There are many reasons people go to Newark.

There are the black-and-red-clad Devils fans spilling out of Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and the Edison Ale House to catch a game at the Prudential Center.

There are the classical music, jazz and pop aficionados getting a bite to eat and a drink before a concert at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

There are the foodies seeking out Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian food in the Ironbound.

The city’s strong cultural, historical, educational and entertainment tradition has always been there.

But after decades of neglect and decay, now there are people heading to work and to their homes in the many new developments New Jersey’s largest city has attracted, a combination of new construction and renovation of classic architecture totaling more than $4 billion in investment and creating about 11,000 housing units:

Riverfront Square , a multi-building, mixed-use community adjacent to NJ Transit’s Broad Street Station and the city’s light-rail link to Penn Station.

→One Theater Square, a 22-story brick and glass tower with 245 residential units and retail space, across the street from NJPAC.

→Eleven80, a luxury rental building, located at 1180 Raymond Blvd., was converted into residential use after a $120 million renovation by the Cogswell Group. The building is in the heart of downtown and near five university campuses. The New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Prudential Center and numerous art galleries are within walking distance.

→Ironside, the redevelopment of a 150-year-old warehouse between Prudential Center and Penn Station, to become headquarters of the Mars Wrigley candy company, with upward of 500 employees.

→One Rector Street, a $65 million, 23-story tower adjacent to NJPAC that offers 169 market-rate apartments. It is also called the “Shaq Tower” because its investors include basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, a Newark native.

→Vibe, at Halsey and William streets, an $80 million, 256-unit residential development.

→Whole Foods anchors the redevelopment of the old Hahne & Company department store between Broad and Halsey streets. The site also houses Marcus B+P, a restaurant owned by celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson.

→New hotels: Courtyard by Marriott on Broad Street near Prudential Center; the boutique Hotel Indigo in a renovated bank building at Broad and Market streets, the city’s fabled crossroads.

→Teachers Village, a five-block redevelopment along Halsey Street with 214 apartments for educators, 65,000 square feet of retail and three charter schools. It takes advantage of proximity to Newark’s higher-education hub, including New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers-Newark and Essex County College.

→Mulberry Commons, formerly called Triangle Park, a public park on what are now surface parking lots between Mulberry Street and McCarter Highway that will link Penn Station, the Ironbound neighborhood, Prudential Center, the Gateway complex and downtown. Edison Properties and J+L Companies are behind this amenity, which will be managed by the Newark Downtown District.

→The nightclubs, bars and restaurants that make for a lively after-dark scene have been joined by the Grammy Museum on Mulberry Street in the Prudential Center building, an interactive celebration of Grammy-winning music and artists.

Why Newark?

Advanced high-tech opportunities, including the fastest internet connections in the country.

Convenience: Newark is a transit hub, with rail and bus links to New York City, one of the nation’s busiest airports and a bustling port.

Affordability for young professionals being priced out of New York.

“Perhaps a better question would be, ‘Why not Newark?’” Mayor Ras Baraka said. “Even a cursory review of Newark’s dramatic transformation in the last 20 years shows that our city has become a national leader for economic growth and a world-class center for business.”

“The change in Newark over the past four years has been driven by strong collaborations involving the entire community — community activists, colleges and universities, businesses large and small, labor unions, clergy, traditional public and charter schools, nonprofits, philanthropies, faith communities and more, working to consciously transform the narrative, perception and reality of our city,” he said. “Some of those collaborative efforts include the Safer Newark Council, Newark City of Learning Collaborative, the Newark 2020 jobs program, the Newark Street Teams, Newark Street Academy, Opportunity Youth, Port Employers Council, Police/Clergy Patrols and the Shani Baraka Center for at-risk women.”

Baraka, a former community activist, public school principal and councilman, is in his second term as mayor. He says Newark’s time is now.

“The outline of Newark’s future is coming into view right now,” he said. “We are attracting established technology companies and startups with the fastest broadband fiber network in America and two world-class research universities.”

Technology Is the Turning Point

“Newark’s growing technology prominence was recognized this year when Amazon put Newark on the shortlist for its HQ2, beating out dozens of other cities across the nation,” Baraka said.

Aisha Glover, who recently moved from the city’s Economic Development Corp. to become chief executive officer of the Newark Alliance, has seen the long-awaited Newark renaissance from both the government and the nonprofit perspectives. She sees a policy “trifecta” of City Hall, the corporate community and nonprofits moving the city forward.

