How Jersey City’s skyline will look from Manhattan when the 99 Hudson condominium tower is completed. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Growing city

With a population of more than 262,000, Jersey City is on pace to surpass Newark (population 277,000) as the Garden State’s largest city, possibly by the end of 2016.

Jersey City Councilwoman Candice Osborne said 99 Hudson will help create a skyline to rival the one across the Hudson River. It will show Manhattanites that “our skyline’s pretty cool, too”, Osborne said.

If built today, 99 Hudson would be the sixth tallest residential/mixed-use building in the US, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a group considered the international arbiter of skyscrapers. The new building would eclipse 900 North Michigan Avenue, a mixed-use tower in Chicago that is 869 feet tall.

The Jersey City development is part of a broader effort by Fulop’s administration to transform the city into the state’s leading job creator and attract hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to the region.

Fulop, who will turn 39 later this month, is an emerging star in New Jersey politics and has been mentioned regularly as a potential gubernatorial candidate for the Democrats.

The former trader at Goldman Sachs left the business world and joined the US Marine Corps after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He eventually was stationed in Iraq. After his tour of duty, he returned to the US and worked in financial services again before entering politics.

The city he manages is in the midst of a frenzied construction boom and has the most homebuilding permits of any New Jersey municipality. Through November, Jersey City had approved 2,595 building permits, almost 10 percent of the 28,114 in the state, according to the NJ Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Fulop told NorthJersey.com that there are almost 7,000 housing units being built in the city, and almost 8,000 have been completed since he took office in 2013.

The 99 Hudson project is the first major Chinese-backed development in Jersey City, according to Fulop. However, China Construction America, which is based in Jersey City and is a sister company of China Overseas America, has multimillion-dollar contracts to rebuild parts of the 83-year-old Pulaski Skyway, a four-lane causeway that carries routes 1 and 9 between Jersey City and Newark.

“This is a transformative project,” Fulop told Politickernj.com. “It is symbolic of our continued growth as a world-class metropolis. The fact is, more people than ever want to call Jersey City home, and more businesses than ever want to invest here.”

Jersey City also has one of Wall Street’s former titans investing in a business venture, albeit one who was involved in the financial crisis of 2008.

Former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld and his Chinese business partner announced on Jan 28 that they’ve chosen a Jersey City-based stock exchange as their first step toward helping Chinese small- and medium-sized companies (SMEs) list their shares in the United States. Fuld’s financial advisory firm, Matrix Advisors in New York, and Suzhou Industrial Park Kaida Venture Capital co-invested in the National Stock Exchange.

Wang Yulong, chairman of Suzhou Industrial Park Kaida Venture Capital, said that the China Securities Regulatory Commission has loosened its requirements for Chinese SMEs to list on foreign stock exchanges. It is their primary goal to create a “credible platform” for that purpose, he said.

In November 2014, the two men jointly announced the partnership in Beijing.