Atlantic City's Casino Heyday Is Behind It. Multifamily Developers Are Swooping In

After years with just a trickle of multifamily construction activity, more developers are putting their chips on the table in Atlantic City.

The New Jersey city known for its casinos notched the fastest rate of apartment rent appreciation in the country over the last five years, and multifamily players appear to be taking notice.

At least three projects have moved forward in recent months, and city leaders expect more to come. They hope this activity will help reduce Atlantic City’s reliance on gaming revenue as its casinos face growing competition.

One of the latest residential projects to advance in Atlantic City is Kushner Cos.’ 180-unit proposal for a 2.5-acre lot that has been empty since a department store burned down in the 1970s. The Casino Redevelopment Authority greenlit the project on Feb. 17.

“If that one is successful, you’re going to start to have the domino effect, where more and more developers and investors and owners are going to take a shot,” Leo Head of Regional and Indirect Sales Tony Juliano said.

“Now is the time to do it,” added Juliano, a Philly-area brokerage veteran born into a longstanding Atlantic City family with ties to the casino industry. “I don’t think land and property there could be any cheaper than it is right now.”

Atlantic City now has 200 housing units under construction, according to data provided by a city spokesperson.

Hundreds more have been entitled or proposed, a big change of pace for the historic beach town where very little new residential product has been brought online since the Great Recession, Mayor Marty Small told Bisnow.

“We have so many more projects to announce, so many developers who are sniffing around,” the mayor said. “Development is a copycat league.”

Amid low supply and rising demand, Atlantic City experienced more rent growth than any other U.S. city in the five years leading up to the end of 2025, according to Waymaker and RealPage data compiled by multifamily economist Jay Parsons. He found average rents in Atlantic City over that span grew 7.9%.

Parsons said the ranking of cities with the most rent growth over the last five years was dominated by markets that have seen little new supply like Atlantic City. 

The domino effect Juliano predicted may already be playing out.

About a mile away from the Kushner site, a joint venture associated with Dresher-based Trax Partners in November proposed building 152 townhomes in the shadow of the Ocean Casino. The project would be just a few blocks from the 250-unit NoBe at North Beach complex, which started coming online in 2019.

“I think that’s been pretty successful,” said David Ginsberg, managing director of the New York/New Jersey region at WinnCos., which owns two properties in the city. “That was a pretty different product from what you’ve seen in the last 20 years in Atlantic City.”

Last month, WinnCos. spent $13.8M to buy the 20-building, 177-unit Garden Court affordable housing complex at 1425 McKinley Ave. It is receiving $53M from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority to complete an extensive rehab of the buildings.

Grand plans also advanced last year for a $3.4B motorsports-centric mixed-use redevelopment of the defunct Bader Field airport. Developer Deem Enterprises named Cooper Levenson as the project's legal counsel earlier this year. 

The increased residential demand in Atlantic City is coming in part from the vacation home crowd. This has led to a new crop of single-family projects, particularly around the Gardner’s Basin complex that houses a marina and the Atlantic City Aquarium, Juliano said.

But Atlantic City remains a largely working-class town, and there have been recent developments in the affordable housing sector as well. Small said much of that work has been supported by state funding from NJEDA.

WinnCos.’s purchase of Garden Court, a Low Income Housing Tax Credit-backed complex, will extend the deed-restricted affordability there for another 30 years, Ginsberg said.

The property was a good fit for WinnCos. in part because it already owns the 131-unit Liberty at the Heritage Apartments about a half mile away, he said. Ginsberg said the city government’s business-friendly approach has been another big plus.

“We like Atlantic City,” he said. “We found the city to be a great place to work.”

Fostering new construction is a north star for the Small administration.

“It won’t be because of the city government that a development project won’t happen,” the mayor said.

While a wide array of real estate pros see promise in corners of Atlantic City, the fate of the casinos that underpin much of its economy remains uncertain.

The rise of legal online gambling in some states has shaken up the industry, and last year, New York City officials issued permits for three new casinos.

Between 20% and 30% of Atlantic City’s gaming traffic originated from NYC and its suburbs in 2024, so Juliano believes there could be a big drop in revenue when those projects come online.

Atlantic City's gaming industry suffered in the years after the Great Recession, with four of its previous 12 casinos closing by 2014, costing the city 8,000 jobs. 

In the following decade, Massachusetts and Maryland welcomed big new casinos, eating away at Atlantic City's dominance of the East Coast casino market.

Small said the city’s beaches, boardwalks and restaurants will allow it to remain an enduring destination for gamblers, but added that he is not opposed to minimizing the role gaming plays in the local economy.

“We definitely don’t need any more casinos,” the mayor said.

Juliano expressed that same sentiment and said Atlantic City should look north to another historic Jersey Shore town.

“I think Atlantic City could take a lot of cues from Asbury Park,” he said.

The urban beach town, which picked up steam around the same time, had a similar period of turbulence in the late 20th century. But in recent decades, Asbury Park’s downtown was revitalized as it became known as a destination for artists.

This momentum translated into new development activity, including the 112-unit waterfront condo project Somerset Development broke ground on in December.

Small thinks similar activity will be commonplace in Atlantic City soon.

“Now is the time to get in,” he said. “People are starting to see that.”