“Newark has its charm, its dynamism, its talent, and folks are finally discovering that,” she said. “We can build our case with technology, infrastructure. It’s a perfect time for the city, a perfect storm.”

And, Glover says, the momentum isn’t just coming from new arrivals — existing businesses are anchoring the surge in development. Prudential, which was established in Newark more than 140 years ago, added a 20-story tower on Broad Street and has committed $1 billion to fund improvements in the city; Audible, which has been headquartered downtown for more than 10 years, initially brought 500 employees but may increase its workforce to 1,000 (it has named its conference rooms after famous Newarkers such as Philip Roth and Sarah Vaughn); Panasonic arrived five years ago and recently expanded, bringing Panasonic System Solutions to its North American headquarters on Route 21 overlooking the Passaic River.

Glover sees the city’s high-tech infrastructure — miles of underground fiber-optic cable, buildings full of servers, citywide Wi-Fi — continuing to attract technology startups, seeking the nanoseconds advantage that Newark provides as the most-wired city in the nation.

Newark wants to be an incubator for new high-tech companies.

“We have the room for it, we have the infrastructure for it,” Glover said.

The high-tech potential of Newark attracted VOICE, sponsored by Amazon Alexa, the largest voice-technology conference in the country, which brought more than 1,500 attendees to 175 sessions at NJIT over three days in July 2018. The VOICE conference will take place at NJIT again on July 22-26, 2019.

The city is planning LinkNWK, a network of sidewalk kiosks that will provide free Wi-Fi, charging stations and phone service, information about the city, maps and directions at no cost to taxpayers.

Residential Renaissance to Attract Millennials

Riverfront Square is billed as a “city within a city,” and the prospectus more than makes that case. On 12 acres that is walking distance to the Newark Public Library, the Newark Museum, the expanded campus of Rutgers-Newark, NJPAC and the rest of downtown, Lotus Equity Group and Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) have planned 2 million square feet of class-A office space, 1.4 million square feet of residential space with up to 2,000 apartments, retail, a 240-room hotel with conference space, maker spaces and cultural and arts space and parking for 2,500 cars.

Designed by Michael Green Architecture, a 500,000-square-foot building will be the largest timber building in the United States, combining the warmth and appeal of wood with the sustainability of “green” construction.

Although there will be more than 10 buildings, 5 acres of open space is included in the design.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of PAU, is a leading advocate of urban living, citing economies of scale, which make cities more affordable, lessening of environmental impact due to use of mass transit, and greater social mobility afforded by access to jobs and cultural opportunities.

Young people are moving to cities for the same reasons people did in years gone by, he said.

“They just want an apartment they can afford, and we’re going to supply that,” Chakrabarti said. “The market-rate housing at Riverfront Square will be some of the most affordable housing in the region.”

“In a lot of American cities there was a sense they were dying,” he said. “There was a stigma. A lot of that is a half-century old. Newark has a lot of assets.”

“I think young people are looking for interesting places to live,” Chakrabarti said. “Newark has a lot going on.”

He said the design of Riverfront Square is meant to be welcoming, with the buildings topping off at 15 stories, retail and restaurants on the ground floors, and public space in the heart of the complex. He wants people to walk in and the residents to walk out to the nearby attractions, including NJPAC and the Newark Museum, with its world-class art collection.

“The workers will use the amenities during the day, and the residents will use them at night and on the weekends,” Chakrabarti said.

“The main idea is to create another destination in Newark,” he said. “It will really feel like any great city should.”

Betting Big on Newark

Carl Dranoff, the founder and chief executive officer of Dranoff Properties, is known as a gambler in his business, but he says Newark was “a calculated gamble” when his company was chosen by NJPAC 11 years ago to develop One Theater Square in the shadow of the arts center. The property, which began renting earlier this year, includes 24 affordable units — 10 percent of the total, he proudly points out, which he hopes will go to current Newark residents.

After successful high-rise developments in Camden and Philadelphia, he saw Newark to be “in the vortex” of “cutting-edge” development potential.

“We’re leaders, not followers,” he said. “With the infrastructure there, we saw the fact that 50,000 people worked downtown every day and nobody lived there.

“Being across the street from the NJPAC gave us a huge neighborhood advantage,” Dranoff said, pointing out that his development mimics the architecture of the performing arts center, with a brick facade and mahogany doors on the ground floor, and includes a police substation and a 285-car parking garage.

