Living in Fall River, MA

About Fall River

Fall River separated from Freetown as a town in 1803, spent about 30 years named Troy, and took back its name in 1834; it became a city in 1854. The name comes from the Quequechan River, believed to mean 'falling river' in Wampanoag. A fire in July 1843 destroyed much of the town center, and the city motto, 'We'll Try', dates from the rebuilding. Mills followed the river's drop to the bay, and by 1868 the city had passed Lowell as the leading U.S. textile city. The 1847 Metacomet Mill is its oldest surviving textile mill.

I-195 divides the city into the North End and the South End. North of the highway, the Highlands ridge keeps houses from about 1840 to 1925 in Greek Revival, Italianate, Second Empire and Queen Anne styles, along with North Park, designed by the Olmsted Brothers. Below it, the Lower Highlands mixes Federal and Greek Revival houses with late-19th-century multiunit worker housing. On the waterfront, Battleship Cove and Fall River Heritage State Park sit beside the Braga Bridge, and to the south Kennedy Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, slopes down to Mount Hope Bay.

The 2020 Census counted 44,346 housing units in Fall River, and the Census Bureau's 2020-2024 survey puts the owner-occupied share at 35.3 percent. The city's Waterfront Transit-Oriented Development district, created in 2011 along the Taunton River, already set a minimum multifamily density of four units and allowed mixed uses; to meet the MBTA Communities law the City Council extended it north from Davol Street to North Main Street and from Walnut Street north to Wayland Street, and the state lists Fall River as compliant as of October 21, 2026. MassDOT has been replacing the Route 79 expressway on the waterfront with a grid of surface streets and a narrower, rebuilt Davol Street (the work was nearing completion in November 2025), and on July 24, 2026 it opened bidding to develop about 20 acres of former highway land on the river beside Fall River Depot, which the state says could support more than 1,000 homes; proposals were due October 21, 2026.

Homes in Fall River

Fall River's mill boom housed workers in thousands of wood-frame, multi-family tenements, usually three-floor triple-deckers with up to six apartments, and mill companies built more than 12,000 units. The 2020 Census counted 44,346 housing units, 7.5 percent of them vacant. The Highlands and Lower Highlands keep older single-family and Victorian houses, and The Warren Group recorded 300 single-family sales in 2025.