Proposed Large Housing Development Doesn’t Thrill Hulmeville Residents

The small Lower Bucks County borough of Hulmeville will get a lot bigger if a developer’s plan for a major residential project is eventually approved.

At a community meeting Thursday night attended by more than 150 people at the borough’s William Penn Fire Company, Gene Lorenzetti of Superior Holdings LLC presented two conceptual plans for 45 acres off Trenton Road known as the Harriet Black Family Farm.

One concept is a mixed use residential plan with a roughly equal number of apartments, townhomes and single-family houses totaling 111 units. The other is for 84 single-family homes.

The consensus among the more than 25 people who spoke at the meeting is that they don’t want either, but would prefer the all single-family homes plan as kind of a lesser of two evils.

At the end of the meeting, Lorenzetti – who said during the gathering that he preferred the mixed use plan – said he now prefers all single-family houses based on what he heard from residents.

“I could make more money with the other (mixed use) but that’s not my interest,” said Lorenzetti, who owns Superior Holdings along with his wife and two children.

He was accompanied at the meeting by Southampton-based realtor Al DiFrancesco, who is working with Lorenzetti on the Hulmeville project, and engineer Rob Cunningham.

Lorenzetti, a former Northampton Township resident who also has a home in Florida, said he plans to live in one of the single-family houses on the Hulmeville property if one of the two concepts eventually comes to fruition.

Questions and comments from residents at the meeting touched on traffic, drainage, impact on wildlife and other issues.

“Why do you have to put up so many homes? We already have so many problems on the roads,” one resident said.

Another added that Trenton Road is “already a chaos of traffic” and a development of this size would only make things worse.

Lorenzetti, DiFrancesco and Cunningham said they would do traffic studies and come up with a plan to handle additional traffic that would have to be approved by PennDOT.

The development has the potential to increase the borough’s current population of 980 by 10 to 20 percent or more.

“We would much prefer the all single-family homes development,” Neshaminy School Board President John Allen said. “Townhomes and apartments would overburden our district.

“We wish this land would remain open space but realistically, we know that is not possible.”

Borough Council President Tom Wheeler said Thursday’s gathering was not an official borough meeting and was being held to present the concepts and gather feedback. Whatever plan the developer moves forward with would have to be reviewed by the Bucks County and borough planning commissions and other agencies, and eventually reviewed and approved by borough council in order to be built.

“We know nobody here wants this, including myself, but he (Lorenzetti) owns the property and has the right to build on it,” Wheeler said during the meeting.

Cunningham said the project will not worsen flooding along the Neshaminy Creek and other spots in the borough. Residents along the Neshaminy most recently endured flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida in September of 2021.

“The impact would be improvement, not negative, in terms of stormwater management,” Cunningham said.

Lorenzetti stressed throughout that he wants to work closely with residents and officials to come up with the best plan for everybody.

“My passion is to build a nice development for the community,” he said.

Lorenzetti added that he and others involved in the project would do market studies to determine how to price the residences, but that he’s thinking of using $550,000 as a base for the single-family houses.

Harriet Black was a well-known Hulmeville figure who served the borough as tax collector, borough secretary and other roles before dying in 2016. Her husband Edward had predeceased her.

Their son Fred Black will be allowed to remain on the property in an old house that will be renovated for him, Lorenzetti said.

The property, which has seen previous development plans come and go, has been purchased in pieces since 2019 for a combined total of just over $6 million, according to county property records. The land was also the former home of Langhorne Wood Products, a company that had sold wood pallets before recently closing.

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