The influx has meant that, despite a softening market, bidding wars remain common in neighborhoods where townhouses still trade for less than $1 million, like Bergen-Lafayette, Journal Square and Jersey City Heights. And now that the downtown waterfront is almost fully built out with high-rises, developers are pushing into those areas as well.

“Jersey City has been maturing for decades. At this point, it’s an extremely well-known marketplace and is seen as a housing opportunity for anyone moving to the New York scene,” said Michael Barry, the president and an owner of Ironstate Development Company. “It used to be much younger, but people that came here in the 80s and 90s stayed and fell in love with the area. Now people don’t move out when they have school-age children anymore.”

At 90 Columbus, a building near the Grove Street PATH train station that Ironstate and Panepinto Properties opened this fall, two-bedrooms, which start at $3,850 a month, are moving at an almost equal rate to one-bedrooms, said Jackie Urgo, president of the Marketing Directors, a real estate advisory company that worked on the project.

Martin D. Brady, an executive vice president of sales and leasing at the Marketing Directors, said that people who are tired of commuting find the 15- to 20-minute train ride from Lower Manhattan appealing.

“It used to be that people with kids would stay in Jersey City for two years, then buy their house in Short Hills,” he said. “That’s not really the case anymore.”

James Tortorelli, the Jersey City branch manager of Coldwell Banker, raised his first daughter, now 22, in the Bergen County suburbs, where he grew up. But he and his second wife have opted to raise their 5-year-old in downtown Jersey City.

“I had a really good childhood in Bergen County, but I so prefer urban living,” Mr. Tortorelli said. “We have 1,100 square feet here instead of 3,000, but our daughter is exposed to so much more — culture, arts, diversity. Growth-wise, I think it’s a much healthier environment, much more enlightening.”