It’s a good thing every once in a while to get out of your own element.
I got out of my New Bedford element a few weeks ago when I visited Barcelona in Spain.
I’d been to northern Europe a couple times but never to the south. And never to a city that I ended up thinking was as beautiful and liveable as Barcelona.
The Spanish city’s metropolitan area is about the same size as Boston (5.3 million vs. 4.9 million), but the similarities pretty much end there.
The European metropolis on the Mediterranean Sea was originally founded by the Romans, and it is both an old and new place. Wedged between a mountain range and two rivers, it has some natural boundaries that have pushed it toward dense development.
Mid-way through the 19th century, Barcelona had begun to experience the growing pains of the industrial revolution. So it set to tear down its medieval walls surrounding the Gothic old town and began planning for a dense urban future for the growing neighborhoods in the sweep of flat land outside the historic walls. It has now developed all the way up to the nearby Collserola Mountains, which are literally just 6 or 7 miles from the sea.
Barcelona during this period of growth was gifted to have a local engineer named Ildefons Cerda, who came up with an idea for a city with dense apartment buildings but surrounded by wide avenues and lots of garden islands. So even when you’re in the heart of the thickest developments, most buildings are no more than 150 feet high and have sculptured corners to allow better visibility.
“He (Cerda) took what was, for the time, an exceptionally holistic view of urban quality,” writes David Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy in a 2019 article in the online newsite Vox. “He wanted to ensure that each citizen had, on a per capita basis, enough water, clean air, sunlight, ventilation, and space.”
Cerda designed avenues that would eventually be wide enough to accommodate both automobiles and mass transit; the buildings are high, but they are not skyscrapers; the blocks are long but not too long. Buildings have sculptured corners for increased visibility, the first floors are designed for commerce and the upper floors divided between living space, and this is key, the same housing is designed to include living spaces for both the working and middle classes.
Barcelona is not perfect.
Its sewage system often smells, faintly and strongly, in a variety of different parts of the town. This in spite of the fact you frequently see uniformed septic workers on the street. The best explanation I received for this is that it’s an ancient system, first built as aqueducts by the Romans, and much of it is now inaccessible and hard to maintain.
More ominous, affordable housing is increasingly scarce in Barcelona. The reason is insufficient government-funded housing and pressure on a tourism-reliant economy connected to the growth of Airbnbs.
The city government has committed to increasing long-term affordability by way of an approach in Europe that is referred to as “social housing.” The goal of that approach is to create housing that is permanently affordable, democratically controlled by residents and with a goal of equity between social classes.
Efforts have been made to use government grants, eviction mediation and emphasis on protections for the elderly. Whether they are more or less successful than in America I’m not equipped to judge.
Barcelona is not all that much like New Bedford, except for the fact it has preserved a lot of its historic old town, and that, like the Whaling City, it is clearly a place that values art and architecture. Its world-renowned, and astonishingly innovative modernist architect, Antoni Gaudi, had a vision of buildings as a reflection of the natural world. I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like his rounded, almost ethereal creations, anywhere in the United States.
But it was the multi-story apartment buildings that line the Barcelona avenues that most got me thinking about New Bedford as we embark this year on what is hoped will be a major expansion of multi-unit housing. With both mortgages and rental prices escalating, we badly need it.
Most visible so far in New Bedford is the development on Union Street in the heart of the downtown. There are currently no fewer than four big housing projects underway:
- Eighteen and Union, the big mostly high-end 28-unit development over the National Club; and Tallman Warehouse.
- 117 Union Street, a mixed-use, mostly affordable, 45-unit development that is the brainchild of New Bedford Housing Authority director Steve Beauregard.
- 10@8th, minority developer Duane Jackson’s largely affordable, 52-unit building at the site of the former Registry of Motor Vehicles.
- And One Circle Company’s planned 45-unit, market-rate project at the site of the former Keystone Building, a site that has been a vacant lot for 20 years.
It strikes me as a good thing that New Bedford is reaching for both affordable and market-rate units, and not one or the other. All construction will help control the escalating prices, and a diversity of classes is something New Bedford, indeed all post-industrial cities, need.
All of the Union Street developments are on a somewhat smaller scale than what I saw in Barcelona, which you’d expect in a metropolitan area that is less than one-tenth its size. With the exception of Route 18, Acushnet Avenue, Ashley Boulevard, maybe County Street, our thoroughfares are not as wide as those in the Spanish city. New England urban centers have just not developed, and been planned, in the same way. But with the current push for lots of bigger, multi-unit buildings to solve the housing crisis, now might be a time to plan for the future.
