Abstract
Over the past 150 years, New Jersey has experienced two major economic transformations, each time successfully reinventing itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the state’s once-dominant agricultural economy had become a powerful technology-driven, urban-manufacturing economy. At the end of the twentieth century, the state’s manufacturing economy had become a powerful technology-driven, knowledge-based, suburban service economy. Now, in a vast temporal telescoping, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the state faces a third transformation. However, this time, in a few short years, the underlying foundations of the second transformation had dramatically weakened. In particular, the hugely successful core geographic model of the recent past—the office-based suburban growth corridor—was no longer the state-of-the-art economic configuration. Yet, the critical mass of the state’s office capital stock remains tied to that spatial format. Such massive fixed investments can be neither quickly nor easily jettisoned. It may now be necessary to reinvent New Jersey for a third time—transforming, restructuring, and reimagining its suburban office ecosystems to adjust to the new employment and business dynamics that are emerging. Failure to do this is likely to incur high costs for the future of the state’s economy.