According to Mayor James Fife, Harrison, NJ, once held the state record for the most liquor licenses issued in a square mile. Today Harrison seems to be gunning for the title in a new category — building permits.

There’s a construction boom underway in this town, tucked into a bend of the Passaic River across from Newark.

Roughly 8,000 new residential units are slated to come to market in Harrison over the next decade, Fife says — this in a city with a population of just under 14,000. Add to that the opening four years ago of Red Bull Arena here — a 25,000-capacity stadium that serves as the home of Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls — plus a planned $256 million modernization of the Harrison PATH station, and you have a town on the make.

And what else accounts for its soaring appeal? As the old real estate saw would have it, location, location, location.

“Location is first and foremost,” says Michael Barry, president of Ironstate Development, which, with The Pegasus Group, is currently constructing their multi-phase, mixed-use Harrison Station development next to the Harrison PATH station.

Thus far, the partners have completed a 275-unit rental building — with studios from $1,460, one-bedrooms from $1,820, two-bedrooms from $2,155 — and are currently putting up a 329-unit rental building scheduled to open next year. They also last month opened a 138-room Element by Westin hotel as part of the project. When completed, the Harrison Station complex will comprise seven buildings, 2,250 residences and 80,000 square feet of retail space.

“Harrison is located on the PATH train, and that gives you direct access to Jersey City, New York City and Newark,” Barry says. “So essentially from the [town’s] redevelopment area, you’re less than five minutes into Newark, about a 10- to 12-minute ride into Jersey City, and about a 20-minute ride into New York City.”

Comparatively low prices — for developers and renters both — are also a key attraction, says Michael Sommer, managing director at Advance Realty, whose Riverbend District project will bring to Harrison around 2,100 rental units, along with a hotel and more than 100,000 square feet of retail.

“The basis on the land is much lower [than in Jersey City and New York City], and therefore we’re able to bring product online at a different price point,” he notes.

Sommer says monthly rents at Riverbend will be in the mid- to high-$2-per-square-foot range — or around $2,500 a month for a 1,000-square-foot unit. Jersey City and Hoboken, meanwhile, average around $3 per square foot, while Manhattan and Brooklyn can reach into the $6 range, he notes.

Low prices and proximity to New York City were keys for Harrison resident Archana Sood, who moved to the city in May. An operations officer with the United Nations’ UNAIDS organization, Sood was transferred this year to the US from Nigeria and needed a place convenient to UN headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

When she started her apartment search, Jersey City’s Newport district topped her list of potential neighborhoods, but, put off by the area’s high rents and what she found to be older and, in some cases, poorly kept buildings, she turned her sights to Harrison.

Ultimately, she settled on a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Harrison Station, where, she notes, she’s as close to the PATH station as she could possibly be.

“It’s exactly 20 minutes from the station to World Trade Center, and then I can take the subway to Grand Central,” she says.

For Elaine Lau, who, with her husband, Jonathan Proman, and daughter Violet, moved to a one-bedroom in Harrison Station in 2011, the development’s amenities were a deciding factor.

“It has a concierge, a gym — and the pool is a huge plus,” she says, adding, “for the same price in Brooklyn or Queens we would have gotten a much older building.”

To an extent, Harrison’s boom is due to overflow from Jersey City’s ongoing orgy of development. The town sits one PATH stop from Jersey City’s Journal Square station, around which some 33 developments are currently in the works, including KRE Groups three-tower, 2.4-million-square-foot Journal Squared complex.

City planning has also played a significant role. Back in the mid-1990s, Harrison began to convert former industrial areas to residential use, leading to a series of waterfront redevelopment plans — the most recent issued in 2012. The entire effort ultimately encompassed some 275 acres of land along the Passaic River, or more than 30 percent of the town’s total land area. The city, Fife says, has used PILOT (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) programs to incentivize builders to clean and prepare these industrial properties for residential conversion and development.

“I think Harrison years ago recognized the very valuable asset they have in the PATH train, and like any other town they wanted to see the town blossom and grow — and so they designated a very large area around the train and what is now Red Bull Stadium a redevelopment area,” says Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of developer BNE. The firm completed a 176-unit condo project, River Park at Harrison, in 2007, and last month opened a 141-unit rental building, Water’s Edge, with studios from $1,495, one-bedrooms from $1,795 and two-bedrooms from $2,205.

Carl Lordi, a stationary engineer at Newark’s Penn Station, moved to a one-bedroom in the development shortly after it opened after watching it rise throughout the previous months.

“I saw the construction going on over the winter, and I was curious what was going to be built,” he says. “I was interested in a brand-new apartment, and so I decided to move in.”

Fans of new construction like Lordi have plenty to look forward to. In addition to the new Ironstate, Advance and BNE projects, Russo Development’s Vermella Harrison will open next year with 399 rentals (pricing to be determined). Heller Urban Renewal also has a project underway: Named Harrison Station (like the Ironstate-Pegasus project), the development will consist of 747 rental units and around 30,000 square feet of retail space.

“You can see in the next five to six years the development is going to come up very fast,” Sood says. “In another five years, this place is going to be big.”