The Hilltop Housing Plan

Shaun Ellis and Beth O’Brien, longtime residents of Lambertville, stand on the edge of a heavily overgrown twenty-five-acre tract atop Connaught Hill that was once occupied by Lambertville’s high school, the town dump, and the Taurus Corp. machine shop. A sign warns: “NO Trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted.”

“All of this would be developed,” O’Brien says, sweeping her hand in a wide arc. She’s referring to a plan by the national homebuilder K. Hovnanian to build 200 homes on the steeply sloped hill, which overlooks downtown Lambertville. “And all the people living here would have to come and go through these narrow, very hilly streets.”

Ellis and O’Brien are among the leaders of the opposition to the K. Hovnanian project, which would be the largest single development in the city’s history. It would add an estimated 600 residents to the city’s population of 4,210 people, a fourteen percent increase. Under the K. Hovnanian plan, several buildings would house 160 market-rate townhouses. Another forty rental apartments, deemed “affordable” under a complex state formula, would be segregated in a separate building.

“It’s the massive scale of this that’s the problem,” Ellis says. “If they wanted to put forty units of affordable housing here, fine. But building 160 condos will overwhelm this neighborhood.”

In July 2025, a state Superior Court judge ordered the city to approve the development in order to meet its “Fair Share” obligations to create affordable housing under New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine. Under Fair Share rules, developers must devote at least twenty percent of large new housing projects to affordable units.

The project is moving ahead even though the property owner has not allowed the state Department of Environmental Protection to test the soil at the site. Fully testing the sprawling site, DEP officials say, will take two years. The firm’s attorney, Craig Gianetti of Day Pitney in Parsippany, New Jersey, said K. Hovanian would have “no comment” on the negotiations or on opponents’ objections to the project.

Some Connaught Hill residents and local environmental activists suspect the Taurus shop, which used Teflon to coat electrical parts, could have been the source of the carcinogenic PFAS found in 2025 in seventy homeowners’ wells. That they’ve been ingesting PFAS for decades, residents say, explains why so many of them have developed cancer, ulcerative colitis, and other serious health problems in recent decades. More than forty residents are suing DuPont, the original manufacturer of Teflon, and 3M, which bought the rights to make Teflon, alleging that PFAS in that product caused their illnesses.

“There are people young and old up here who have been sick with cancer and other illnesses,” Ellis says. His son developed testicular cancer at 16—a form of cancer that studies have shown is frequently linked to PFAS exposure. After extensive treatment, his son is now in remission.

No one knows what was deposited in the soil when the property served as a town dump for decades before it was closed in 1960.

Before work on the project can begin, city officials are seeking a detailed agreement with K. Hovnanian for how the developer will remove toxic soil and mitigate stormwater runoff. The two sides are conducting confidential meetings before an arbiter. Nowick says the city and the developer have been unable thus far to agree on terms for the environmental clean-up.

The 200 new units will be connected to city water and sewer pipes, and the developer might seek to share that cost with the city. Because the property is on a steep hill, opponents fear that replacing wooded land with concrete and other impermeable surfaces will worsen Lambertville’s chronic flooding problem in the downtown. During major storms, water runs down the slope of the hill and also gathers into Swan Creek. The runoff has caused numerous major floods in downtown Lambertville over the decades, including during Tropical Storm Ida in 2021, when dozens of homes were damaged by water rushing into basements and first floors, and, in one case, lifting a house off its foundation.

“When Lambertville floods, the water comes down from the hills and the creeks,” O’Brien says. “The runoff issue should be on everyone’s mind. It will affect people downtown more than they realize.”

Jeff Tittel, a former director of the New Jersey Sierra Club and a local activist, also worries that the construction process will create new environmental hazards. “We don’t know how contaminated that soil is,” Tittel says, “and whether the toxins will spread downhill once they start digging.”

Mayor Andrew Nowick says city officials have serious concerns about the impact of the housing project on stormwater management, and he concedes it was “not ideal” to locate forty affordable apartments on a steep hill separated from the Bridge Street commercial district by busy Route 29. “Walking into the downtown will be problematic,” Nowick says. No doubt some of the estimated 600 new residents would instead drive into town, adding to traffic and the competition for parking spots.

Residents also note that, under current plans, the project would be separated from the Connaught Hill neighborhood of modest, single-family homes. “The purpose of Mount Laurel is to integrate people with lower incomes into the community,” O’Brien says. “But what they’re building is essentially a gated community.”

Ellis points out that the affordable rental housing will be in a separate building from the townhouses. “Essentially,” he says “they’re ghettoizing the affordable housing.”

Ellis and other residents say they feel shut out of the whole process, including Nowick’s private meetings with K. Hovnanian. “There’s been too much secrecy,” Ellis says, “and not much transparency or communication.”

Like other Lambertvillians, the residents of Connaught Hill contend they are not opposed to all development. “We should be good stewards of this town that we all love,” Ellis says. “We want responsible development. For so many reasons, this project is not responsible.”