With new multi-unit zoning planned for the so-called “transit oriented districts” (TODs) around the coming MBTA station on Church Street in the North End and the Whale’s Tooth Parking Lot near downtown, New Bedford is on the verge of a big development splurge. Maybe not quite as big yet as the quiet spurt of scores of apartments constructed over the last two decades in the North End. The former Wamsutta, Cliftex, Whitman and other historic mill conversions along Riverside Avenue in the near North End and in the Hicks-Logan area have been both extensive and big successes.
They are not enough.
City Planner Jennifer Carloni says that New Bedford is in the process of developing an overall planning philosophy for its push for updated zoning, and that additional housing will be a big part of that.
The city is in the midst of hiring a consultant to research multi-unit housing and related issues like parking and transportation in the two transit-oriented districts. “We’re utilizing a grant we got from the MBTA communities group,” she said.
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Much of the housing development so far has taken place in denser sections of the city such as Union Street in the downtown.
But the TODs will be a prime spot for much of the housing development in New Bedford. The MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority) has mandated denser development in those districts, and the city is in the process of defining where they will be.
It won’t be easy.
Already there has been pushback by residents who presently live in the TODs and are worried that a proposal for .75 parking spaces per unit (the national standard for urban development) will burden already crowded streets. The city’s current parking requirement is two spaces per unit. These residents say there are not enough non-motor vehicle transportation options in New Bedford to make the denser buildings with fewer parking spots really work.
At a Zoning Board of Appeals meeting last September, some residents turned out to object to a Boston developer’s plans to build 35 market-rate units for young professionals in a complex around the historic Charles Russell House in the Clasky Common neighborhood. That mansion in some of its past incarnations has been a convent/hospital and offices for Child & Family Services.
But the plans of the developer, Ben Marshall, for only 27 off-street parking spaces for the 35 units, got a cool reception from both the neighbors and ZBA.
“You can’t live in New Bedford without a car — at all,” city resident James Clark told him.
The developer has promised to do a traffic study.
Many urban New Bedford neighborhoods were built densely before the invention of the automobile. As time went on and the city tried to compete with suburbs designed for cars, it changed its zoning to prevent the development of units that nowadays could help address its housing shortage. Now there is a disconnect between the zoning and the actual housing in some sections of the city, Carloni explained.
“Now, you can’t actually build what currently exists,” she said. “Are we prioritizing people or are we prioritizing cars?”
The fact is that New Bedford lacks housing, has limited land for development and that residential buildings with parking are more expensive to construct than housing with limited parking, she said.
In Barcelona, many of the nine- and 10-story housing complexes have underground garages. Some of the developments planned for New Bedford, such as 10@8th will. But many will not. Some say that it is difficult to do underground garages in the city because of ledge.
Ward 6 Councilor Ryan Pereira, who chairs the city’s Ordinance Committee, has proposed 1.25 spaces per unit as opposed to the .75 proposed in the Planning Department’s proposed ordinance.
“You can’t take public transportation everywhere you want to go,” in New Bedford, said Ward 3 Councilor Shawn Oliver at a November council meeting. His ward will be home to one of the new passenger rail train stations on Church Street.
In many ways it’s a chicken and egg question. Which came first, the dense neighborhoods or the good transportation?
The planners believe that “If you build it, they will come.” In other words, as dense housing without parking for every unit develops, that will put pressure on both the government and private sector to develop better transportation options.
Marshall, the developer of the Russell House project, points out that many young urban professionals don’t need an automobile; they just call up an Uber or Lyft ride once a week for the occasions when they need to go outside their neighborhoods.
SRTA, the Southeast Regional Transit Authority, has slowly been trying to expand its bus and van service for years. It recently announced the return of Sunday bus service for the first time in memory, and is currently using free fares for a limited time to encourage ridership. But SRTA needs much more service, including at night.
Wherever New Bedford ends up going as it revamps its zoning ordinances in an effort to develop more housing, it needs to solve the problem of the slow pace that development is currently taking place.
The conventional wisdom is that the city needs many thousands of new housing units, but this year there were only about 500 on the table. A new report commissioned by the Regeneration Project Committee calls for 8,700 new homes by 2030 — a tall order, to be sure.
