New housing finally comes to New Bedford but neighbors have concerns

Anyone who regularly drives up and down Kempton and Mill streets into the heart of the city’s West End knows that as you near the downtown, the United House of Prayer for All People is an iconic landmark.

Though the successor to “Sweet Daddy” Grace’s original church may not be as packed with congregants as it once was, it is still an important touchstone for the followers of “Sweet Daddy” (Charles Manuel Grace), the Cape Verdean immigrant who took his spiritual vision from its origins in Wareham and New Bedford to the highest of national stages, including establishing large congregations in Washington, D.C, Charlotte, and Los Angeles. 

To this day, the United House of Prayer for All People on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith has 137 churches in 29 states. It has been legendary for its soul food restaurants and as a charismatic leader-centered organization. Its founder, well known for an endearingly flamboyant style, has been called one of the first “celebrity preachers.”

The church’s rise is arguably an important development in American religious history, with “Sweet Daddy” known to have preached to integrated followers in the South decades before the Civil Rights movement. 

So the news that a developer named Tracey White planned to build 15 condominiums (now reduced to nine) in a vacant lot directly next to the church has been greeted by many well-respected members of the New Bedford Cape Verdean and African American community with deep skepticism. 

Many view the church site as an historic site in New Bedford’s history that has been underappreciated by the city. And others are anxious about gentrification in an area of New Bedford once abandoned by white flight but now under redevelopment pressure that could make it unaffordable to those who live there.

Certainly, the proposed market-rate condominium development would help address the housing shortage in the city. 

Whether it would help the low- and moderate-income people is another matter, depending on whether or not one’s philosophy is that the best way to solve housing shortages is to build new construction of any sort.

Mr. White is to be complimented for scaling down the development to a more manageable size and design. Still, the reconfigured plan will block much of the view of the United House structure as you come down Kempton. 

With 15 parking spaces slated for the nine units, it’s doubtful that the proposal would seriously change the area’s traffic and parking situation. Together with the plans to build an additional 44 condos in the former Holy Family Holy Name School a few blocks away, a better case can be made that the two developments might make this section of the West End more dense and busy.

But dense development is undeniably going to happen in New Bedford and everywhere else in Massachusetts as the state tries to solve its dispiriting housing crisis. The indisputable facts are that there are too many people seeking housing in too few units in Massachusetts and that the state is already densely developed and overly dependent on the car. The solution on the table for both cities and suburbs is to develop in more dense ways, and for all to rely less on individual motor vehicles and more on public transportation.

The people objecting to the development near the United House of Prayer are by no means the only local neighborhood group with concerns in the city, even as the Mitchell administration and City Council have done the right thing in updating zoning regulations to encourage more multi-family and neighborhood-respecting housing.

After decades of sluggish starts, New Bedford is finally seeing a housing spurt. But even so, neighborhood residents of proposed developments are objecting to any number of the proposals.

We’ve seen this in the original 35-unit apartment complex envisioned at the historic Child & Family Services building on Pleasant Street, and also at the three-story apartment building talked about near the former New York China Buffet on Ashley Boulevard in the North End. 

We’ve also seen it at that 29-unit studio apartment proposal near Clasky Common Park that completely fell apart, and we even saw it in relation to a massive 300-unit low-income apartment complex proposed for Hathaway Road just over the Dartmouth town line. That development will abut many of the single-family residential New Bedford neighborhoods in Ward 3.

The reasons for neighborhood objections are diverse — from concerns about parking to the desire to preserve a neighborhood’s character and yes, also due to prejudice and fears about low-income or people of color moving in, or, on the other side, fears of gentry moving into urban neighborhoods.

The bottom line is that most people are skeptical of change, particularly change in their own neighborhood that might directly affect the way they have been accustomed to living.

I myself have lived in downtown New Bedford for 24 years and was initially worried when a new five-story apartment complex was proposed near the corners of Union and Eighth streets. I was concerned that it might cast the nearby historic First Unitarian Church into shadow, and that its initial designs seemed rather pedestrian.

But the 53-unit structure that has come to be called the Flats at 8th has turned out to be a great addition to Union Street. It sports a very interesting contemporary design and as of Friday is fully rented, with apartments going from $1,200 a month to a little above $2,000.

It has limited parking onsite, so most of the parking will be offsite, according to the city. The Zeiterion garage is just a few blocks away, but there is no doubt the Flats will bring more cars downtown. My hope is it will also help spur SRTA to continue with its increased service in recent years. We will see.

In the meantime, these proposed developments all around the city will work out compromises with the neighbors or they won’t. Several have already been altered or abandoned.

For Tracey White, he has said he is willing to sell his plot between Kempton and Mill to the United House of Prayer if he is able to recoup his development costs, and understandably he’ll want to make a profit. Whether the church — which has a history of building low-income and elderly housing — will decide to purchase it is unknown. The bishop, who is based in Washington, D.C, makes that decision, according to its local pastor, Harold Taylor.

It might be nice if the plot could be developed into an historic park nodding to the site’s history. But to be fair to the rest of the residents of New Bedford, any effort in that direction would deprive all residents of needed property tax revenue. So it would also be nice if the church decided to construct low-income housing at the plot or nearby. 

These housing and development issues are complex when they come right down to the nitty-gritty of individual proposals. That’s the natural tension on any issue in New Bedford or elsewhere. There’s the noble public policy goal and there’s the neighborhood that will have to live with the changes in the real world.

Only time will tell whether New Bedford can solve these issues as a win-win for everybody.

Jack Spillane is a news and opinion columnist for The New Bedford Light. You can contact Jack at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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