Hundreds of new apartments have been approved on a former industrial site in the center of a South Jersey college town.
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The Glassboro Planning Board voted Wednesday to greenlight Nexus Properties’ plans for 220 units and about 8K SF of retail on the corner of Academy and East High streets in the town's central business district, 42Freeway reported.
The market-rate project, dubbed Glassworks, will span two city blocks and six stories on a site about three-quarters of a mile from the core of Rowan University’s campus.
Nexus expects the project to deliver sometime in 2029, 70and73 reported.
Its new retail component will effectively be a replacement for older commercial properties that existed on the site.
The site once housed the Whitney Glass Works, which closed in the 1920s. The Heritage Glass Museum operates in the neighborhood and will remain open, alongside Angelo’s Diner. The former Glassboro Library is set to be razed.
Lawrenceville-based Nexus is also a major student housing owner in Glassboro, with five properties listed on its website.
Some of those are part of the Rowan Boulevard project, where Nexus struck up a $425M public-private partnership with Rowan University to build a mixed-use neighborhood overlooking the campus.
While permitting can be a challenge in South Jersey, the region is seeing some multifamily development, a large share of which is affordable housing meant to meet state requirements for municipalities under the Mount Laurel doctrine.
Enforcement of the 1975 New Jersey Supreme Court decision requiring local governments to use zoning to further attainable housing production was clarified in 2024.
That push is also underway in Voorhees, where 180 affordable units are on the way. Administrators there greenlit plans for a 178-unit, market-rate office-to-residential conversion last month.
But mixed-use plans for a redevelopment of the nearby Echelon Mall have fallen through since they were introduced last year, the Philadelphia Business Journal reported this week. Hoboken Brownstone Co. told the outlet this was due to uncertainty about a $90M tax credit it sought through New Jersey’s Aspire program, which has paused its application process.
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