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This Just In

Affordable housing effort targets $30-60k bracket

The Armory Revival Company may not be the first developer that comes to mind when affordable housing is mentioned, especially since the company’s participation in the Rising Sun Mills project in Olneyville has been a focal point in Providence’s ongoing gentrification debates. Yet in 2007, Armory Revival was the single biggest beneficiary of the $50 million affordable housing bond approved by Rhode Island voters in a 2006 referendum
 
Armory Revival is receiving more than $2.5 million of the first $10 million that was awarded, to develop a mill building in Tiverton with promises that one-third of the units will be affordable.
 
HousingWorksRI, a broad coalition of more than 100 organizations, pushed the housing bond in last year’s election and recently released a one-year status report detailing how the housing bond money has been spent.
 
In awarding state dollars to local developments, it cites a “targeted response to the state’s affordable housing crisis” that is “intended primarily to help people making between $30,000 and $60,000 a year to rent or buy a home in Rhode Island.”
 
The state agency charged with administering the bond money, the Housing Resources Commission (HRC), awarded $10 million for 20 developments: 10 for rental housing and 10 for home ownership. Contrary to opponents’ rhetoric before the referendum, the bond did not pull public money into the urban core, but rather it dispersed affordable housing dollars among 17 different cities and towns in its first year, with Providence receiving just eight percent of the money.
 
HRC executive director Noreen Shawcross points to two of the projects as examples of the bond’s diversity in stimulating both rural and urban development: “The development at Stillwater Mill is taking a blight in the village of Harrisville and making it come alive; it also caused the town to put in a new library and to make other exciting investments. And a different kind of neighborhood transformation is happening in Callaghan Gardens in Pawtucket, where a drug-infested and dangerous block is being transformed into affordable town homes in a mixed-income project.”
 
Furthermore, the West Lane Project on Block Island includes the installation of 11 affordable modular homes on three acres and its completion ensures that New Shoreham will reach its state-mandated goal of 10 percent affordable housing. Since only five out of the 39 communities in Rhode Island have reached this goal (Central Falls, East Providence, Newport, Providence, and Woonsocket), the bond is a potentially powerful tool for cities and towns to use in partnering with developers, utilizing state dollars, and creating innovate housing plans.
 
A major challenge still facing the HRC is investing bond money in affordable housing projects that utilize renewable energy. Henry Shelton, of the George Wiley Center, says, “People don’t see energy as a major cost factor in housing for low-income people. Other than rent, it’s the single biggest
cost of living.”
 
With rising oil prices and record utility shutoffs, Shelton hopes that the bond money will begin supporting housing with renewable energy to ensure the long-term affordability of housing for working families.
 
Shawcross points to green building techniques that were used in the Callaghan Gardens project, but she acknowledges that no first-round grantees are utilizing renewable energy to lower housing costs for families: “That,” she says, “is certainly something that we need to begin doing.”

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