TRANSPORTATION / HOUSING

Is South Coast Rail bringing ‘a bunch of rich people’ to New Bedford?

There’s no sign that South Coast Rail is gentrifying the city, say people who watch New Bedford’s housing market closely.

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Jeremi Ramos hoped to find a tenant for this apartment soon.

The property manager thought he was offering a great place at a competitive price — $1,400 a month for a spacious living area, one bedroom, and a “bonus room” where afternoon sun streams in through big bay windows. He touted the unit’s brand-new high-efficiency heating system and new insulation.

A year or two ago, Ramos says, he would have found a tenant in a matter of days. But on a recent Wednesday evening, he locked up the unit in New Bedford’s North End and walked down the stairs of the triple decker again. He had just finished his fourth showing in three weeks without receiving a single application — just a “trickle” of mild interest.

Less than a mile away, a diesel train chugged into Church Street Station. This new stop opened in March 2025 as part of South Coast Rail, the billion-dollar MBTA expansion that brought New Bedford and a few other communities around Massachusetts’ South Coast region into Boston’s transit network. 

The newly renamed Fall River/New Bedford Line now offers a roughly 100-minute ride to Boston’s core. Ridership on the line jumped by 2,000 trips a day after the extension opened. 

In the working-class fishing port of New Bedford, where about half of households are on food assistance and three-digit monthly rents weren’t unheard of just a few years ago, residents have worried that the MBTA extension would flood the housing market with trainloads of rich Bostonians ready to scoop up apartments and displace locals.

But people who closely watch New Bedford’s housing market say there’s no sign that South Coast Rail is gentrifying the city. 

“Rail-wise, I’m underwhelmed, honestly,” Ramos said. “I haven’t noticed a big impact at all.”

If anything, data and anecdotes from property managers like Ramos suggest the rental market may actually be cooling off. That doesn’t mean the city’s housing crisis is over — local tenants are still reeling from years of drastic rent increases. But experts say rents would have risen even without South Coast Rail on the horizon.

“If you waved a magic wand and the train went away, rents would not fall,” said Michael Goodman, a professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Housing costs are up because New Bedford hasn’t built enough housing to keep up with its increasing population, according to research by MassINC Policy Center.

When there’s more demand for a limited supply of apartments, it gives landlords more leverage to charge higher rents. Recent rent increases also reflect the rising expenses that landlords are facing from higher mortgage rates, property taxes, and repair costs.

“It’s driven by all sorts of factors, and it’s definitely not a bunch of rich people moving to New Bedford — I know that for sure,” said Elise Rapoza, a New Bedford resident who studies housing for MassINC.

What we know — and don’t know — about the train’s impact

New transportation projects can be linked with gentrification in some cases, but the exact relationship is murky.

“You can spend a lot of money on a new rail line, and the community doesn’t change,” said Yonah Freemark, a housing and transportation researcher at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Freemark’s team reviewed a range of research and found mixed evidence about whether new rail projects displace residents of nearby neighborhoods. It’s tricky to study this link, he said, because so many other factors could be at play in a housing market.

In New Bedford, there certainly are other factors. Rapoza said New Bedford is an increasingly attractive place to live, even without South Coast Rail — it’s on the ocean, has a vibrant arts scene, and offers a quick commute to the state university UMass Dartmouth one town over.

“As Greater Boston has become impossibly expensive, it’s one of the few remaining inexpensive places,” she said.

Of course, “inexpensive” is a relative term, Rapoza added. New Bedford rents have become unaffordable for many locals, but data shows housing costs are still much lower on the South Coast than in Boston and other mid-size cities around Massachusetts.

Population growth has driven rent increases for years in New Bedford, mainly from younger people forming new households and international immigrants flocking to the area, according to a 2024 MassINC analysis. It found that the number of households in the city increased twice as fast as the rate of new housing construction.

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“Across the city and its suburbs, the region now has roughly 5,000 new households trying to fit into just 2,800 new housing units,” the report said.

The analysis did find that thousands of people moved to New Bedford from high-cost-of-living areas elsewhere in Massachusetts throughout the 2010s — but they probably weren’t a driver of the city’s housing crisis. Data showed these movers tended to have lower incomes than long-term New Bedford residents, which meant the newcomers were not the well-off crowd associated with gentrification.

It’s still too soon to know how migration trends have changed since South Coast Rail was completed, because public data lags by a few years. But local housing experts strongly doubt that rail service has caused a sudden change.

Some of them question the appeal of commuting to Boston from New Bedford. On one hand, a white-collar worker with a hybrid schedule might not mind such a long train ride if they only need to be in Boston once or twice a week.

