“We have friends here who are Muslim, Hispanic, you name it,” said Mr. Chuon, a 38-year-old online marketer. “There’s a Colombian guy on one side of me, a Polish lady on the other. Everyone’s trying to just make a living and better themselves. I tell my friends and family in New York, ‘You’ve got to check out this place.’”

What You’ll Find

Wrapping like a horseshoe around Passaic, Clifton is adjacent to 10 other municipalities, including struggling Paterson, in Passaic County, and Montclair, Bloomfield and Nutley in Essex County. The city, which takes up five ZIP codes, is defined by its distinct neighborhoods, most with their own commercial districts, public elementary schools and parks. (Old-timers tend to say they’re from Athenia or Allwood or Botany Village rather than Clifton.)

What is called downtown Clifton is Main Avenue. Along this low-rise thoroughfare stretching between the Paterson and Passaic borders are Peruvian restaurants, hookah stores, Turkish markets — even a pierogi maker.

Among the neighborhoods, Allwood is known for its district of Tudor-style homes; Albion, in the shadow of the Garret Mountain Reservation, has street after street of tidy Cape Cods; Clifton Center, which includes Main Avenue, abounds with older, multifamily colonials on narrow lots. The most expensive properties are in Montclair Heights and Rosemawr.

Condominiums and rentals are in ample supply. Cambridge Crossings, a 15-year-old gated townhouse community on a former industrial tract, has several hundred homes, some for ages 55 and older. Country Club Towers, next to the Upper Montclair Country Club, has 476 rental apartments in a pair of 1960s-era high-rises.

Clifton’s largest development project in years is in the early stages. A medical school affiliated with Seton Hall University and Hackensack Meridian Health is expected to begin operating later this year at the former headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Roche, once Clifton’s largest taxpayer. The 116-acre site on Route 3, partly in Nutley, is being reimagined as a life sciences campus consisting of the medical school and ancillary businesses, including a hotel. New construction is planned for the Clifton portion. “Five years from now, we hope to be talking about hundreds of new jobs,” Mayor James Anzaldi said.