Blog / 2026 / A Lambertville Life

Since 2022, I’ve had the incredible luck of living in Lambertville, New Jersey, a thoroughly quirky slice of idyll where nylon rainbows wave from every other house and the annual Halloween celebration closes seven blocks of a town that’s only fifteen blocks long.

My connection to this place is such that, if a town had to play me in the movie of my life, I would hope it would be Lambertville. This community is stunning, both in the people and in the locale, with the green beauty of this region making it a gentle place to live. Lambertville embodying me in a film would be a huge compliment.

But, of course, towns can’t play people and, more importantly, this isn’t a movie.

Back in the real world, for the first six months of 2026, my sweetie and I were pretty sure we’d have to leave Lambertville. The main culprit was greed. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment has gone up $500 a month in the last four years—and that’s without any improvements to the properties. If owners follow the industry standard of only renting to tenants who make three times the rent, that means that many mouse-poop-errific Lambertville properties are available exclusively to those who earn over $75k.

The owners of our now-former home are like so many in this town. They’ve put their money into Lambertville, but they don’t understand what it means to truly invest in this place: physically and emotionally, as well as in community. Over the years, the owners made our lives hard in a variety of ways. I won’t get into it all, because, though it sucked, their unkindness wasn’t especially unusual or inventive. Suffice it to say they never figured out that, when you have tenants who care about their neighbors and always pay their rent on time, you should treasure them.

In the end though, after months of uncertainty, we found a new place in town. It’s beautiful and affordably priced, and we only get to live here because a whole lot of wonderful Lambertvillians stepped in to make it happen. I am lucky to have each of them in my life.

Lambertville is the place where, as a forty year old, I finally came into myself more fully. And these two photos, one of me at the shore a year after I first moved to NJ and a more recent pic on the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge, make it clear what I mean.

I’ve always dressed colorfully, but it was in Lambertville that I stopped complying in any way with what people in the US generally think of as a normal palette for fashion. This town welcomes artistic sensibilities more than any place I’ve lived, and it’s given me the space to embrace my own more completely.

Lambertville is also where I’ve learned to trust myself, and that was in large part because of this person.

To explain: I’ve worked for myself for years. Yes, I briefly had a job at another artist’s studio in 2024, and of course I’ve made art for many clients over the last few decades. But Amy runs a local charity that puts on a large art auction in order to fund two $25k art scholarships every year, and I’ve been involved in the ShadFest scholarship and auction since 2023.

That means I’ve been able to observe from up close the way Amy manages this whale of a project, and I’ve also been the beneficiary of her confident leadership style. Amy is certain that volunteers will ask when they need clarification and also that they are, by and large, the people who know their particular part of this complex undertaking better than anyone else.

All of which is to say that Amy believed in me so much that it was hard for me not to believe in myself—even outside of the context of my own art career where I’m so used to making all the decisions that I can’t help but be self-assured.

Finally, Lambertville is where I learned to trust others more fully again.

Despite the crummy landlords, my first four years in this town have been some of the best of my life. And that’s saying a lot, considering that housing insecurity can really eat into a person’s sense of wellbeing.

There are so many people who’ve contributed to my renewed faith in my fellow humans—that’s pretty much the point of this post—but the one I’m painting in this video created the most dramatic shift for me in just the last year.

Richie, like me, is relatively new to the area, and we were both drawn here for the same reasons: the art, the natural beauty, and the idea of a place where people want to lift each other up.

I still don’t know that I’ll be able to stay in Lambertville for the rest of my life. Developers are hungrily circling this sweet little town, and only some of them are outsiders. Living here will almost certainly get more expensive.

But all we ever really have is now.

Now is when I get to stay here and keep benefitting from the gifts of this community, and I am grateful for this present moment and for all the wonderful people who are a part of it.