‘I don’t want to let this house go’

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It costs more to live in New Bedford than many of the city’s residents can afford. But people keep on fighting to make a life here — because they have a connection to the city, because they have nowhere else to go, or a combination of both.

Housing in Distress / Third in a series

For this installment of the Housing in Distress series, The Light collected three stories of people grappling with the city’s housing crisis.

A home falls apart

Layala Lazenby woke up to the sound of her grandmother calling for her.

It was 3:30 a.m., and Dorothy Lynch, a petite 92-year-old, was on the floor just outside the bathroom.

“I fell,” Lynch shouted. She had scraped her forehead, but luckily she wasn’t seriously hurt.

Lynch has been falling more often. She says she’s not sure how she ends up on the floor, but Lazenby thinks she knows the reason — the wood floors in their home are uneven and in dire need of repairs.

The bubbling, buckling, and peeling wood is so bad in the bathroom that the toilet leans at a visible angle. There are more tripping hazards in the kitchen, where the peel-and-stick tiles have shifted from the wood’s warping.

Lazenby grew up in this historic house in New Bedford’s West End. She moved back in 2015 to take care of her grandmother and aging mother, who is slowly losing her mobility and vision. Since then, Lazenby has become overwhelmed with a long list of expensive repairs, and the floors are just the beginning.

The roof, windows, siding, and fence have all failed in one way or another. Plus, the little house is overcrowded and needs upgrades like ramps to help her grandmother get in and out.

“I really just want it to be safe,” she said. “I’m torn, because I don’t want to let this house go.”

Lazenby can’t find another house that works for her family. She has been watching the listings for months, waiting for something within her $290,000 budget to appear. All the homes she’s seen in that price range need extensive work.

“In the meantime, my house is falling apart,” she said. “It’s like I’m running into roadblocks left and right.”

Lazenby’s situation shows just how severe New Bedford’s housing crisis has become. About one in four of the city’s households spends more than half of their income on housing costs, according to 2023 census estimates. Even with three combined incomes from Lazenby’s full-time job and the two other women’s pensions, this family can no longer afford to maintain a home in the city where they have lived for generations.

Like many homeowners, they just can’t seem to keep up with the repairs. 

An enormous branch that recently fell in the backyard, just a few feet from the house, cost $500 to remove. The tree is dying and needs to be cut down — but Lazenby knows it will cost her “an arm and a leg.” She gets nervous about another branch falling on the house every time the wind picks up.

The family has until March to fix part of their fence that fell down, or their insurance company won’t renew their home insurance policy. They have been quoted $2,300 to rebuild it, about double what Lazenby had budgeted for. 

The house’s siding is due for a replacement too, but Lazenby doesn’t know when she’ll get to that $30,000 project. She’s already paying off a $27,000 loan she recently took out to fix the roof and replace the house’s drafty windows.

The city has programs to help homeowners with accessibility upgrades and essential repairs. But, paradoxically, Lazenby says moving home to take care of her family has made them ineligible for that aid. The programs count the income for everyone in the household, and Lazenby’s pay sends them over the maximum.

Lazenby, 50, works full time as a supervisor at a local nonprofit. Her retired mother collects a pension from her career as a chemical engineer at Polaroid, and her grandmother has a pension from her nursing career. Those incomes were supposed to support them through their retirement.

“They worked hard,” Lazenby said. “They worked good jobs for that reason.” 

Now they’re struggling to stay in the house they’ve lived in since the late 1960s. 

On a sunny Saturday morning, Jeanette Lynch carefully made her way down the back porch’s wooden steps. She turned 70 this year.

“I’m feeling it now, too,” she said. She has arthritis and a knee that’s been replaced three times. She’s also losing her vision.

Her mother, Dorothy Lynch, walks slowly with a rollator. Lazenby, afraid of her grandmother’s next fall, wants to build a ramp to help the nonagenarian get in and out of the house — another expensive improvement.

Lazenby also wants to expand the house to fit the whole family. She sleeps in the living room. Dorothy Lynch sleeps on a twin bed in the first floor’s only real bedroom, a nook so small that a king-size mattress would nearly touch all four walls. Jeanette Lynch shares a room on the second floor with her 17-year-old goddaughter.

“There is no space, no privacy,” Lazenby said.

A few times a week, they sit down for game nights together. Uno is their favorite. It’s a tight squeeze to fit everyone in the small living room that doubles as a dining room.

“But we make it work,” Lazenby said, “in spite of all the stuff we gotta deal with.”

A tenant takes action

Renee Ledbetter held a small coffee from Dunkin’ in her hands. She was grateful to a coworker for bringing it to her — it was the only thing in her stomach that Wednesday afternoon.

She was sitting at a small white table in her office, where she works as the director of a local program for at-risk youth. Ledbetter said she loves everything about her job, especially when she gets to see her clients succeed. The wall behind her was decorated with her leadership awards. But she wondered what they really amount to if she can’t afford lunch most days.

“It’s not really a job thing,” she said. “It’s a cost-of-living thing. I don’t know how to fix that.”

Rent for Ledbetter’s two-bedroom apartment in Fairhaven has increased from $1,000 to $1,800 over the last six years. In June, her landlord hiked the rent by $300 with less than a month’s notice. She can’t find anything cheaper than $1,800 in a neighborhood that would feel safe for her and her young adult son.

