Bob Hartsgrove knows Keansburg is no Asbury Park or Long Branch, where beachfront condos sell for millions to folks not even around on weekdays. It’s not there yet, anyway.

“This is a blue-collar town, and you’ve got to embrace that,” said Hartsgrove, a 56-year-old retired dock builder, who was having a walk on Main Street, where even Borough Hall is a hand-me-down, a gift to the municipality from the bank that used to occupy it.

“Be proud of what it is,” Hartsgrove said of Keansburg. “It’s a nice town with great neighborhoods. Be proud of that.”

He was addressing borough officials now trying to improve Keansburg’s fortunes and its image.

With at least one towering success in the past year, local officials are trying to take advantage of Keansburg’s own Monmouth County beachfront, this one on Raritan Bay, with calmer surf than the ocean’s and a nocturnal view of New York City to the north that outshines the mere moon and stars visible to the east from the rapidly developing Shore towns on the Atlantic Ocean side of Sandy Hook.

To capitalize on that natural and man-made beauty, officials are weighing whether to designate a 15-acre neighborhood along the bayfront a “non-condemnation area in need of redevelopment,” meaning the borough would refrain from invoking its power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire properties for redevelopment.

The planning board had been scheduled to hear a presentation of a redevelopment study of the area Monday night by the borough’s engineering firm, T&M Associates of Middletown, followed by a vote to recommend that the Borough Council make the designation. However, a representative of T&M, Robert Yuro, said late Monday morning that the presentation and the vote had been postponed until the planning board’s March 9 meeting. Yuro said he did not know the reason for the postponement.

A link to the study is posted on the borough website.

Rather than bulldozing whole blocks and starting from scratch, the study recommends building on the borough’s history as a tourist destination, by encouraging restaurants, entertainment venues and other uses that piggyback on existing attractions like Keansburg Amusement Park and Runaway Rapids Waterpark.

Bob Hartsgrove, a 56-year-old Keansburg resident and retired dockworker, said the borough should be proud of its blue-collar roots.Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media.com

At the same time, the mile-square borough also wants to encourage more residential development, along with year-round businesses that would help create a more stable economy and serve new and existing residents.

Most of the proposed redevelopment area is occupied by small summer cottages long since converted to year-round residences, a common form of housing in the borough, which began as a resort catering largely to New Yorkers ferried across the bay. Keansburg lost much of its luster over time, officials said, after construction of the Garden State Parkway in the middle of the last century allowed tourists and commuters to bypass the borough for ocean-front destinations and roomy subdivisions.

That decline is evident today in Keansburg’s relative poverty compared to its largely prosperous Monmouth County neighbors. The borough’s 2018 median family income of $46,725 was less than half of the county’s overall, while Keansburg had a poverty rate of 25%, versus 6.7% for all of Monmouth, according to Census data.

Keansburg’s population has also been shrinking in recent decades, after nearly a century of steady growth. It started at 1,321 for its first Census in 1920, three years after incorporating, peaking at 11,069 in 1990, before falling to an estimated 9,719 in 2018.

Keansburg’s public school system is one of the state’s 31 former so-called Abbot Districts, cash-strapped systems whose building projects are funded by the New Jersey Schools Development Authority.

Officials said the main targets for redevelopment of the area would be the most conspicuous ones: a dozen or so vacant lots scattered throughout the waterfront neighborhood, along with a few unoccupied and in some cases dilapidated residential and commercial buildings.

Borough officials say they aren’t trying to make Keansburg into something it’s not, just something it could be: a more thriving, stable community, with a more positive image in the eyes of people from outside. So apart from encouraging growth of its entertainment sector, that also means developing a more year-round economy, including businesses that serve existing residents and encourage residential growth.

While the shuttered arcades and other seasonal businesses at the north end of Carr Avenue aren’t abandoned or on the verge of collapse, they are by no means inviting. Hunkered down for the winter like dancing bears in hibernation, they send a message that no one is welcome in that part of town, at least not 'til summer comes.

“We definitely want a change,” said Borough Manager Raymond O’Hare, a retired Keansburg police chief. “There is a history of Keansburg, years ago, as a honky-tonk town, a bar on every corner. And we’ve kind of gotten away from that. We’ve hired a PR firm, a branding firm, to give Keansburg a different image now that we want to show we’re moving ahead.”

“Sometimes people hear you and they’re, ‘Oh, you’re from Keansburg,’ in a negative tone,” O’Hare added. "And we’re trying to show people that’s not true, that’s not what Keansburg’s about.”

A house in Keansburg that sits on blocks after having been damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 is pictured in a redevelopment study.T&M Associates

So just what is Keansburg about?

“It’s a good place to live,” O’Hare said. “We have brand new schools, a brand new police station. There’s brand new development taking place. It’s on the upswing. It’s rising.”

And, said Yuro, the engineering firm’s representative, “There’s a mile of beach on the bay.”

One of the state’s few free beaches, O’Hare added.

Yuro and O’Hare were among four borough officials, along with Councilwoman Judy Ferraro and Construction Official Edward Striedl, who met a reporter in the manager’s office eager to put Keansburg’s best foot forward.

