Getting Serious About Providence’s Housing Crisis
Lesson's from the Providence we built in the Industrial Revolution
This piece was originally published in the Providence Eye as part of their ongoing coverage of the Comprehensive Plan update process.
It’s no secret that Providence is in the midst of a housing crisis. In 2012, the median home sold for around $200,000. Today that number is nearly $500,000, far more than the median household can afford. From 2018 to 2023, average apartment rents increased 50% while wages only increased 22%, according to a presentation from the RI Department of Housing. Rising housing costs are driving increased homelessness, which has increased 70% since 2019. [1]
The Housing Crisis Last Time
This is not the first housing crisis Providence has experienced. In the 1800’s, industrial growth and open immigration caused Providence’s population to more than quintuple in a lifetime. Someone born in 1850 would have seen the city grow from 41,513 to 224,326 people by their 60th birthday in 1910. This represents an average annual population growth of 7%. (In comparison, over the last 60 years, Providence has lost population and is only just catching back up, and still 30,000 people short of the 1910 population.)
How did they do it!? To accommodate that tremendous growth, our ancestors built the Providence that we know and love today. No building type is more synonymous with that boom than the triple decker. Thrown up quickly in incredible numbers across the city, often on then-farmlands on the edge of town, triple deckers greatly increased the housing stock for industrial workers, their families, merchants and others. The triple decker had many benefits. Separation of structures reduced fire risk. Smaller buildings allowed working class families a path to homeownership. Extra apartments could be rented to bolster household finances or house extended families.
But it may shock many who cherish their neighborhoods today to learn that the triple decker was reviled at the time. They were seen as encouraging sloth, disease, and vice. Populated by immigrants, transients, and “the lodger evil,” they were considered a blight by the more genteel old-guard and the striving middle class. In 1912, Massachusetts banned cooking above the 2nd floor to battle the triple decker “scourge.” In 1913, the newly formed National Housing Association advocated for using fire codes as a pretext to ban three-family homes. And in 1923, Providence prohibited the construction of new triple-deckers, citing health concerns and overcrowding.
The Crisis This Time
Providence’s population is not growing rapidly today, nor is employment. So, why is Providence facing a housing crisis today? If you ask ten people, you’ll hear eleven explanations. Like the blind men inspecting an elephant, everyone sees a different part of the problem based on what they are most closely experiencing:
Some see corporate greed. (But surely people were greedy in the 2000’s when prices were stable?) Some blame banks, where the credit is either too loose (allowing people to use debt to bid up prices), or too tight (keeping many families out of the homebuyer market). Others say it lies in exclusionary zoning laws, or the structures and incentives of local government, or building codes and construction costs.
Like the elephant, the housing crisis is a combination of all these things. Together they have resulted in us building very few new homes for decades. Today, Rhode Island only builds one fifth as many homes per year as we averaged in the 1980s and less than half what we did in the 1990’s and 2000’s. The result is a tight housing market. More people would like to buy or rent a house than there are people selling. As a consequence, existing owners have the power to drive top dollar.
The natural competitor for an existing house is building a new one. But most land in Providence is off limits for building new homes (you can build a nicer bigger home, but you can’t build more individual dwellings). Look at a zoning map of Providence, all those areas colored yellow or brown are the Residential or R-zones. Nearly all of those lots are already occupied, meaning that new development can’t build many homes under our restrictive zoning. The commercial corridors and postindustrial sites where development is allowed and occurs is just a small area (This is a striking contrast to the 1880’s where development occurred across the entire city.)
And demand has changed as well. Households are smaller: down to about 2.4 per household. There are many more single people living alone. Just to maintain the same population, demand for homes has increased. And at the same time, people want more space per person. A hundred years ago, two or three kids would share a bedroom, where today they each have their own. Where the demand for larger, nicer homes is not met by new construction, wealthier households will out-bid poorer families for old homes and renovate them or combine units to get what they want. In the last decades, New York City has lost a 100,000 homes to this effect. The result is a cruel game of musical chairs.
Our Predicament
Providence’s predicament is this: on the one hand, the status quo is quite bad and getting worse for anyone who doesn’t already own a home. On the other hand, most of us generally like our city and our neighborhoods the way they are. The changes that most of us would like to see are modest edits and repairs. The scale of the problem belies simple easy solutions.