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New Bedford Housing Authority executive director Beauregard is in the midst of completing his exciting 45-unit building on the edge of the historic district.
The city has steered him to a traditional design in keeping with the nearby National Park waterfront neighborhood. But he noted that the project, which is almost entirely financed by state and federal grants, took five years to build because of the slowness of the grant administration process and the limited funds available. New Bedford is competing with every other municipality in the state for the grants, he noted.
“The process takes too long,” he said.
The state would do better to combine its grants into one agency, and awards should be given on a rotating basis, so some communities don’t win more grants than others.
It’s hard to deny that the city isn’t making progress with new construction. But it needs to go faster.
Will New Bedford ever be as beautiful as Barcelona? In its own way, I think it already is.
It has the historic bones and some wide, well-landscaped avenues that are a good start. Transportation is about to get a little better.
Now is the time to put good planning, like that done by Ildefons Cerda, in place.
Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
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Absolutely, New Bedford needs to build up. It’s time. We have areas. The lot near Kylers seafood, the Hicks Logan area. The huge empty lot that is a waste of space behind PAACA. The parking don’t always have to be underground. Just build the garage and then the building on top. It can be done.
Fall River reportedly has a housing development pipeline of over 2,000 new units (nearly 10x larger than New Bedford) and they are dealing with the same funding options, construction costs, and state grant-making process.
It appears there are some lessons still to be learned a little closer to home.
When Fall River’s government is beating you at anything, you know you are in a bad place.
Anyone who has been in New Bedford for long enough knows that the government isn’t actually interested in building affordable housing. Just go look up the City’s property dispositions, which are mostly supposedly geared towards building housing, see how poorly they are managed and you’ll never wonder again why the City owns so much useless real estate that is unused. There is no political will in New Bedford to develop, it will never happen. Too insular, too backwards, too corrupt.
I agree with much of this, but it has a major blind spot and doesn’t go far enough. The fact is that it is imperative that we greatly densify New Bedford. It is necessary economically, socially, ecologically, and financially.
Economically, the nation as a whole is increasingly concentrating value production in a relatively small number of metropolitan areas. Boston is one of them. We need to leverage that economic influence to build dense housing that high-paid, remote/hybrid, knowledge workers will want to live in while not displacing the existing working class. Once a large enough cohort of knowledge workers live here, some of their employers will open branch offices/labs here just as they’re doing in Worcester, Lowell, Lynn, and Quincy. No workers, no high-paid jobs to supercharge the tax base. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue and we can take advantage of it if we choose to. There’s a huge amount of latent demand throughout all of Eastern MA for housing at all levels, and anything we build will be occupied.
Socially, anyone in the 2/3rds of the city who currently rents knows too well that the city is gentrifying. Rents are exploding because of demand and as much as the author wants social housing, the city doesn’t have the money to build enough to even make a dent. However, that gets to an important blind spot missed in this article: The importance of ownership. If people owned their units, forced displacement wouldn’t be happening. We should therefore be prioritizing condos and housing cooperatives. Housing that is owned. Ownership prevents displacement by keeping a stable price for the owner for decades and gives them a real stake in their neighborhoods. It also means that after 15 – 30 years, a family finally owns their home outright and can then spend the extra money within the community instead of on some rich absentee landlord’s 3rd yacht in Florida.
Our current ownership rate of 33% is abysmal. The existence of a large permanent renter class living in indefinite precarity and sends tens of millions of dollars out of our city each month is a travesty. The goal should be increasing that rate to 50% in 10 years and 80% by 2050. We should remove zoning restrictions city-wide for construction of owner-occupied condo and coop buildings in order to do this.
Some will say: But why condos when most people want houses? The answer is simple: Because housing is a necessity, they’re what most people in this city can afford, and we have limited land to build on. Limiting housing with unnecessary restrictions like our current zoning regulations because it’s not what people think is ideal is like limiting the number of supermarkets because people would rather eat out every day at restaurants instead of cooking. How many people would starve if we prevented groceries stores and supermarkets from existing within the city’s zoning plans? Why are we okay with doing that with housing? Most families in New Bedford could afford a 3-bedroom condo if we built them in large numbers. In addition, the new condos would have central air, create a more walkable environment, have proper ventilation, and wouldn’t be filled with century-old lead piping and asbestos.
