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A friend of mine who had not been to New Bedford in about five years recently asked me what the heck is going on in Custom House Park.
She happened to be in the city and said she was shocked to see unhoused people living in tents in the beautiful park where they first staged DATMA’s fine-art installations. It looked rough, she said.
My friend is not the only one who’s noticed.
A colleague of mine at The Light had not been down to the historic district lately and told me he was horrified to drive by and see the tents and unhoused folks living in the park. A second colleague who lives downtown said she never frequents the pretty little spot because of the challenging population there.
Slowly but surely over the past few years, Custom House Park, which was designed and built 13 years ago by an internationally known landscape architect, has become home during the warm months to about 20 unhoused folks. This year some of those folks began to pitch tents and spread their blankets and belongings over much of its hilly lawns.
So what started out as an oasis of pastoral beauty in the middle of the downtown, replete with tables and chairs for downtown workers to eat lunch, or revelers to listen to music at summer concerts, has now become an all-day resting place for the unhoused and unbusy.
It’s not because the park, which was partially inspired by the very successful pocket park at Post Office Square in the Boston financial district, was not a good idea. It was. And Mayor Jon Mitchell should be admired for building it.
But unlike Post Office Square in Boston, there is no robust office/retail district surrounding Custom House Park. Well over a decade after it was built, vacant buildings and lots continue to line the adjacent Acushnet Avenue and even Freestone’s, the city’s first successful downtown restaurant of recent decades, closed in the wake of the pandemic. The handsome mixed-use housing development at 117 Union St. on the Barker’s Lane side of the park has been a big success but the overall area is still a long way from thriving economically.
The problem of Custom House Park is the problem of America in 2026. In a word, housing has become so expensive in post-pandemic New Bedford and most everywhere else, and cutbacks to government-funded behavioral health and housing programs have become so great, that the numbers of unhoused in the city is on the rise.
Carl Alves, the longtime director of PAACA, is one who has noticed.
In January, he wrote a letter to The New Bedford Light, about a “silver tsunami” of chronic homelessness among older adults. He recommended that Greater New Bedford establish a coordinated system of regional shelters, find a way to fund medical respite care, and expand community engagement for hot meal and housing services.
The mayor and City Council, however, have so far passed up on a chance to move toward dedicated homeless encampment spaces where the unhoused could legally pitch tents and avail themselves of services. Understandably, the fear is that no neighborhood would want it, or that it might attract folks from outside the city.
There simply is not enough help for these folks. And whether you are a religious person or not, I think a good number of us would agree that these people are our brothers and sisters, our fellow community members, whom we have a responsibility to try to help.
And please do not believe those who peddle the bogus story that they are mostly folks from outside New Bedford. They are not. And really, in the end what difference does it make whether they are originally from here in terms of solving the problem? They are living in New Bedford now and they need help. There has to be a way for the region to step up to address the situation.
There literally is no day-care type place in New Bedford for the unhoused to go during the day. Sister Rose House, the principal shelter in the South End of the city, is frequently full. Like many shelters, it requires folks who do not live there to leave during the day. House of Hope, a shelter in the North End, has a very mixed reputation among the unhoused folks and advocates I talked to for this column.
Let me be clear. The unhoused and others hanging around downtown New Bedford are not just at Custom House Park. Anyone who frequents the center of the city knows this. Take a walk by the sidesteps of the downtown post office, the side entrance to City Hall on Pleasant Street, the grand staircase to the downtown library, and it’s all the same. Tens of people, sometimes more than a score, sitting outside, completely dominating many of New Bedford’s public spaces. It’s not uncommon to see folks who have brought collapsible chairs, suitcases and carts and set up house for the day or evening. It just is the way it is these days.
By the way, this co-opting of public building steps raises the issue of what happens to these structures when you close an entrance to the public. But that’s another column.
What’s going on with the folks living at Custom House Park strikes me as something different from the historic unhoused population that you see sleeping in the morning in many of the sheltered doorways in the downtown. Those are people in the most acute throes of addiction but at least some of the women and men that I talked to at Custom House Park were sober. I’d describe them as folks like many of the rest of us but who for one reason or another are not able to take enough charge of their lives to figure out how to obtain affordable housing.
One woman, five months pregnant, talked about her fears that she would not be able to find some place to live as her time draws near. Another young man, burned out of his rooming house by fire a few years ago, continues to struggle with psychological stability.
