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Newark has been an enigma in the metro New York – New Jersey region. The city is located right next to the largest urban region in the country, has a major international airport at its door, and a state that would love to see it rejuvinated.

But it languishes. Race riots decimated the city in 1967 and for some reason it could never come back. You would figure that parts of the city would have issues, but a whole city? The Real Estate Journal goes into why Newark has remained in such bad shape, but they have not left alone a major part of the equation. Newark’s political structure has been rife with corruption and political shenanigans that have scared any major business from relocating to the city. Until that changes, the city will have a hard time coming back.

Newark, which began as an industrial port city, evolved in the first half of the twentieth century into a commercial hub with a strong insurance sector; Prudential Financial Inc. still has its headquarters in the city. It boasted cosmopolitan retail offerings on Broad Street, and world-class architecture, as well as the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed Branch Brook Park.

But perhaps more than some other older industrial cities, Newark fell into a decline that many say was accelerated by the race riots of 1967. There are some healthy corridors of real estate, such as the Ironbound neighborhood and the high-end office buildings near the Penn Station train hub, an area that commands pricier asking rents than the northern New Jersey average. But vacant lots still dot the city, and the commercial real-estate market has struggled to make a broad-based recovery from the crime and urban blight of recent decades. White flight to the suburbs helped shrink the city’s population by about one-quarter to 273,546 in 2000 from 1960, and last year 22% of Newark’s families were still living below the poverty level, more than double the national average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the 2005 American Community Survey.

Some say the picture may be changing, thanks in part to the city’s affordability in comparison to the glitzier Big Apple, a national trend toward urban living and an increasing roster of large capital projects. All have helped to attract about 7,000 new residents since 2000, reversing a decades-long slide and increasing the confidence of a handful of real-estate investors. “When I first started teaching, I focused on the reasons why a truly great and dynamic and heterogeneous city could be unraveled so quickly,” says Rutgers University History Professor Clement Alexander Price. “Over the last five years the focus has been what went wrong and why the city now seems to be recovering.”

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