Our limitations on housing production are literally poisoning children and causing people to become homeless. Is your “neighborhood character” worth the lead poisoning the neighborhood’s children will get from the lead paint and piping in those old houses? Is your parking availability worth people with full-time jobs having to live in their cars that they can barely afford? Do we care more about the people living in the neighborhood or the aesthetics of the neighborhood? What’s more important?
With regard to parking minimums, we shouldn’t have them at all. This city’s neighborhoods were built for people, not cars, and we’re better off for it. Personal automobiles are the most inefficient form of modern transport, the most harmful to the environment, the most expensive, and the most dangerous for those outside them.
We should be building toward a society that doesn’t have them at all. For one, imagine how much extra money you’d save if you paid for a $100 transit card each month instead of however much you currently spend on car payments, insurance, maintenance, and the rest? Transitioning over the long-term to a car-free New Bedford would pull most of the city’s working poor out of poverty entirely without any other policy changes. Most people would be able to afford a much larger condo (4 bed, 2 bath instead of a 3 bed, 1 bath) in the future if they didn’t need to pay for cars as well.
In addition, why are we okay with having rapidly moving heavy machinery crisscrossing the human environment? We’re all used to it because we’ve mostly lived in an auto-centric society for so long, but is it really a good thing?
What’s the primary reason why parents don’t let their children play outside with their friends anymore till dark? Because they might get hit by a car. Why are the majority of people in this city overweight and obese today? Because of the car. Why do so many no longer know their neighbors and feel depressed and socially isolated? Because of the car. Why is it more dangerous to drive at night? Because of people drunk driving their cars. Why are our small businesses on the Ave and Downtown struggling compared to the big box stores in North Dartmouth? Because of the car. Why don’t you have an extra $500 – $1000 a month or more in your bank account? Because of the car.
And last, but not least: If you or someone you knew was a victim of a crime from 1960 to 2000, do you know what the primary cause of that was? You know, that huge crime wave from the 1960s to the 1990s that made so many cities like New Bedford far more dangerous than before or after? That was primarily caused indirectly by lead particulates in car exhaust. Half of all Americans in the second half of the 20th-century had some level of lead poisoning due to leaded gasoline. Lead poisoning greatly increases aggression, lowers IQs, and increases impulsivity. Hence the crime wave.
So after everything I just mentioned above, is the personal automobile worth it? Could we have gone a different way? What if New Bedford instead had light rail running beneath Acushnet Ave and Rt. 18? What if we had expanded the streetcar network instead of ripping it out? What if we had a bus system that was actually usable for most people? More importantly, could we change our tack if we did collectively say the personal automobile was a mistake?
Either way, owning a personal automobile in the future is going to become much harder for people in our city. Cars, used and new, are becoming much more expensive, car insurance is becoming downright usurious, and the repair costs are crazy. But what happens in 2035 when new gasoline-powered vehicles are no longer being produced?
Most families in New Bedford currently park a car on the street, and the vast majority of those who don’t park on the street still don’t have an easily accessible charger for an electric car. Will we all have to spend a decent block of our time every week sitting at a charging station? Not to mention that many of these electric cars start at ridiculously high prices, aren’t easy to fix, and lose much of their range in winter. Is it still worth it to have an auto-centric society that requires parking minimums and personal automobiles? Is it still worth limiting housing density over?
As I stated before, I believe we need to abolish parking minimums and residential zoning restrictions for condos and housing cooperatives city-wide entirely. We didn’t have them when most of the city was built and we shouldn’t have them now. They were always classist concepts anyway.
“But I don’t want a condo, I want a house on 2 acres!”
Great, do you have $500k or more? No? Then have fun paying for your landlord’s new Audi until you do. I’m sure Freetown will still be there when you can afford it. However, don’t stop the rest of us from being able to own what we can afford in the meantime.
Barcelona is on my bucket list but seems much like,Athens and Thessaloniki whi h I gave visited w smaller multi story apt blds w stores below many w a Seaview stores below and,stitching living and dwelling needs together.Zoning laws prevent developers from building monster towers that you see in NYC or Chicago or Beijing that wall off peopke without a view .Barcelona had the fortune of a creative Gaudi Athens not so much in its rush to rebuild after a brutal civil war that tore down many mansions and neo classical bldgs that its now trying to remediate.Tks Jack for a thoughtful article that reminds us of New Bedfords historic bones which w some creative planning can add some meat and potatoes to living and shopping downtown and in the North end..then there’s something to do w that highway to nowhere rt 18