With the Military Park redevelopment and Whole Foods in the old Hahne’s department store building nearby, “we are a seven-minute walk from Penn Station and 12 minutes from the airport,” he said.

“Newark is a genuine city with a variety of architecture, historic buildings and new buildings,” Dranoff said. “We were able to create a masterpiece there from scratch. We created a trophy building that was much needed.”

He bragged that John Schreiber, the president and chief executive officer of NJPAC, was one of the first to become a resident of One Theater Square.

Schreiber said he loves living there.

“Having worked hard as part of the team that helped make the building happen, moving in a few months ago was a dream come true,” he said. “My commute to work has been reduced to 45 seconds, and my fiancée and I enjoy exploring the neighborhoods of Newark and learning about the city’s rich history.”

NJPAC still has a little more than six acres to develop, with hopes of a hotel and conference center to rise in the near future.

Prudential, one of the corporate sponsors of the Newark Alliance, has backed up its commitment to Newark with more than $1 billion in funding of nonprofits, infrastructure projects and investments.

Among other projects, it funded the renovation of Military Park, modeled after New York’s Bryant Park, with a carousel, a restaurant and a regular schedule of cultural and fitness activities to complement the monuments, including the epic “Wars of America” sculpture by Gutzon Borglum, who also carved Mount Rushmore, and the bust of John F. Kennedy by cubist Jacques Lipchitz that was funded by contributions from Newark schoolchildren after the assassination.

“Prudential has called Newark home since our founding … and the company’s commitment to our hometown has only strengthened over time,” said Shané Harris, vice president of corporate giving for Prudential Financial Inc. “In the past decade alone, we have committed more than $1 billion to support economic and social growth across the city through investments in education, real estate, public safety, and arts and culture to help create a thriving, vibrant city.”

“We believe this diverse community is a model for inclusive growth,” Harris added. “We will continue to partner closely with the City of Newark, nonprofits and fellow anchor institutions to fuel lasting change for generations to come.”

Newark might have missed out on being chosen for Amazon’s second headquarters, but the fact that it was in the running sent a signal that the city is a major player, Glover said.

“It was never just about Amazon,” she said. “It was always about the jobs. If we can attract another corporation or several corporations, we still win.”

Bringing Boom Beyond Downtown

But the renaissance must radiate outward from downtown to include the entire city.

“I am confident we could be a model for equity in the country,” Glover said. “We have the bones, we have the infrastructure, we have a head start.”

That equity would include jobs, affordable housing and neighborhood amenities.

“We have to think holistically about the entire city,” she said. “How do we build an equitable, inclusive city that benefits from growth in all the wards?”

Baraka pointed to “our strongest-in-the-nation inclusionary zoning ordinance,” which now requires developers who build or renovate residential projects of more than 30 units to set aside 20 percent as affordable housing.

“We also require developers receiving tax abatements to partner with smaller minority and women contractors as one way to build wealth in our communities,” the mayor said.

“We encourage renters to become homeowners through low-interest loans, reduced-cost purchases of city-owned housing and workshops in negotiating the process of buying and maintaining a home,” he said. “We are about to help those facing eviction keep their homes through a right-to-counsel initiative, which will provide legal representation to low-income people about to be evicted, often illegally.”

The Newark Community Economic Development Corp. addresses the need for development beyond downtown: a new ShopRite supermarket on Springfield Avenue in what had been a “food desert”; affordable housing and gallery space for artists on Clinton Avenue; small residential buildings throughout the Ironbound neighborhood, which old-time Newarkers call “Down Neck.”

“The unemployment rate is decreasing every year; overall crime is down to its lowest level in 50 years and still falling,” Baraka said. “We went from layoffs in the police department and losing officers annually to hiring hundreds of officers annually. More Newark students are graduating from high school. As our graduation rate has increased, more are being accepted into Rutgers-Newark to add to the 50,000 or so college students on our streets any given day.”

Baraka invited a cross-section of Newark’s leaders in 2018 to develop “Newark Forward,” a four-year plan for equitable growth that includes targeting development in specific corridors of each ward, strengthening of procurement to include minority and female-owned companies, stabilizing and preserving existing affordable housing, creating a land bank to promote development of vacant and underused tracts, developing green spaces in every neighborhood, and launching a literacy initiative, among other programs.

“What will make Newark stronger will be its people – a diverse population of united people, who love their city, are proud of its present, and excited to build its future,” the mayor said. “That is what will sustain Newark’s growth.”