The Record Sale on Summit Street Isn't the Englewood Cliffs Story This Year. The Building Three Miles Away Is.

In March 2026, a newly built home on Summit Street closed for $5.4 million, the highest residential sale ever recorded on NJMLS in Englewood Cliffs. It is the kind of number that confirms what everyone assumes about this borough: tight lots, tighter inventory, buyers competing for a handful of architect-driven new builds perched on the Palisades.

That story is true. It is also not the biggest thing happening to the Englewood Cliffs housing stock this year.

Three miles from Summit Street, at 1 Valentine Street, a 338-unit apartment building with a speakeasy-style lounge, a splash pad, and studios starting in the $2,500 range began leasing in July. It sits on the old Unilever corporate campus, and it exists because a court told the borough it had to build it. For the first time in the town's history, Englewood Cliffs has multifamily rental housing. The comps everyone is using to price a house here were built for a town that didn't have that. They no longer describe the town that exists.

A town that had never allowed an apartment

Englewood Cliffs is a small, wealthy borough of roughly 5,400 people perched above the Hudson, and for decades its housing stock was almost entirely single-family: 1960s and 70s brick colonials and split-levels, increasingly replaced in recent years by larger contemporary rebuilds. There was no rental apartment tier to speak of. That wasn't an accident of the market. It was the outcome of a fight the borough had been having with the state for a decade.

In 2015, developer Normandy Real Estate Partners filed a builder's remedy lawsuit against Englewood Cliffs, arguing the borough had failed to meet its constitutional obligation under New Jersey's Mount Laurel doctrine to zone for its fair share of affordable housing. Fair Share Housing Center, the statewide advocacy group that enforces those obligations in court, joined the case. After a contentious public trial in 2019, a Superior Court judge ruled against the borough, and by April 2020 had stripped its Planning Board of authority to review the development at the center of the dispute: the old 800 Sylvan Avenue campus. Litigation over the terms of that ruling continued for years, including a 2024 settlement in which the borough paid the developer $7 million and another $1.3 million to resolve a related tax appeal, according to reporting at the time. In 2022, the Appellate Division sided with Fair Share Housing Center again, clearing the way for construction to finally begin.

That construction is now open. It is called The Sylvan.

What actually got built, and what's still coming

The Sylvan comprises 338 apartments and 112 townhomes on the former Unilever site, developed by Garden Communities. Leasing opened in the summer of 2026, with market-rate rents starting in the mid-$2,500s for a studio, and the complex includes over 90,000 square feet of shared amenity space: a fitness center with Peloton bikes and private training rooms, a resident lounge, a media room, a pool, and a dog park nearby at Witte Field. Ninety of the units are set aside as income-restricted affordable housing, and the borough opened a public lottery for those apartments in the spring, with a waiting-list deadline in early June and priority given to residents and workers of Bergen, Hudson, Passaic, and Sussex counties.

That alone would be news. What makes it a market signal rather than a one-time event is what the borough enacted while The Sylvan was still leasing up. The borough introduced two new zoning ordinances at a special meeting in February 2026, Southern Sylvan Avenue Overlay Zone C and Overlay Zone D, permitting additional multifamily residential development at density up to 20 units per acre along a stretch of Sylvan Avenue and nearby Charlotte Place and Rose Avenue, each requiring a 20 percent affordable set-aside. Formal adoption notices for both followed that spring. A separate 48-unit mixed-use project at 20-32 Sylvan Avenue, on what's known locally as the Cioffi site, was still moving through Planning Board technical review as of April 2026. None of this is speculative future zoning sitting on a shelf. It's the borough executing the compliance mechanisms in its Fourth Round affordable housing plan, which the state calculated obligates Englewood Cliffs to plan for 329 additional units.

In other words: The Sylvan wasn't an exception the borough absorbed once and moved past. It was the first of several parcels along the same corridor working through the same process.

Why this matters more than the median

If you've been comparing Englewood Cliffs to nearby towns using a portal median, you've likely already noticed the numbers don't agree with each other. Depending on the source and the month, the reported median has shown up anywhere from the mid-$1.3 millions to the high $3 millions over the past year. Some of that comes from the well-documented split between resale colonials, which have been taking around 105 days to sell and closing near 3 percent under list, and new-construction spec homes, which move faster and closer to list price when the product is right. That's a real dynamic, and it's worth knowing if you're pricing an offer.

But that split was always a story about two flavors of the same thing: owner-occupied single-family homes. What's new is a third category that didn't exist in any of those medians a year ago, because it couldn't. A renter comparing Englewood Cliffs to Fort Lee or Edgewater used to have nothing to look at here. Now they have a resort-amenitized apartment building three miles from the George Washington Bridge with a leasing office and a floor plan menu. That's a genuine new entrant into the housing conversation in this ZIP code, not a variation on the existing one.

For a seller of a resale colonial, the practical question isn't whether The Sylvan is competing with your house for a buyer. It isn't, directly. The question is what happens to the pool of would-be Englewood Cliffs buyers who might have stretched into a starter home here five years ago and can now rent a two-bedroom with a fitness center and a pool instead, at a fraction of the carrying cost, while they wait for the right house or the right rate environment. That's a slower-moving effect than a comp adjustment, and it's exactly the kind of thing that doesn't show up in a monthly median but shows up over several selling seasons.

For an investor, the more interesting fact might be the zoning itself. Overlay Zones C and D and the Cioffi site show a borough that spent a decade fighting multifamily development in court and is now the entity approving more of it, parcel by parcel, along a corridor most buyers only associate with the LG corporate campus and light commercial. That's worth knowing if you're evaluating property along Sylvan Avenue for anything other than a single-family purchase.

What this doesn't change

None of this touches the north side of the borough, where the Roberts Road and North Cliffs new-construction market that produced the Summit Street record continues to trade on its own terms, largely insulated from what's happening on Sylvan Avenue by geography and lot size. If you're chasing that tier, the affordable housing story is background noise, not a comp.

What it does change is the assumption, still baked into a lot of casual comparisons between Bergen County towns, that Englewood Cliffs simply doesn't have rental inventory. As of this year, it does. And the zoning on the books suggests it will have more before this planning cycle is over.

A few questions worth asking before you compare towns

Does The Sylvan affect what I'd pay for a single-family home in Englewood Cliffs? Not directly through comps, since apartments and detached homes don't share a sale-price database. The more relevant effect is on demand at the entry level, where renters now have an option that didn't exist before.

Is more multifamily housing definitely coming after The Sylvan? The zoning is adopted. Southern Sylvan Avenue Overlay Zones C and D permit it, and the Cioffi site proposal was in active Planning Board review as of spring 2026. Adopted zoning and an active application are not the same as a certificate of occupancy, so timing on any specific project can still shift.

Are the affordable units at The Sylvan still accepting applications? The borough ran its lottery registration window through early June 2026. Anyone interested should check the borough's own affordable housing page for current status rather than relying on this article, since eligibility windows and waiting lists change.

If you're weighing Englewood Cliffs against another Palisades corridor town, the median price is the least useful number in the comparison right now. What actually explains the market is a decade of litigation that just started paying off in poured concrete, and a set of ordinances that say it isn't finished. Ridgeco Properties works this stretch of Bergen County daily, on both the resale and new-construction sides of the ledger, and can walk you through which comp set actually applies to the property you're looking at. Get your free home valuation to start with a number that reflects the town as it exists today, not the one from before The Sylvan opened.