 757-acre research and engineering campus, located in Clinton, for warehouses was met with local opposition in 2022. In May, the company announced a plan to leave the campus at the intersection of Routes 22 and 78, by 2028, moving more than 600 jobs to Houston.
Park Ridge officials and residents resisted a plan to construct housing on the 37-acre former Sony site in Park Ridge and Montvale. “Here you have a thriving community, and they’re forcing a template that will degrade the community and that will probably increase the population of the town by 10 percent,” says Burton Hall, a 37-year Park Ridge resident who spoke out against the proposal.
But, despite the borough’s legal fight against the development, construction has started on the planned 448 residential units in Park Ridge, including a number of affordable units. Montvale has already approved development on its part of the Sony site, as well as the redevelopment of former corporate sites occupied by A&P and Mercedes-Benz.
Towns have a cudgel they can use to shape renewal, as these sites often require use variances from planning and zoning boards. The process is often protracted. In Wayne, the owners of the 192-acre former Toys “R” Us corporate headquarters were in talks with the township for years over details of a redevelopment plan that would include 1,360 housing units. An agreement was reached in October.
Sometimes, developments win approval through the courts, because towns are required to meet state affordable-housing benchmarks. A bill has been introduced in Trenton that would loosen local zoning restrictions to make it easier to redevelop those properties into mixed-use sites, provided they include some affordable housing.
Advocates say that remaking unloved corporate properties into housing just makes sense. “In a lot of cases, those are buildings that are sitting vacant. When you’re dealing with such a deficit of housing, they’re opportunities to provide housing for New Jerseyans,” says Alex Staropoli, founder and principal of Staropoli Strategies, an advocacy consulting firm. Staropoli adds that the impact of added housing on municipal services is often less than opponents fear.
An evolution
The glut of corporate space has its roots in the 1980s, when 100 million square feet of cubicle farms were constructed in northern and central New Jersey, according to Hughes. Municipalities welcomed these new neighbors, who paid handsomely in taxes but didn’t use local services like schools; plus, an influx of workers supported restaurants and other businesses.
But in the years that followed, advances in technology shrunk office staffs. And as millennials entered the workforce, they often shunned isolated, car-dependent suburban office parks in favor of urban locations like Hoboken and Morristown, where they could take public transit to work and stroll out the door at lunchtime or happy hour to a nearby restaurant.
The Covid pandemic and the rise of remote and hybrid schedules sealed the fates of many office parks. These days, JLL says office-vacancy rates average around 27 percent across northern and central New Jersey. And even if there were greater demand, these aging buildings would require expensive renovations to suit today’s users. Hughes sums it up: “We were left with a huge amount of obsolete buildings on the landscape that are never going to be offices again.”
A reimagined future
When it comes to new uses, location is key. In suburban Bergen, Essex and Morris counties, with their well-regarded schools and leafy landscapes, multifamily housing is often the first choice, according to JLL.
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Close to major highways, warehouses are popular. That’s especially true in the Meadowlands because of its proximity to both New York City and Port Newark/Elizabeth, says John Obeid, senior research manager at commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield’s New Jersey office.
In Mount Olive, a 920,000-square-foot office building overlooking Route 80 sat empty for almost two decades after BASF, the chemical giant, moved to smaller quarters in Florham Park. Now, the building has been torn down, to be replaced by a warehouse. “Although the township was sad to see such a great corporate office be demolished, having the site redeveloped as a warehouse brings jobs to Mount Olive and can boost the local economy,” says Mayor Joe Nicastro.
It will also help with tax revenues. In the BASF era two decades ago, the property generated annual taxes of about $4 million. The empty building brought in about $355,424. The warehouse is expected to pay roughly between $1.5–$2 million annually, officials estimate.
In most redevelopments, old corporate buildings, with their sprawling floor plans, can’t be repurposed into housing or warehouses and must be demolished. But at ON3 in Clifton and Nutley, the 116-acre former North American headquarters of Hoffmann-La Roche, developer Prism Capital Partners was able to find new users for all the site’s lab and office space, including the pharma company Eisai, Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, and Seton Hall University’s graduate school of nursing.
Prism has also proposed building retail space and more than 1,000 apartments at the property. Unlike more remote suburban properties, this site benefits from its location just nine miles from Manhattan, according to Edwin Cohen, a Prism principal.
In Berkeley Heights, a township of about 13,000 on the western edge of Union County, the former Connell Corporate Park is now the Park, which includes a Life Time Fitness and Embassy Suites. The nearly 1.5 million square feet of office space on the site have been upgraded, and some buildings have been demolished. Plans call for construction of 328 residential units and 190,000 square feet of entertainment, dining, retail and other amenities like a dog park, pickleball court, bocce courts, parks and a bowling alley.
“Companies are really struggling to get employees back to the office, so the resort amenities are a big draw,” says Shane Connell, executive vice president of the Connell Company. “We are trying to recreate the city in the suburbs.”
In total, Connell says, nearly half a billion dollars will be spent on the project. He envisions a three-mile public walking trail that connects elevated parks and mimics the High Line.
But even as the Park moves forward, Berkeley Heights has learned that Nokia Bell Labs, the township’s largest taxpayer, will leave its campus in the Murray Hill section. That opens the question of what will happen to the 200-acre property, which contains about 40 buildings, some dating to the 1940s.
The state Economic Development Authority has offered towns a $50,000 grant to help with the “revisioning” of office parks. Berkeley Heights has availed itself of that grant to begin planning for the Nokia Bell Labs move.
“We’re trying to do our homework to see what would work well,” said Brian Kraut, head of the economic development committee and member of the planning board in Berkeley Heights. “There’s a lot of opportunity for the town and the area.”
Kathleen Lynn and Patricia Alex are contributing writers to New Jersey Monthly.
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