THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By Theresa Agovino
Dec. 15, 2015 6:03 p.m. ET
Over three decades, the LeFrak family has moved mountains of dirt to transform a 300-acre derelict rail yard on New Jersey’s Hudson River waterfront into a sprawling waterfront community of apartment towers, stores and office buildings.
For its latest project it had to import 50,000 tons of dirt to prepare LeFrak’s latest Jersey City site for development on a peninsula that juts into the river. LeFrak, which just broke ground on the 43-story rental apartment project, hopes demand will be strong for the units, which will have water views in three directions.
But LeFrak needed to upgrade the site to comply with regulations passed after superstorm Sandy, which devastated Newport—the LeFrak’s name for their sprawling Jersey City community—and many other waterfront areas in the New York region three years ago.
Federal regulations passed after Sandy required LeFrak to push the first floor of the building up to about 13 feet from roughly 10.6 feet, according to Jamie LeFrak, principal and vice chairman of his family company. He said the price of the dirt increased the building’s cost by roughly 2%.
“Clean dirt is expensive,” he said.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/lefrak-r...ent-1450220615