The history of New Bedford is a history of hardworking immigrants making this city at one time one of the richest per capita cities in the country, and when whaling began to die out and manufacturing called for workers, they came from every country making it a city of immigrants.

Typically, people gathered among their own for safety and community and this resulted in ethnic neighborhoods that retained much of the culture of the home countries. Even today you can choose your cuisine and bakery goods from any number of ethnic groups and know where to get it from fancy restaurants to little holes in the wall where the food is great but there are local residents not crowds.

The same holds true with culture expressed in music and art. Beyond the obvious public audio and visual celebrations, there are, like the eateries, little hole in the wall places where culture is real and not being performed or displayed in a way comfortable to the uninitiated, artificial and programmed.

Pride in origin resulted in quite a few immigrant organizations, festivals, parades, museums, art spaces, and neighborhoods with murals touting the areas greatness and community.

Having my roots in Boston, coming to the Southcoast of Massachusetts to places like Fall River or New Bedford was rare and most people I grew up with knew very little about New Bedford as anything they wanted was available in Boston.

The city went through a slump approaching death, but there were those who remained in the downtown area, and this kept what had once been a pre-mall hive of activity from becoming a plywood fronted city. Some retailers and restauranteurs held in there when all around the downtown area things were folding up.

Even as state and federal governments imposed Urban Renewal and ripped the city apart destroying history for the sake of a highway to nowhere that had a purpose but also caused structural and historical rape with a frenzy of destruction.

And people stayed, the city survived as it adapted, and the ethnic neighborhoods were anchors to the cities past greatness and, surviving as little communities within the greater one, contributed to the city’s life.

I had lived in Boston when it was relatively affordable until property speculators began to buy up property and raise rents so that the quaint neighborhoods became ones of metal and glass and older buildings are now unaffordable to the people who had kept that area of the city alive.

In Long Beach CA. after a few decades of decline and affordable housing, there was a renaissance with an overpowering gentrification which, as in many places, displaced the people already living there and keeping that area alive. I was not there for a long time, but in the years I was, I saw a city comfortable for people of average income become, because of a city plan to make the water front area a place to be, become unaffordable and people displaced because the pink walled and off-green trimmed apartment buildings took over streets with few being affordable for the people who had been living there, and low rent dumps were discovered to be desirable as was evidenced by the ballooning rents to bring the monied people into them.

During the oil bust of the 1980s that resulted in a number of foreclosed and abandoned homes throughout Oklahoma City, housing costs were low. Houses in some rather tony neighborhoods were selling for a few thousand dollars. Gay people moved into the empty homes, as so often happens in cities grasping for life, and fixed up certain areas inspiring nearby neighborhoods to do the same and the resulting revitalization of the area they saved increased taxes from what they had paid for the property to its fair market value. With insurance and other household expenses going up as the quality of the homes improved, many owners had to sell their homes.

That neighborhood is now high-end bordering on the unaffordable with huge rent increases because of the rise of the area from sketchy to classy.

Long story short, after retirement and returning to my home state, I eventually moved to an affordable apartment in New Bedford unaware that the MBTA Commuter Rail was extending it southern line to New Bedford and Fall River, and, even if I heard some news about it, not being as fully invested in a place to which I had recently moved, it might not have initially registered as it later would. The quiet, big little city was about to face gentrification and dislocation.

I attended an informational meeting about the coming of the commuter train to Boston and having lived, it seemed, any place people were about to be displaced, I had my concerns about having to  move from a place I figured I was going to spend what years I had left in to some place I had to and with which there would be no emotional attachment, a form of populated banishment.

I like it here and have become involved in the community on a variety of levels.

As I explained at that meeting, and I am sure I spoke for many, doubling my rent would make it unaffordable for me to stay but it would be a huge bargain for someone living in a similar apartment in Boston. There would be huge rent decrease leaving enough cash to buy a monthly train pass and still have the saved excess rent cost for a pleasant city life in a regrowing and changing city.

People moved to Cape Cod because it was quaint with cottages and old New England charm, only to find they missed all the other things they were used to and Hyannis became a blemish as a mall sprung up attracting what malls do as far as the metastasizing of retail sprawl, and the mainland came to the Cape destroying for the sake of the people who moved there what they had moved there for.

As they bring Boston with them, the newcomers to New Bedford will be unknowingly destroying some of what they will have moved here for while driving the city’s flavor out.                         

Property is now being bought up by out of state people who see the cash cow New Bedford will become as all Improvements in the city seem less for the sake of those already here, but for those they want to entice to come here.

In all the cities in which I had lived and that got swept up with gentrification it has been justified as making the city a Class-A city, leaving out that this is not for the benefit of the people who had been keeping a city alive and live there, but for a few politicians and businesses who see apartments as rentals and not as homes and see they will get more profits getting the residents replaced with new comers and those newcomers.

They never publicly state that it will be a Class A city for other people coming in and those who profit.

In anticipation of this migration, charter schools have been proposed so that the children of the people from Boston with high expectations and standards will not have to mingle in school with those people. The improvement of student achievement rates and graduation in the city schools have become some of the highest in the state making charter schools, which are to replace failing public ones, unnecessary. But old misinformation is hard to kill, and parents will want an alternative to the mingling.

There is usually some city-to-city migration, but this will be on a grand scale and room and accommodations must be made at the expense of the people who are keeping a city alive. The very people who kept the city from dying are the ones being displaced for those who would never have even considered moving here but now see the financial advantage as it is being presented to them with a welcome sign and a warm invite.

They can’t be blamed. I am here because it was affordable, but instead of attempting to have the city morph to my needs and expectations or hate being here, I got to become part of it and promote the city as it is. There will be changes, all cities have them. Urban evolution happens, but just as with the destruction of much of the history of the city with urban renewal ripping through it, this is an unnatural evolution that will tear the spirit out of a city that has a great one.

Yeah, I will be honest. My building was sold to an out-of-town interest and we tenants all have to move out as the building is gutted of all it historical remnants, upgraded to modernity, and reopened with rents two to three times higher than we pay right now.

One man has lived in this building for over forty years and away he goes.

The new people will have a great building as the proposed roof deck will have a commanding view of the downtown area and the harbor.

In the meantime, the people in twenty four apartments enter the competition for affordable housing with others already in or about to enter the queue heading out of the city they have grown up in or move to and became a part of.

People were so happy the train was coming only to find it was not for them.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.