Data sources
Where the facts come from
Every fact on a building page links to the record it came from. This page says what those records are, what each one is good for, and where each one lets you down.
What we use
Jersey City's own mapping service
The city publishes parcels, address points, zoning, redevelopment plan areas, historic districts and flood areas, with the state assessment record attached. It is where most of the hard numbers on this site come from: year built, number of floors, number of homes.
Current to February 2026. We ask it only for the fields we need, it will also return owners' names, and we do not want them.
New Jersey assessment records
The state's own tax assessment list. The only official source for floor area, a four-year assessment history, and condominium sale prices unit by unit.
Stamped current to 1 October 2026.
FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer
Both flood maps: the 2006 one in force, and the 2015 draft that has not been adopted. We read them against each building's land parcel rather than a single point, because a point in the middle of a building can say "no risk" while the ground at the edge of the same parcel is in a flood zone. More on the two maps.
PATH, light rail and ferry locations
Station positions come from the Port Authority's own data, cross-checked against the state's and OpenStreetMap, all three agree within about 50 feet for PATH. Walking times are routed along real streets.
Ferry terminals are the weak link. The federal dataset is from 2019 and lists terminals downtown that no longer run a scheduled service. We do not use it for the ferry. Walking times are measured to Paulus Hook, the only working terminal in this area, and to Hoboken Terminal just outside it.
Commuting times
The door-to-platform figure on each building page is two measured numbers added together: the routed walk to the station, and the scheduled run time between that station and the destination in PATH's published timetable. The station chosen is whichever gets you there soonest, which is not always the nearest, because Exchange Place has no Midtown train at all.
The timetable is the Port Authority's own data file, published 22 May 2025. Its calendar ran out on 1 June 2026 and we cannot find a newer machine-readable one, so the page says which timetable the numbers come from rather than claiming they are this week's. Waiting on the platform is not in the total, on purpose: the frequency is shown beside it so a reader can add their own. What the number leaves out.
Schools
The school an address is zoned to comes from Jersey City's own attendance zone file, revised March 2025. The district presents it as a map. It is a table, one row per street and house number range, and we read it straight out of the file rather than by eye. Where it gives two answers for a year group, or none, the page says so instead of choosing.
Which schools exist, which grades each takes and whether it is still open come from the federal school directory for 2024-25. Each school's location is checked against New Jersey's school location file and Jersey City's address record, and used only where two of the three agree, within 500 feet. Every school name links to the state's own report card. Look up any Jersey City address.
What is being built nearby
Jersey City keeps its development pipeline as a map layer: every project, its status, its approved height and story count, how many homes it will hold and the year it was approved. We read it live and show what is within 800 feet of each building, about two blocks, measured to the nearest edge of the project's own site rather than between center points.
Only two statuses appear: under construction and approved. Completed projects are buildings, and this site already describes them. An approval is a permission and not a promise, so the page says the year it was granted and says plainly that some are never built. Where a project is the building itself, it is left out.
OpenStreetMap
Building names, the coverage border, and the map on the home page.
Rent
The Census Bureau's median gross rent for the census tract a building stands in, from the American Community Survey, with the margin of error beside it and split by the number of bedrooms. HUD's Fair Market Rent for Hudson County sits under it, labeled as what a housing voucher pays rather than what a landlord asks.
No public record says what an individual building charges, and the sites that claim to are listing sites, which this site does not use. So the figure on a building page is the area's and the page says so: it is the middle rent across every rental home in that tract, mixing a tower finished last year with a walk-up built in 1920, it is a five-year estimate so it lags, and it is not that building. Nothing is modeled or scaled down to one address. Where the Census publishes no figure for a tract, the page says that rather than borrowing the tract next door.
What we refuse to use
Apartment listing sites
No Zillow, StreetEasy, Apartments.com, Redfin, Trulia or RentCafe. Not for rents, not for prices, not for unit counts, not even to confirm an address. They are marketing, their numbers are unsourced, and their terms do not allow it.
This costs us. The number of homes in some older condo buildings genuinely only appears on listing sites, so we leave those blank rather than launder the figure through somewhere else.
311 complaints and code enforcement records
Both are public, and we will not touch either. They contain residents' names, apartment numbers, phone numbers and, in one record we looked at, a child. A guide to buildings does not need to republish that about the people living in them.
They would also be unfair. A building where people report problems looks worse than one where nobody bothers, and that is not the same as being worse.
School ratings
No Niche, no GreatSchools, no star counts or letter grades. A school rating is an opinion wearing a number's clothes, it moves house prices, and the sites that sell them do not let you reuse them anyway. New Jersey publishes a full report for every school, one a year, and we read those: results on the state assessments, growth, absenteeism and graduation rates, year by year.
Each school also shows the state's own score out of 100 and where that sits against every school in New Jersey. That is the state's number, not a rating of ours. We publish it because the state prints the weight on every part of it, so the whole figure can be taken apart on the page, and we rebuild it from its own parts before printing it. Nothing about family income goes into it. We have not built a score of our own and we will not.
One correction worth making here, because this page used to say otherwise: these reports do not carry class sizes. They have not for years. What the school pages show is pupils for every teacher, from the federal directory, which counts every teacher in the building rather than the children in one room.
We also do not use the federal attendance boundary files. They were last collected for 2015-16 and marked research only, and Jersey City redrew its zones in 2025. Ten year old boundaries would be worse than none.
Owners' names
We can see who owns every home in every building. We do not publish it. For a condominium the owner is usually a resident, and New Jersey law protects the home addresses of some people specifically. We stay at building level.
What the records cannot tell you
No public record says how many lots make up one building, we have to work that out. Rental buildings have no sale prices at all, because they change hands as companies rather than as property. And nothing in any of this tells you whether the elevators work.
That last part is why every building page asks the people who live there.