There are about 80,000 homes in Providence. If the average home is 1,200 square feet, that’s 96 million square feet of residential space. A modest 10% increase in the housing stock (to meet changing demographics e.g.) represents around 8,000 new homes and almost 10 million square feet of new floor area (net, so add any area that has to be demolished to allow for new building). This is a lot of new floor area.
Many people are proposing that we have more “adaptive reuse” of existing structures, i.e. re-purposing old mills, churches, etc. for housing. Absolutely! Some builders are committed to putting new life into old buildings, believing it adds a lot to the neighborhoods they work in. But it has its limits. Smaller households in more space means that total floor area has to increase significantly, just to maintain a steady population. Adaptive reuse puts what we have to better use, but it doesn’t do much to increase the total floor area.
And here’s the thing about triple deckers: they were an immediate response to a current need, not a forever building. That most are still here today 130 years later more or less the same might surprise their builders. Why replace them with larger brick townhouses, an apartment building, or a hotel? How narrow is our vision, how degraded our abilities if we think we cannot improve upon our great great grandfathers’ work? We can love our historic homes and still recognize that for Providence to evolve and meet our needs today and tomorrow, many triple deckers will need to be replaced with bigger buildings. Neighborhoods are never meant to be “finished.” There’s no such thing as “built out.”
Is There a Way Out?
There is currently a lot of debate around Providence’s Comprehensive Plan Update. Does it propose too much change? Or too little? What is the best way to make the city more affordable and preserve its diversity and creative spirit?
There are two time-tested ways to reduce the cost of housing: 1) a collapsing economy or 2) building a bunch of new homes. As for the former, during the great housing prices declined nationwide during the Great Recession. As Detroit’s economy and population collapsed in the late 20th century home prices fell steeply, such that you can buy a fixer-upper in Detroit for $35,000. Austin, TX on the other hand has tried the latter strategy. Despite a growing employment and population, prices and rents are declining following a decade plus building boom.
The proposed comprehensive plan a step forward, but a timid one that is too small to make a dent in our housing crisis. The proposed measures will no doubt help compared to doing nothing, but without more strenuous action, the overall picture will continue to worsen–housing prices and rents will be higher in 10-years than they are today. Visible homelessness and encampments will increase. If we want to change course, we need to steer the ship much harder.
This is no council of despair. There is a lot we can do, and we can change course whenever we decide to. For inspiration, look to Spokane, WA. In the last decade they have seen home prices more than double, in part because of economic refugees from California’s housing crisis. In response, city leaders have taken swift and decisive action, enacting major changes to zoning rules: eliminating parking requirements, increasing building heights, and allowing small multifamily (like triple deckers) across the whole city.
The Housing Crisis Affects Everyone
We can debate the particulars of demographics, economics, and development all we want. The simple fact is that in every family, twenty or so years after the kids are born, they will want their own place to live, and their parents will still need a home as well. Unless we build more homes, some of our children will have to move away, because there will not be enough homes to go around. The housing crisis doesn’t just affect the young, the poor, the renter. Homeowners and the even wealthy will feel the effects of family moving away, of grandparents living far from grandchildren, and seniors with little family to care for them as they age.
Boston has by some accounts had a building boom, building over 25,000 new homes in the metro between 2020 and 2022. Yet the Boston still lost 25,000 people between 2020 and 2023 and the average rent for a 2-bedroom apartment has soared to $3,272/mo. with a vacancy rate of just 1.3%. There are not enough chairs to go around.
Everyone’s child should have a reasonable chance to make a life in the community they were raised in. We can follow the path of Spokane and not Boston. We can build an abundance of homes instead of scrabbling over a scarcity of homes. But we can’t make space for my kids, and your kids, and everyone’s, by circling the wagons and fighting change.
It’s past time to embrace change, let people build, and make room for everyone. The best time to start was ten years ago. The next best time is right now.
[1] If you think addiction or mental health is the cause of homelessness, not the rising cost of housing, ask yourself if West Virginians, who have the lowest homelessness rate in the country, really have much lower rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, and mental illness? Or could it be that houses are much cheaper so people struggling are much more likely to have a roof over their head?