The higher payment forces her to make tough decisions every day. Will she pay her electric bill or her car payment? Will she buy groceries or medicine? The consequences are real: In August, her car was repossessed. She eventually got it back.

Ledbetter, 58, said she can’t apply for housing assistance because she makes too much money.

“It’s not just the people at the bus station,” she said. “It’s professional people that live their lives every day and struggle.”

Getting a second job isn’t an option because Ledbetter is often on-call. Her 29-year-old son has epilepsy and shouldn’t be working, she said, but he had to get a job as a security guard to help pay the bills.

Ledbetter said she copes through prayer. She takes everything one day at a time.

She’s also trying to get the attention of public officials. She’s president of United Interfaith Action, a local group that advocates for issues such as housing, education, and public safety. Just a few weeks after Ledbetter’s rent jumped by $300, the group organized a community meeting and a demonstration at City Hall supporting policy changes to promote affordable housing.

Speaking to dozens of people at the group’s meeting in the basement of Our Lady of the Assumption Church, Ledbetter described her situation as a “living nightmare.” She and other local leaders who work full-time, professional jobs described the painful sacrifices they had to make to keep a roof over their heads.

United Interfaith Action advocated for “inclusionary zoning,” which would require every new housing development to set aside a certain percentage of units for low-income renters. The group also wanted the city to commit more of its funding from the state and federal government toward housing.

Ledbetter and another UIA leader, Andrea Sheppard Lomba, met with Mayor Jon Mitchell in August. They told The Light the mayor was noncommittal on inclusionary zoning, afraid it would scare away developers. That’s similar to the stance he took when he vetoed a nonbinding ballot question on rent control last year.

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office confirmed that the meeting took place and provided a written statement from city housing director Josh Amaral. The statement said that the mayor would be “all for” inclusionary zoning if New Bedford had a stronger housing market.

“It isn’t that inclusionary zoning would inherently ‘scare away’ developers,” Amaral stated. He argued that such a policy “makes more sense” in areas where it’s more profitable to build housing. In New Bedford, such a law would create “another administrative roadblock” for developers, he stated.

Many housing developments in New Bedford, Amaral added, aren’t profitable without heavy government subsidies. As a condition of those subsidies, the developers are usually required to set aside more income-restricted units than a typical inclusionary zoning law would mandate.

Sheppard Lomba and Ledbetter said they do appreciate zoning reforms that the mayor has recently proposed to allow for more housing development. The group is doing more community outreach work to help it decide on its next steps. They say the city has a lot more work to do to address spiraling housing costs.

Sitting in her office on that recent Wednesday afternoon, Ledbetter said she doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her.

“Don’t sympathize,” she said. “But mobilize.”

A student misses out

Randy Hepburn didn’t grow up in New Bedford, but he loves it here.

The 20-year-old is a full-time biology student at Bristol Community College. When he’s not in class, he spends a lot of his time downtown. He frequents the coffee shops. Sometimes he grabs a bite at his favorite lunch spot, Destination Soups. He said he likes the culture of the city, its “grassroots” vibe, and its street life. 

“This is gonna sound so stupid, but even walking past randos on the street is so cool,” he said.

When he’s ready to go home at the end of the day, he gets in his car and turns on some pop-punk music — or maybe psychedelic electronic, which he’s been getting into lately.

Then, he drives nearly an hour northwest of the city to his parents’ house in Wrentham — “raw suburbia,” in his eyes.

The commute? “It sucks,” he said. Hepburn would love to live in New Bedford, but he can’t afford an apartment here. He says most of his friends live with their parents, too. He hasn’t met anyone at the community college with their own place.

“They know it’s not affordable or worth it, so they’re not even bothering,” he said.

Hepburn did live in New Bedford for about a year, renting an apartment from his stepbrother and sharing it with his sister and her boyfriend. The rent was manageable, partly because they were getting the family price, he said. But his stepbrother sold the property, forcing him to move in June. His sister and her boyfriend wanted a place of their own.

He scrambled to find another apartment close to his school. He didn’t know anyone else he felt comfortable rooming with.

Most one-bedroom apartments he saw were going for $1,400 a month, way out of his $800 maximum budget. The listings closer to $800 looked run-down and dirty — some lacking basic amenities like a fridge, he said.

“I searched for two days, and by then, I saw it wasn’t happening,” he said.

So he moved back home. He said his parents don’t mind him being there, but he’d rather be closer to school. He thinks he’d make more friends in New Bedford if he did.

“I’m 20, I want to do stuff on my own; I want to be a person,” he said.

Right now, he’s planning to save up his money while living at home, transfer to UMass Dartmouth, and try to live on campus there. The dog day care where he works part-time in Wrentham can’t give him enough hours, so he’s looking for a new job right now — either a dog day care in New Bedford, or a typical college gig like food service.

One recent Monday, he discovered another thing he loves about the city: the views from the study lounge on the fifth floor of the college building. It was a bright, clear day, and he could see plenty of fishing boats in the harbor. He said the city’s heritage as a fishing port is another thing that makes the city so cool.

“The culture around here and the people around here are really nice,” he said. “It’s just that I can’t live here.” 

Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org

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