A $130 million construction loan is clearing the way for one of the biggest residential projects to hit Newark's Ironbound section in years — a seven-story, 501-unit building at 412-426 Ferry St. that will come with its own grocery store built into the ground floor. Demolition on the site is already finished, and the developers expect the building, known as Ballantine Phase II, to be ready in the fourth quarter of 2028.
The loan comes from PCCP, a real estate finance and investment firm, and goes to a joint venture between Bogopa Enterprises and Shorewood Real Estate Group, according to ROI-NJ. Of the 501 units planned, 400 will rent at market rate and 101 will be set aside as affordable housing. PCCP has managed, raised or invested more than $50.4 billion in capital since its founding in 1998, per the same report.
A Grocery Store Built Into the Building
The project's defining feature may be retail rather than residential: a 57,500-square-foot Food Bazaar will anchor the ground floor. Food Bazaar is operated by Bogopa Enterprises, a family-owned company founded in 1988 that now runs more than 30 locations across the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut metro areas specializing in international and mainstream groceries, the outlet reports.
Beyond groceries, the building is being designed with amenities aimed squarely at young renters — a 24/7 concierge, a fitness center with a yoga studio, two courtyards, a pool, a basketball court, co-working space and bike storage. Units will range from studios up through three-bedroom layouts, and the development will include 300 parking spaces, according to the report.
Why PCCP Says It Made the Bet
PJ Finley, a vice president with PCCP, said the firm was glad to lend on a grocery-anchored development in what he called a high-growth, high-barrier-to-entry Newark neighborhood, per ROI-NJ's reporting. Finley pointed to the numbers behind that confidence: the Ironbound has held roughly a 3% vacancy rate over the past decade even as it packs about 55,000 residents into just four square miles. He added that he expects continued demand from young people looking for Manhattan-adjacent housing at a lower price point than the city across the river.
That tight vacancy rate lines up with how little new high-end housing the neighborhood has actually seen. Only 431 Class A multifamily units have been built in the Ironbound over the past ten years — and more than half of those, 280 units, came from Ballantine Phase I, the Shorewood-developed property sitting right next door that delivered in April 2025 and is now stabilized, the outlet notes.
Part of a Larger Supermarket-Housing Playbook
Ballantine Phase II isn't an isolated bet for either partner. Shorewood has developed 1.5 million square feet of construction and adaptive reuse projects to date, and its current pipeline includes more than 1,000 residential units and 305,000 square feet of supermarket space either under construction or in pre-development, according to ROI-NJ. The firm has leaned on the grocery-anchored model elsewhere, too — its 1100 Myrtle Avenue development in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood pairs 233 units with a 36,000-square-foot Food Bazaar, according to Shorewood Real Estate Group's project listings.
PCCP, meanwhile, has used a nearly identical structure outside New Jersey. The firm provided an equivalent $130 million senior loan for The 360, a 304-unit mixed-use project in the South Bronx that also includes a Food Bazaar store, this one sized at 47,892 square feet, as reported by citybiz. That Bronx project is expected to finish in spring 2028, a few months ahead of the Ferry Street building.
Shorewood also has another Newark project in motion. In partnership with Bridge Investment Group, the firm announced an $88 million, six-story mixed-use building at 80 Freeman Street on the site of the former Ballantine Brewery, planned to include 280 residential units, 2,600 square feet of retail space and 125 below-grade parking spaces, according to Real Estate Weekly. Separately, another developer has proposed a five-story building with 125 apartments and about 1,100 square feet of retail space elsewhere in the Ironbound, per Jersey Digs.
Together, the projects point to a wave of grocery-anchored housing bets landing in one of Newark's most densely populated, supply-constrained neighborhoods — with Ballantine Phase II, set to rise right beside its already-stabilized predecessor, as the largest of the bunch.
