What are the technical issues with building densely around Secaucus Junction? (condos, luxury)

[OyCrumbler]

Secaucus Junction seems to be a very important transit hub for Northern New Jersey and the Tri-State area since so many New Jersey Transit trains, Metro-North trains, and buses service the station.

I understand the Meadowlands should be preserved for various reasons including as a mitigation measure for flooding and I'm not advocating building over the parts currently existing. However, there seems to be a lot of parking lots and low-slung buildings within a half mile radius and it seems like these parts would make great sense in terms of doing much more high-density development both for residential and commercial usage. With that, a transportation hub like Secaucus Junction can then be leveraged as a much stronger commercial hub.

Is there a large host of strong technical reasons against this?

[jaymoney]

The ground is very mixed, but mostly the bedrock is harder to find for building foundations. Buildings are lower and spread the weight out horizontally to avoid literally sinking into the marshland.

Putting up a high rise and floating the foundation simply makes it too expensive for the most part, it's easier and less expensive to build such buildings not very far away. So it's less a host of reasons and just the main one: cost.

[lammius]

There was a proposal to build skyscrapers attached to the Secaucus Jct station when it first opened, but those plans were abandoned, probably due to the reasons jaymoney mentioned.

[jaymoney]

They could do it near Snake Hill, but that land's been turned into a park and the surrounded by condos, so I doubt they're going to find a similar chunk of rock large enough. The condos are also probably depressing the market right now as well, so it's hard to build luxury condos in those conditions.

This is an interesting study, from back i the 50's. But even then there are sections of the maps marked "Bedrock?" indicating that they don't even know how far down it goes. Most of the borings seem to indicate that it's gravel, clay, and sand for at least the first hundred feet or so, and then it's on to shale.
http://www.state.nj.us/dep/njgs/pric...port/gsr01.pdf