Earlier this year, developer Moshe Sugar placed a “for sale” sign on the empty lot at 410 Main Street . Residents of Parker Drive, who fought against Sugar’s proposal to build a three-story apartment building there, interpreted this as a flag of surrender.
However, in February, Sugar filed a lawsuit against the Planning Board for denying his plan.
“The application was inappropriate for our neighborhood and would have worsened our already existing parking nightmare,” said MK Adams, a Park Drive resident, who fought against the project. “Mr. Sugar should withdraw his lawsuit and move on.”
Last December, Adams left Town Hall in utter disbelief when the Planning Board, despite its pro-development reputation, had denied the proposal.
Sugar was requesting eight variances, which are deviations from the local zoning laws. It was evidence, Adams argued, that this building was “obscenely large” and didn’t belong in this neighborhood. Not only that, but it offered 14 parking spaces for 12 units and a ground-floor commercial space, which she and neighbors believed would spill over into the neighborhood and make street parking worse.
The developer came up with an idea to use the parking spaces at Bethany Church across the street and the municipal parking lot located two blocks away from the proposed site, a plan that even Mayor Susan McCartney found questionable.
“I don’t think that there’s enough across the street and I don’t really think people are going to use the municipal lot down the street,” said Mayor Susan McCartney, a member of the Planning Board. “I have always been concerned about the parking and the traffic.”
“It’s a beautiful building,” said Planning Board Vice Chair Jerry Guarino. “But to me, it’s very overwhelming for the area, overwhelming for that neighborhood.”
“Say to yourself, “How would you feel if you were in their position?” he said.
What made the victory so sweet is that Adams and her neighbors didn’t have a nonprofit status or the sort of deep-pocketed funders that other neighborhood organizations need to fend off unwanted developments. It isn’t cheap to hire lawyers and engineers to testify at a land-use board.
Instead, they organized, held meetings in driveways, coached their neighbors on how to testify. The residents of Park Drive never hired a single expert – and still managed to win. However, one of the complaints in Sugar’s lawsuit is precisely that they never brought forth an expert.
“The board is free to disagree with an expert, but must do so in reliance on contrary expert testimony rather than ‘bare allegations or unsubstantiated beliefs,’ the legal briefing reads. “Reviewing the six public hearings, the opposition primarily came from the public who voiced concerns about traffic and safety issues along Main Street, neither of which would be impacted by this proposed development, and which were expressly addressed by the applicant’s experts.”
Even before Sugar presented plans for an apartment building, many residents were bracing themselves for this project because there used to be a well-known landmark on the property that the developer demolished in 2023. It was one of the oldest buildings in the township, an extremely rare 18th-century home. However, it didn’t have official landmark status, so there was nothing the township officials or preservationists could do to keep the building upright.