“People are not afraid to help one another,” said Striedl, a retired Keansburg Police captain, prompting his old chief to jump in with a story about Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“More than half of our town — my house, I lost mine for about 7 months — was affected by Sandy," O’Hare said. "We had an evacuation to the Bolger School. Just about everybody in town that wasn’t directly affected by the storm was down there helping, handing out food, collecting things, doing things. I loved just sitting back and watching everybody. It’s like a family. We have disagreements, we argue and fight. But when there’s a particular need in the community, everybody forgets their petty B.S. on the side and they just pull together and help pick themselves up.”

It was a family atmosphere around Boro Hall that day. A bunch of employees took a break to sing happy birthday to Keansburg’s recreation director, Michele DeRoche Hoff, including her husband, Keansburg Code Enforcement Official Christopher Hoff, whose brother, George Hoff, is a longtime councilman.

O’Hare said there was no nepotism involved, noting the couple met only after both were working for the borough, while insisting that he has sole hiring authority, with no council input, and that he hired Christopher Hoff, a disabled Afghan War veteran, initially based on a referral by a veterans organization, and then on Hoff’s stellar job performance.

The illustrated photograph deliniates the 15-acre neighborhood along the Raritan Bay waterfront that may be designated a "non-condemnation area in need of redevelopment." Keansburg Amusement Park and Runaway Rapids Waterpark are visible at the top and upper left of the picture, with the beach and bay just out of view.T&M Associates

The year-round businesses in the area include Kazia Rae’s on Carr Avenue, which serves up subtly sophisticated burgers and cheesesteaks conjured by chef Bryan Morales, whose partner in the business is Cliff Moore, the borough’s economic community development coordinator. Morales said he would like to see more music venues, which would generate pre- and post-show diners and attract visitors to the area all year long.

“Except for the seasonal folks, no one comes to this end of town,” said Morales, who also lives in the borough. “If we’re going the Asbury route, you might as well have a music scene in Keansburg.”

Towering above Keansburg’s waterfront stands the 9-story Cove on the Bay apartment complex, built at a cost of $74 million just across Beachway Avenue from the amusement park and the beach. Built under a previous redevelopment plan for a smaller, adjacent area, the Cove on the Bay was hailed by borough officials as proof of Keansburg’s development potential as well as a source of affordable housing, with 45% of its 186 apartments reserved for people with low and moderate incomes.

The Cove began leasing in January 2019, with rental units ranging from one-bedroom apartments starting at $1,500 a month to penthouse duplexes for $3,600, said Joseph Portelli, the vice president of real estate for RPM Development Group, the Cove’s Montclair-based developer. Portelli said all but 10 of the apartments are leased and occupied, with ground-floor retail space still being finished.

Typical of projects in redevelopment areas, the Cove was granted a 30-year tax abatement with payments that gradually escalate to the level of standard taxation, an inducement intended to make the project economically feasible.

“Every project has risk, especially when it’s in an untested market or a market that hasn’t had a lot of activity recently,” Portelli said. “But I remember a night where we had a meeting with (former) Chief O’Hare and some other borough officials, and we walked up to the dune and we saw the ‘billion-dollar view,’ as they described it. And we felt that it was worth taking that risk.”

The Cove on the Bay, a 186-unit rental complex in Keansburg, with only 10 vacancies remaining since leasing began last year. The building is seen from atop a dune that runs the length of the mile-long beach, intended to protect the borough from storm surges. Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.comSteve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Portelli said he would like to see year-round retail and service businesses encouraged in the new redevelopment area, so his tenants won’t have to travel as far for them. He also welcomed additional residential development and said his company hoped to be part of it.

By labeling the neighborhood a “non-condemnation area in need of redevelopment,” Keansburg has officially signaled that it does not intend to invoke its power of eminent domain to condemn and acquire properties it wants to redevelop, particularly occupied homes and businesses.

Rather, officials said the borough will focus on vacant or abandoned properties, through voluntary purchase agreements between the property owner and the borough or designated developer, once a plan is drafted, development proposals are submitted and an official developer is designated for the area.

“It’s really a political decision that the municipality makes whether they want eminent domain or not, and the truth of the matter is, there’s a lot of towns that want to do redevelopment, but they don’t want to get involved in condemnation,” said Peter Wegener, a veteran property rights lawyer in Monmouth County. “There’s been some negative fallout from the use of eminent domain.”

The “non-condemnation area” label does have legal and practical significance, allowing owners to wait to contest a redevelopment plan until after their property has been singled out for condemnation, rather than having to act within a certain time frame after the entire area has been deemed in need of redevelopment, Wegener said.

Even so, condemnation will still be a last resort available to the borough — with the owner compensated at fair market value — in case a refusal to sell threatens the redevelopment plan or a key element of it, both Wegener and Hale said.

“The fact that they don’t put it in the notice doesn’t mean that they couldn’t ultimately condemn the property,” Wegener said.

The 'billion-dollar view,' as some call it, looking north from Keansburg across Raritan Bay toward (l-r) Staten Island, Manhattan, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and Brooklyn. Steve Strunsky | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

NOTE: This article was updated to include the postponement until March 9 of a redevelopment study presentation and a vote by the Keansburg Planning Board on whether to recommend that the borough council declare the area to be in need of redevelopment.

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips.

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