In 1986 Samuel J. LeFrak and the shopping-mall developer Melvin Simon broke ground on 600 acres of old rail yards on the Jersey City waterfront. Inside Philanthropy reports that the cost of building Newport had reached $10 billion by 2004. Today the development has 7,500 homes, 8 million square feet of offices and 25,000 workers, and nearly two dozen more sites are still to come. Few American families have built something closer to a city of their own.
Newport’s 40th year has brought three things at once for the LeFrak Organization: a large new charitable commitment, a visible handover to a new generation, and a tenants’ campaign that has reached City Hall. They are connected, and the family’s fourth generation will have to manage all three.
The next generation, and a non-family president
Richard LeFrak has run the company since 2003. In February 2025 he did something the firm had never done in its 120-year history: he brought someone from outside the family into the Office of the Chairman. Adam Silfen, a Goldman Sachs alumnus who first joined LeFrak in 2003, became president and chief operating officer. He serves alongside Richard and the two vice chairmen, Richard’s sons Harrison and Jamie LeFrak. “We’ve grown significantly over the past twenty years and need more senior hands on deck,” Richard said at the time.
Family firms often handle succession this way. Bringing in a senior professional manager lets the heirs take on more without the founder’s generation having to step back all at once. Inside Philanthropy, in a profile of Jamie published on October 19, says the brothers are “slated to lead the LeFrak Organization eventually.”
Richard, for his part, remains the firm’s public voice. In a CNBC interview last month he argued that the market’s “extend and pretend” era was ending. He also said the family’s build-and-hold model still works after 58 years.
Jamie LeFrak’s case for giving across the river
Jamie LeFrak, 53, has made Jersey City his cause. For Newport’s anniversary the company set aside $1 million for 40 local nonprofits. At a September 24 gala it doubled that to $2 million and committed a further $1 million a year for five years. According to Inside Philanthropy, 135 organisations applied.
He explains the logic as a mix of civic duty and long-term self-interest. “Giving where you make a business is sort of always a good idea, because your business, if it’s any good, is going to outlast you,” he told the publication. Jersey City’s charities, he said, suffer from “the unfortunate geographic problem of being across the river from giving central.” The city, in his words, “is starving for sources of giving.”
That is a striking thing for an heir to a fortune built in Queens and Manhattan to say. For decades the LeFrak name meant Lefrak City in Queens. Jamie’s pitch is that the family’s future lies on the Jersey side, and that its giving should follow its rent rolls.
The tenants’ campaign
The same anniversary has brought a dispute that tests that argument. As Hudson County View reported on October 20, tenants of 271 moderate-income apartments at Newport are asking the company to extend their affordability protections. The apartments are spread across four buildings: 135 of the 608 units at 35 and 55 River Drive South, and 136 of the 896 units at 30 and 40 Newport Parkway. The state housing finance program that kept those rents low has ended. Tenants argue that their protections should run to 2028 or 2029, and they asked LeFrak to extend an October 21 deadline.
The company’s answer, given by Charles Burton, its head of government and community relations, is that it has tried. “Newport twice attempted to extend affordability protections with the City of Jersey City in 2019, when the affordability protections expired, and 2025,” he said. “Both efforts were defeated by the city.” He added that the company remains “interested in partnerships to preserve affordability.” Burton said Newport would continue to offer eligible residents below-market rent increases of 3.5 percent for a year after their current leases end.
Some council members want to go further. Ordinance 26-089, sponsored by Council members Jake Ephros and Eleana Little, would replace Newport’s permanent exemption from the city’s rent-control law with a 30-year limit. According to Hudson TV, the measure was not moved at the October 21 council meeting and is now promised for introduction on November 12. “We are not going to delay indefinitely,” Ephros said.
The measure has critics beyond the company. Hudson TV reported that not every speaker at the meeting supported it. Ivan Ovalle objected that it had been added to the agenda just hours before the meeting. Darío Gutiérrez urged the council to “hire some economists to do the math” and called the ordinance “the equivalent of using a shotgun to swat a fly.” The tenants’ argument is simpler. They say their protections should not have ended yet, and that they need time and certainty before they can plan. The Jersey City Times has covered both sides at length.
Both sides have a point. LeFrak can fairly say it offered to extend affordability twice and was turned down. Tenants can fairly say that a 3.5 percent cap for one year is not the same as the protection they had.
What the succession will be judged on
For a family that builds to hold, a problem like this does not end with one lease cycle. Jamie LeFrak’s own line, that a good business “is going to outlast you,” applies to tenant relations as much as to philanthropy. Jersey City will remember how the 271 households are treated long after the 40th-anniversary grants have been spent.
The brothers are inheriting a company with entitled land for about 16,000 multifamily homes in New Jersey and Florida and roughly 1,500 units under development. The question for the next generation is not whether it can build more of Newport. It is whether it can be the kind of landlord that a city of 25,000 workers and 7,500 households will want to keep doing business with.
Featured image: Newport, the LeFrak family’s waterfront development in Jersey City, with parts of Hamilton Park in the foreground, in November 2021. Photo by King of Hearts via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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