Model of urban future: Jersey City?

Once, this was a city of browns and grays. Railroads owned a third of the land, and trains rumbled night and day to the cacophonous riverfront. Factories belched fumes and leaked chemicals. "Nobody cared," says Bob Leach, born here in 1937. "Smoke meant jobs."

And those were the good years. Then, in the 1960s, the railroads went broke. Rail yards were abandoned, piers rotted, factories closed. In the 1970s alone, the city lost 14% of its population and about 9% of its jobs.

Now Jersey City has come back as its own antithesis: clean, green and growing — an example, urban planners say, of how the nation can accommodate some of the additional 100 million Americans expected by 2040 without paving over every farm, forest and meadow.

Jersey City, a model of smart growth? Even Robert Cotter, the city's planning director, says he was surprised by the notion. But because so many people here live in apartments or attached houses located near shops, offices and mass transit, they require less land, gasoline, heating oil, water, sewer pipe and other finite resources.

Smart Growth America, an advocacy group that ranks the largest metro areas by sprawl, says Jersey City is the second "least sprawling," trailing only New York City.

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