Providence has a housing affordability crisis. Forty percent of households live in housing that is considered unaffordable for them, and the effects of this situation are felt in all corners of our community. High housing costs exacerbate poverty and all the troubles that follow it, make neighborhoods less stable, make our workforce more transient, and more.
I'm working with several colleagues on the City Council and with community groups from throughout Providence, to push an initiative that will start to ameliorate the situation. Housing supply and costs are largely subject to forces over which the city has no control - for instance, RISD's construction of a new dorm downtown will mean a significant reduction in pressure on East Side rents, while were we to decide that rent controls were a sensible measure to undertake, state law would prevent us from implementing them.
But Providence could adopt a so-called "inclusionary zoning" ordinance to generate new affordable housing, at no cost to the city. Inclusionary zoning ordinances are named as such to distinguish from conventional zoning practices, which are often "exclusionary," in that they tend to stratify cities by socioeconomics. This is a huge problem in Providence, where economic segregation is transparent, and which astoundingly suffered from the nation's highest increase in white-Hispanic segregation during the 1990s.
More than 100 communities in California have adopted IZ ordinances, as have dozens in Massachusetts, most of metro Washington, D.C., and other cities and towns across the country.
I have spent several months working with the Casey Foundation, the Rhode Island Housing Network, Jobs with Justice, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, ACORN and the Providence Plan to organize and commission a study of our housing market, and to develop an inclusionary zoning ordinance for Providence. The work of our study is being performed by PolicyLink, an Oakland, Calif., think tank, and recently we brought PolicyLink to town for a series of forums with lawmakers.
Loosely, as our study has not yet been issued, we think the city should require all developments of more than, say, 10 units, to include housing that is affordable to lower-income Providence residents. We anticipate recommending that 10-15 percent of units in such developments be affordable; ordinances in other parts of the country have set asides as high as 25 percent or more.
Ideally, the size and ownership of affordable units would mirror the breakdown of other units in a given development: If half of the development's units were three-bedroom and half were two-bedroom, so too would be the affordable units. If half were owner occupied and half rented, so too would be the affordable ones.
In most cases affordable units would be mixed within larger developments. For costlier projects, like mill rehabilitations, mandates might need to be lower, and the city could provide more leeway as to the location of affordable units, or just require a contribution to the city's new housing trust fund, which we succeeded in establishing last year.
In return for producing and maintaining affordable units, the city would provide certain offsets - perhaps allowing fee waivers, somewhat increased height or density, or other design flexibility - which would save developers time and money. Such offsets would negate any disincentive to development that affordability requirements might otherwise yield. Our study will examine the monetary value of particular offsets so we can match them with development costs.
Inclusionary zoning wouldn't solve our housing troubles, which are largely contingent on action by the state and federal governments. But it could stop the problem from getting any worse, and mean construction of new affordable housing for several hundred Providence residents each year. We hope that an ordinance will be formally before the Council by late summer, and the push will heat up come fall.
David Segal represents College Hill and Fox Point on the Providence City Council.