Danielle Brown, an advocate for the unhoused who visits the folks in the park every day, told me the story of an older man dying of cancer whom she arranged to transport to Boston for his medical visits. He was a veteran but like some troubled unhoused folks he could be very difficult to deal with. She helped him anyway. In another case, she found the $60 necessary for a young man to travel to Providence to visit relatives for a few days.
There are certainly a number of programs and shelters in New Bedford to help the unhoused and folks who may be housed but who are nevertheless on the street all day with little to do. But there are not anywhere enough housing solutions or even enough regular meal services.
New Bedford, for all its progress in recent years, remains a largely low-income place. When there are housing and social service crises nationally, those problems are exponentially greater in post-industrial cities like this one. This seems especially so since the pandemic — when the economy has roared back for those at the very top but muddled along for everybody else.
Everything is a challenge for the folks in the park and on the stairways.
Mercy Meals & More at Pilgrim United Church provides breakfast Monday through Saturday, and the Salvation Army does lunch. Grace Episcopal Church provides some meals and Brown does what she can to fill in gaps.
Medical care is another challenge. South Coast Health provides some care and the Community Health Center serves folks. But there is no end to the problems.
Brown, a woman who was formerly unhoused herself and who works for Steppingstone, confirmed that the unhoused population is changing. It’s no longer just folks struggling with addiction or mental health challenges, she said, but people who have simply been priced out of their apartments.
Brown generally visits the folks at Custom House Park three times a day. She knows them well and every one of them is on the Bristol County Continuum of Care’s “coordinated entry waitlist” for housing. Most everybody in the park has been waiting for housing for over a year, she said. When there is money available, there have been rooms in local motels in the winter, but some of the state financial assistance for that program has now dried up.
Two weeks ago, as the city got ready for its annual Fifties Night, folks at Custom House Park told me that six or so police officers arrived the night before and moved them out. I witnessed several park dwellers with their belongings in the vacant lot across the street as they talked to several officers that night. Fifties Night and the concert in the park then took place without a hitch but the unhoused were all back the next day.
Police had also apparently instructed folks to remove the tents and stop occupying the park lawns with their blankets. Since that time, the unhoused folks and those hanging out with them, have limited themselves to the Fifty-Fourth Regiment plaza directly adjacent to the park.
Last week, the Whaling History Alliance, a friends group for the nearby National Park, apparently were able to co-exist with the folks occupying the plaza. Their Custom House Park concert by Wild Nights and the C & B Horns went off while the banners of their sponsors conveniently screened the concertgoers from the folks on the plaza.
The National Park has also been gracious enough to let the unhoused folks use their rest rooms, though city workers told me they’d also had to clean up human feces from the park.
There’s a lot going on in this little park these days.
New Bedford’s forward-thinking new police chief, Jason Thody, was good enough to spend an hour with me a few weeks ago talking about the folks living on the downtown streets and others who make the center city parks and public steps their summer homes.
He’s a thoughtful guy and explained that people, no matter who they are and what their circumstances, have a right to use public spaces. But when they use them, they have to adhere to certain regulations, he noted, such as not blocking others from using the sidewalks and passageways. And no-one can set up a tent in a public park. It’s against the law.
A few weeks ago the city set up its new Flock camera – which captures detailed images and loads them to a database, outside the library steps when they were getting crowded with people staying all day. The city maintained it had nothing to do with the people there, or a brawl that took place recently outside a nearby pub, but the people on the library steps quickly disappeared once the camera went up.
After folks were kicked out of Custom House Park, Brown said she was able to find a parking lot where the owner let them sleep, and some of the people at the park told me they moved to Griffin Street Cemetery, just south of downtown. At least one of the tents is still at the cemetery.
It’s an ongoing cycle.
The Flock camera later turned up on Acushnet Avenue at Custom House Park, where Brown said folks didn’t even care. They looked right at it and waved. In all honesty, I think the folks at the park have much bigger problems than who’s watching them on a Flock camera or putting them in a database.
Chief Thody noted that rounding up people on vagrancy charges is usually a losing issue in court, not to mention one for which there are no meaningful penalties. He has some downtown police visibility plans to try to keep spaces open to the public as much as possible, but in the end, he correctly noted that this is not a police problem but a societal one. The proper way to address the issue, I think everyone would agree, is through our elected government.
One thing I am sure about. We have to address the problem of the growing numbers of unhoused and behaviorally challenged people in downtown New Bedford. The time is past when we could just shrug our shoulders and say it’s always been this way.
No. It’s getting worse.
Jack Spillane is a New Bedford Light news and opinion columnist. You can reach him at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org
