HUDSON COUNTY PROPERTY GUIDE

What 1888 Studios in Bayonne Actually Is — and What It Means for the Surrounding Market

For decades, a 74-acre stretch of Bayonne's waterfront sat contaminated and idle — a former Texaco oil refinery on the Kill van Kull that no one had figured out what to do with. By December 2025, construction equipment was on the site. By 2028, it's expected to be operating as the largest film and television production studio in the Northeast.

That's not a rumor or a proposal. It's a $1.2 billion project with a signed 10-year lease from a major studio tenant, a state designation from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, a groundbreaking that already happened, and a developer who spent two years remediating the brownfield before putting a shovel in the ground. The pieces are in place in a way that real estate announcements often aren't.

This article covers what 1888 Studios actually is, what's been confirmed versus what's still coming, what the Bayonne property market looks like right now, and what a campus of this scale tends to do to the neighborhoods around it. It is general market and property information only — not tax, legal, financial, or real estate advice.

What 1888 Studios Actually Is

1888 Studios is a 1.6-million-square-foot film and television production campus being built on 58 acres of Bayonne's waterfront, near the Bayonne Bridge. The developer is Togus Urban Renewal LLC. The architect is Gensler. The project broke ground in December 2025 after two years of environmental remediation on what had been a contaminated brownfield since Texaco vacated the site.^[1]

The name is a reference to Thomas Edison — in 1888, Edison patented the first motion picture camera in New Jersey. The choice isn't accidental: the project is being positioned as a return of film and television production to the state that effectively invented the industry.

The confirmed physical scope of the campus is significant by any measure. When complete, it will include 23 smart sound stages ranging from 18,000 to 60,000 square feet, a 22-acre water backlot on Newark Bay — one of the only production water backlots on the East Coast — over 350,000 square feet of production support space including offices and equipment facilities, a five-story parking structure, and more than five acres of public waterfront park and promenade open to Bayonne residents.^[2]

The confirmed anchor tenant is Paramount Skydance, which signed a minimum 10-year lease committing to more than 285,000 square feet of the campus — a major production hub for one of Hollywood's largest studios, positioned 10 miles from Midtown Manhattan.^[3]

The project is expected to generate approximately 2,300 union construction jobs during the build phase and more than 2,000 permanent union positions once the campus is operational. Municipal revenue from the facility — structured as a 30-year Payment in Lieu of Taxes beginning at $2.6 million annually and rising to $7.5 million — flows directly to Bayonne's city budget over the life of the agreement.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority designated 1888 Studios as the state's first Film-Lease Partner Facility, which allows future production tenants to access up to 40% tax credits on qualifying projects — some of the most competitive filming incentives in the country — as long as they film at least half their project in New Jersey and half those production days at the designated facility. That structure is designed to attract long-term, recurring production tenants, not just one-off projects.

Target opening: fourth quarter of 2028.

What the Bayonne Property Market Looks Like Right Now

Before accounting for the studio at all, Bayonne already has a price story that's been attracting buyers priced out of Jersey City and Hoboken. The median home sale price in Bayonne is approximately $650,000 as of mid-2026 — competitive with Jersey City's value neighborhoods but meaningfully below the city's median, and well below Hoboken's nearly $900,000 average.^[4]

The rental market follows the same pattern. Median rents in Bayonne run around $2,300 per month, compared to approximately $2,800–$3,000 across Jersey City and over $4,000 in Hoboken.^[5] For investors evaluating income property in Hudson County, that spread — lower acquisition price, lower but still competitive rents — affects the yield math in a way that's worth running through the numbers.

The market itself is competitive. Homes in Bayonne are currently selling in about 34 days, with nearly half closing above list price and an average sale-to-list ratio of 100.8%.^[4] Prices were up 3.9% year-over-year through mid-2026. This isn't an undiscovered market — demand is real, and the price gap with Jersey City is already narrowing.

One detail worth noting for investors: two-family homes make up the largest single property category in Bayonne at 33.7% of housing stock. That's a much higher proportion than you'll find in Downtown Jersey City or on the Hoboken waterfront. For buyers looking at owner-occupied duplexes or small multifamily, Bayonne has inventory that those markets genuinely don't.

Transit access is four Hudson-Bergen Light Rail stations running through the city. There's no direct PATH, which is part of why the price gap with Jersey City still exists — but the light rail connects to the PATH at Journal Square and Exchange Place, putting Manhattan within commuting range. The average Bayonne commute to work runs about 34 minutes.

What a Campus Like This Actually Does to a Surrounding Market

A studio campus isn't a residential development that adds housing supply. It's a demand generator — a fixed location that employs thousands of people who need somewhere to live, eat, park, and spend money nearby. That's a different kind of economic input than most large construction projects, and the effects run over a longer timeline.

The mechanism is straightforward: 2,000+ permanent employees working on a 58-acre campus near Bayonne's waterfront need housing within a reasonable commute of that site. Some will come from existing workforce pools in the area. Others will relocate. The ones who relocate create incremental rental and purchase demand in the immediate vicinity — which, in Bayonne's case, is a market that already has less inventory than neighboring Jersey City and Hoboken.

Beyond direct employment, production campuses generate significant vendor and support activity — catering, transportation, equipment rental, post-production services — much of which locates near the facility. That economic activity supports retail, restaurant, and service demand in surrounding blocks in a way that tends to be durable as long as the campus is operating.

The public waterfront promenade included in the 1888 development is also worth naming separately. Bayonne's waterfront has been largely inaccessible because of the industrial uses that occupied it. Activated public waterfront — walkable, with direct water views of Manhattan — is exactly the kind of amenity that lifted property values in Jersey City's Newport and Paulus Hook neighborhoods over the past two decades. Bayonne is getting a version of that with this project.

The studio doesn't open until late 2028. That means most of what's described above hasn't happened yet. Whether any of it affects a specific property's value depends on the property's location relative to the campus, the neighborhood's existing infrastructure, and conditions in the broader market at the time. But the capital has been committed, the tenant is signed, and the groundbreaking is done. At this stage, the question for someone considering Bayonne is how much of this is already priced in — and whether the 2028 opening is the event that moves the market or just confirms what the market already decided.