Displacement of Renters with Luxury Condo Owners is Homogenizing Newburyport

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This article was inspired by the following real estate ad I saw on Facebook:

Homogeny feels stable until it isn’t. It feels inevitable until Newburyport realizes it has priced out the very people who made it worth living in. The price of homogeny is the slow death of a community’s soul.

Respectfully, which current city councilors have the resolve to enact a one‑year delay in the sale (for any or no reason) of any of the remaining 79 rental apartment buildings in Newburyport that contain four or more dwelling units? This is not a ban. It is not a moratorium. It is a pause long enough for families to find schools, stabilize their lives, and avoid being pushed out with no recourse. A single year of breathing room is the smallest possible intervention in a housing market that has already tipped far beyond the reach of ordinary residents.

An eight‑month effort in 2025 to pursue such a measure slogged through City Councilor Heather Shand’s then‑Planning & Development Committee hearings, through discussions with Andy Port, Director of Planning and Development, and through hearings with the Affordable Housing Trust, was met with a familiar choreography: Fast‑talking bureaucratic droning, mumbled comments, procedural fog, finger‑pointing. Every gesture except the one that matters: a willingness to act.

Meanwhile, renters such as those displaced from 105 State Street lack the financial means, the time, and often the specialized skills required to challenge eviction notices. They are not equipped to fight LLCs, developers, or the procedural labyrinth that accompanies displacement.

And the City of Newburyport, by receiving increased property‑tax revenues from condo buyers rather than rental-apartment building owners, stands by clutching pearls, shaking hands, and blaming the Orwellian abstraction of “market forces.” The displacement is treated as meteorological (an unfortunate but natural weather pattern) rather than what it actually is: a sequence of human decisions made by people with power, capital, and authority.

Speaking of Power, Capital, and Authority: the current condo‑conversion ordinance fails to protect rental‑apartment dwellers when one party sells a building to another. Enforcement of ordinances — as with the currently unenforced short‑term rental unit (STRU) rules — is at the whims of the mayor.

The recent advertisement for 105 State Street condos made the logic unmistakable:
“Bespoke homes.”
“Engineered hardwood.”
These are not neutral descriptors. They are the vocabulary of a city that has learned to aestheticize its own inequity.

“Bespoke homes” in the Newburyport real‑estate dialect means nothing more exotic than luxury housing customized for people who have enough money to customize it. It means financial warfare without mercy.

Homogeny is not an accident of taste or a neutral demographic drift. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has learned to weaponize aesthetics, language, and procedure to produce a single result: removal.

Financial warfare without mercy is the real ordinance, stronger than any written one, because it requires no vote, no debate, no public comment. It operates through price, through timing, through the speed at which a building can be sold and emptied before anyone can mount a defense. It operates through the city’s willingness to accept higher tax revenues from condo buyers while pretending the displacement that produces those revenues is a natural weather pattern.

Financial warfare without mercy is the slow death of a community’s soul, itemized.

And unless the city can muster the resolve for even the smallest intervention (a single year of breathing room for families already pushed to the edge), then homogeny will not simply continue. It will accelerate. It will become the new civic identity, lacquered in real‑estate gloss and sold back to us as prosperity.

“Bespoke” signals exclusivity: a home not merely purchased but curated, implying the buyer deserves a level of attention unavailable to ordinary residents. “Bespoke” reframes removal as artisanal craft. It homogenizes the buyer class: affluent, white, mobile, frictionless.

In homogeneous Newburyport, “bespoke homes” means homes tailored to the preferences of the people replacing the people who once lived here; homes engineered to match the aesthetic of wealth while pretending to celebrate uniqueness; homes that complete the transformation of a mixed‑income coastal city into a curated lifestyle product.

14 rental units at 105 State Street became six luxury condos. That is the redevelopment logic: a surface of “housing improvement” over a core engineered to reduce the number of actual people who can live in Newburyport.

This brings the question back to the people who hold elected office. Who among the current city councilors and mayor cares enough to act? Who will support a one‑year delay on the sale of any of the remaining 79 rental buildings with four or more units? Who will acknowledge that displacement is not an accident but a policy outcome? Who will say that the city’s responsibility extends beyond the tax revenue generated by condo conversions?

The city already has tools it refuses to use. Enforcement of the short‑term rental ordinance through Granicus software at roughly $25,000 could fund an attorney dedicated to crafting enforceable, common‑sense affordable‑housing protections. The city could choose to treat renters as constituents rather than collateral. It could choose to slow the engineered uniformity replacing continuous, imperfect, alive communities with a curated, resale‑optimized demographic.

The question isn’t whether the city can act. It’s whether anyone in office actually will.

Please send your comments and solutions to:
Citycouncil@newburyportma.gov

Walt Thompson
Newburyport resident

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