At a rally outside New Bedford City Hall last April, protesters shared stories about rent increases in their neighborhoods that seem to march in lockstep with the construction of a new train line to Boston that is scheduled to open this summer. 

Viola Pina, a local landlord and former politician, blamed the train for attracting gentrifiers and house flippers who suddenly see value in New Bedford, which had long felt insulated from the successes and growing pains of Boston, an hour’s drive north. 

“The new people that are coming in here are only out for themselves,” Pina said, “and when the train comes in, then we’re really going to be in trouble. So we need to organize and stay strong and fight back.”

Protesters echoed Pina’s words — “fight back” — as they called on New Bedford’s City Council to approve a non-binding ballot question that night, which sought to gauge whether the city’s voters would support rent control. 

The council rejected the ballot question, but the short-lived debate around rent control demonstrated how widespread fears of gentrification have become in New Bedford, and how closely those fears are linked with the arrival of South Coast Rail. 

A roundtable of business and nonprofit executives known as the Regeneration Committee soon pooled $150,000 to commission a study of New Bedford’s housing market.

The committee hired the MassINC Gateway Cities Institute, a research group that focuses on the state’s post-industrial cities, to investigate the causes and potential solutions to New Bedford’s rising housing costs. The committee’s co-chair, Tony Sapienza, said business leaders also wanted detailed information about whether there really is a large wave of speculators and gentrifiers buying properties in New Bedford in anticipation of the new train. 

“That’s been the rumor that has floated around the city for a considerable period of time,” Sapienza said. “We really needed to figure out if that was true.”

Placing a number on rising rents

MassINC’s researchers spent a year crunching data from Zillow’s real estate listings, the New Bedford tax assessor’s ownership records, change of address forms logged with the U.S. Postal Service, mortgage originations tracked by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Census Bureau’s surveys about migration, race and income.

The report, released earlier this month, found housing costs have risen much faster in New Bedford than similar cities in Massachusetts. Rents in New Bedford rose 27 percent over the 18-month period MassINC studied, from January 2022 to July 2023. Those figures mean the average apartment, which had rented for about $1,200 per month, received a rent hike of close to $330 per month. The average monthly mortgage payment went up 41 percent over the same time period, a problem exacerbated by rising interest rates as well as rising housing prices. 

But the report diverged significantly from public opinion when identifying the causes of the city’s rising housing costs. 

Ben Forman, the director of research at MassINC, said his team did not find large numbers of Boston commuters moving to New Bedford. The report also found the share of properties in New Bedford with out-of-town owners actually declined over the past decade. 

“There’s no data to suggest that New Bedford is undergoing a strong process of gentrification where there’s people coming from outside the community, moving in with more wealth, consuming more housing and pushing prices up and people out,” Forman said. “That’s not the pattern we see at all.”

Not your typical gentrifiers

The study does connect rising housing costs to a growing number of homebuyers and renters looking for a place to live in New Bedford. Forman said many of these people are locals moving out of homes they used to share with their families. 

“The area had very high unemployment through the Great Recession, and a lot of people weren’t able to form their own household or buy their own home,” Forman said. “As the economy improved, they were in a much better position to get their own apartment or purchase their own home.”

Meanwhile, Forman said the newcomers moving to New Bedford for the first time tend to have low incomes. Migration data from the Census Bureau suggest the largest contingents of new residents are arriving from Brockton and Cape Cod, which have housing crises of their own that have caused significant displacement. There is also a large Guatemalan community in New Bedford that continues to grow. None of these groups are typically perceived as gentrifiers, but Forman said all of them are still competing with locals for just a few available housing units. 

“That’s when landlords have 20 applications for one vacant unit and the rents go up,” Forman said. 

MassINC’s report prescribes a straightforward solution to New Bedford’s housing problem: build more housing. The group’s researchers estimate that New Bedford needs 5,500 new housing units to restore the balance between supply and demand that kept the city’s housing prices affordable for so long. New Bedford has not built that much new housing since the 1960s and ‘70s, according to Census data about the age of the city’s housing stock that MassINC compiled. 

The psychology of a housing crisis

The report’s conclusions challenge the notion that the city’s rising housing costs can be traced back to a wave of profiteering outsiders following the train to New Bedford. Still, the 55-page report has not caused a seismic shift in how average people discuss housing. 

Sapienza, the chair of New Bedford’s Regeneration Committee, said it’s difficult for people to perceive the kinds of subtle, yearslong trends that can push an entire city’s housing market into a new price range.

“I think people want to look for a reason that they can understand,” Sapienza said, “and something like the train is more understandable.”

Forman said widespread fears of gentrification in New Bedford are still rooted in a reasonable interpretation of what has happened in other communities characterized by historic homes and proximity to the ocean. 

“I think everybody worries that New Bedford is going to be discovered one day,” Forman said. “It’s a gorgeous coastal city. It’s going to soon have a train to Boston. I don’t think it’s a crazy idea. I just don’t see evidence that’s happening quite yet.”