A home off Cushman Avenue in the Kent Heights section. Journal photo / Bob Thayer

Much of East Providence’s Kent Heights neighborhood was developed in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Kent family, owners of the 400-acre White Rock Farm, began to sell off the land for housing lots.

Members of the family, which could trace its ancestry to the Mayflower, and originally settled in the Massachusetts towns of Plymouth and Dedham, chose many street names, honoring Plymouth County (Plymouth, Mayflower), their own family (Kent, Ide) and Native Americans (Wannamoisett.)

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Kent Heights

The farm had the highest hill in East Providence, and the family donated land for a water tower, which remains one of the neighborhood’s most visible landmarks.

Today, most traces of Colonial America and farm life are gone from Kent Heights, a densely populated, closed-in suburb in the eastern section of the city north of Riverside.

Kent Heights is bordered on the north by Warren Avenue, and it extends south to the junction of Veterans Memorial Parkway and Pawtucket Avenue; east to the East Shore Expressway; and west to South Broadway.

Real estate agent Joseph Botelho, of Red Realty, grew up in Kent Heights and still lives in the neighborhood.

He said many people he grew up with “end up coming back here” when they decide to buy a house, and many people who live on his street are people he has known since he was a child.

“It’s kind of like its own little enclave,” Botelho said. “It’s a very well-kept area of the city.”

Botelho guessed the residential housing stock in the neighborhood was “98 percent” single-family, with few multifamily and condominium properties, but there are a number of condominium complexes south of the neighborhood, on Bullocks Point Avenue.

“There’s not a lot of cut-through traffic. It really has retained its old neighborhood-type feel.”

In the late 1990s, the last 15 acres of what had been the White Rock Farm was sold for another housing development.

Since that time, “there’s really not [been] any new construction,” Botelho said.

Zoning ordinances enacted in the 1960s, after East Providence was chartered as a city, increased minimum house-lot sizes, Botelho said; as a result, the northern part of the neighborhood features older houses with smaller lots than the southern part of the neighborhood.

But even on individual streets, Kent Heights has a mix of housing styles, he said. “There’s not endless rows of raised ranches,” he said. “It has sort of a unique feel to it.”

Last week, houses listed for sale on the statewide Multiple Listing Service in Kent Heights ranged in price from $199,000, for an 874-square-foot, two-bedroom bungalow built in 1930, to $479,000 for a 1960 ranch with five bedrooms, two full baths and two half baths, and a total of 2,688 square feet of living space.

Kent Heights is also “famous for its walkers,” Botelho said. “Between 5 and 6 o’clock, when the weather is nicer, you can sit out on your front step and meet everyone from the neighborhood.”

POPULATION:

(East Providence, 2000) 48,688

MEDIAN HOUSE PRICE:

(East Providence, 2006) $252,500

PUBLIC SCHOOLS:

Kent Heights Elementary School

Edward R. Martin Middle School

Riverside Middle School

INTERESTING FACT:

East Providence offers a homestead exemption on property taxes for owner-occupied residences: 15 percent of the assessed value is exempted from tax.

cdunn@projo.com