On the other hand, it’s still a distant commute that can take as long as two hours in each direction. Spend a little too long at an after-work shindig and you could find yourself waiting hours for the midnight train back to New Bedford.

Rapoza said she’s skeptical of the gentrification theory because other Massachusetts communities closer to Boston have had commuter rail for much longer than New Bedford has, and they haven’t seen the kind of gentrification that some people here are afraid of.

Expectation versus reality

As the days counted down to South Coast Rail’s launch last year, landlords were looking forward to a bigger pool of tenants with money to spend, said Lacy Borges, a New Bedford-based property manager.

“And then the train came, but nobody came with it,” she said.

Since then, Borges said landlords have had to soften their expectations. Some have followed her advice to cut their asking rent after their units sat for weeks without any qualified applicants.

The problem, she said, is that tenants in New Bedford have very low incomes. 

Like many other property managers, Borges used to require potential tenants to show proof that their monthly income is at least three times the rent. But it became too hard to find applicants that meet this standard, she says. So, more than a year ago, she started approving tenants who make only 2.5 times the monthly rent. That hasn’t changed with South Coast Rail.

Ramos, the other property manager, has also noticed more renters struggling to cobble together the income to afford a typical apartment. Many more of his applicants are on housing assistance now, he said.

It’s hard to tell exactly what typical rents are in New Bedford. The census collects information on rents each year, but the latest available data is from 2024, and annual estimates for New Bedford are fuzzy because the city has a small population. Zillow provides rent data at the city level, but even that is still an estimate, because not all apartments show up on the platform.

The Zillow data shows typical New Bedford rents starting to level off in the last few months after years of aggressive growth. It’s worth noting that the data shows a significant jump from July to October last year, after Borges and Ramos say they were already seeing the market slow.

If Borges and Ramos’ experiences are representative of the broader New Bedford market, it may mean that rents have finally hit the absolute limit of what tenants can pay.

It’s part of a grim new normal, one where households are stretched thin by ballooning costs for practically every necessity. Roughly half of New Bedford renters are considered “cost-burdened” by their rent, which means they spend more than a third of their income to put a roof over their head. About a quarter of the city’s renter households spend more than half their income on rent.

“I make darn good money and I look at these rents, and it’s like, wow,” Ramos said. “How do these people afford it?”

The silver lining is that tenants might now have some bargaining power they didn’t have two years ago, when vacant apartments were snatched up in a matter of days. Ramos went as far as calling it a “renter’s market.” He said he sometimes cuts deals with tenants to fill empty apartments.

Ramos said he never believed in the hype around South Coast Rail, but some property investors did, buying multifamily homes at high prices, with unrealistic expectations about the income they could generate from rents. He said one client recently asked him to list a two-bedroom apartment at $2,100 a month.

“I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t get you that,’” Ramos said. “He’s probably going to lose his house.”

Housing researchers are skeptical that housing costs have risen because of speculative investors banking on South Coast Rail, but they acknowledge that it’s a difficult area to study. Deeds generally don’t say why the buyer bought a property, or how they reached the final price. 

An influx of development

South Coast Rail may spur more housing construction, which New Bedford desperately needs to fill its shortage.

Josh Amaral, director of the city’s Office of Housing and Community Development, said developers are reaching out to the city asking about the train. But that’s usually just the start of a longer conversation.

“Developers can’t necessarily underwrite their projects as being grand slam successes because the train is here and it wasn’t before,” he said.

There are other reasons why developers might choose to build here. New Bedford has pursued an aggressive housing strategy to attract more construction, including with new laws to reform its zoning.

Still, Amaral believes South Coast Rail has contributed to an “influx” of development activity near the city’s downtown station. Projects have been proposed to convert a historic mansion, a church, and a nursing home into apartments. New “transit-oriented development” districts near the city’s two stations may be contributing to developers’ interest.

J. Peter Vanko is leading the project to convert the former Holy Family Holy Name School at 91 Summer St. into 44 condos. The building is about three-quarters of a mile from New Bedford Station, and just a few blocks from downtown. 

“There is a waiting pool of people who are going to be coming down from Boston, certainly,” Vanko said in an interview with The Light. “They sit there and they go, ‘Why am I going to pay three, four, five times as much in Boston?”

But that’s not Vanko’s only target buyer for these condos. There’s also a gap in the market for locals, he said. He hopes to offer a path to homeownership that’s affordable to middle-class workers already living in New Bedford — teachers, firefighters, construction workers, and professionals in offshore wind. The lowest-priced unit will start at around $190,000 to $210,000, he said.

The New Bedford Planning Board approved the project in December last year, and construction is scheduled to finish next summer.

“I have a sense that this is not my last project in New Bedford,” Vanko said.

Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org

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