‘There is urgency for this. We need housing yesterday.’
PROVIDENCE — In response to an increasingly severe housing crisis, Rhode Island voters in November passed the largest housing bond in state history. The approved bond package will spread $120 million across six areas of investment, with the lion’s share of $80 million earmarked for low and moderate-income housing production.
While the bond represents a historically high investment in housing, consensus among experts is that sustained funding at this level or at even higher levels, alongside innovative new approaches to increasing the state’s housing supply, is needed to address the state’s huge shortage of housing units across all income demographics.
“Having a large amount of financial resources available at once is a significant win,” said Melina Lodge, executive director of the Housing Network of Rhode Island (HNRI). “Although the current bond funds may still go fast due to a robust pipeline of new developments, we can now fund more projects at once.…However, with a shortage of 24,054 affordable units and 56% of low-income renters burdened by costs, consistent funding will be essential in future years.”
Another key issue seems to be that even when huge expenditures like this are authorized, the housing development process in Rhode Island is slow. It is inefficient not only in terms of the time it takes to actually construct new housing units and make them available for Rhode Islanders to live in, but also in financial terms, with each affordable unit requiring a huge subsidy in order to be built.
“There is urgency for this. We need housing yesterday,” said state Sen. Lou DiPalma (D-12, Little Compton, Middletown, Newport, Tiverton). “There needs to be urgency with regards to getting this money invested and out for development…It is incumbent upon the Department of Housing in concert with Rhode Island Housing amongst others to figure out how to put the program in place to get this money invested posthaste.”
Rhode Island Department of Housing spokesperson Emily Marshall provided Ocean State Stories with the following breakdown of the bond funds, which was also provided in the text of Ballot Question 3, approved by nearly 66% of the state’s voters in November:
| Category | Amount ($120 million total) | Description |
| Affordable Housing | $ 80 million | To increase and preserve the availability of low- and moderate-income housing. Of this amount, up to $10 million may be used to support a new program for public development. |
| Acquisition & Revitalization | $10 million | To support community revitalization through property acquisition and the redevelopment of existing structures. |
| Homeownership | $20 million | To increase the production of low and moderate- and middle-income housing intended for homeownership. |
| Site Acquisition | $5 million | To support the acquisition of properties for redevelopment as affordable and supportive housing. |
| Housing-related Infrastructure | $4 million | To support pre-development and development of site-related physical infrastructure necessary to produce additional affordable housing. |
| Municipal Planning | $1 million | To provide assistance to municipalities to plan and implement changes that up-zone or otherwise enable additional housing development. |
Lodge, who as the leader of HNRIrepresentsa statewide association of nonprofit community development corporations and housing developers, clarified the definition of “affordable” for the purpose of this bond expenditure. She said it means that for any given target demographic in need of housing, their monthly housing costs do not exceed 30% of the targeted income limit.
Jeff Hamill, a publicly policy analyst at the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council (RIPEC) and the principal author of RIPEC’s October 2024 report on Rhode Island’s housing policy, said the bond will likely be issued to the market at the beginning of 2025, and that it typically take up to five or six months from the issuance of a bond before funds are available to be allocated.
He also said that in the meantime, the state has to figure out who exactly will be in charge of administering the bond funding once it becomes available.
“Over the past few years, we’ve added the Department of Housing as a new institution which the General Assembly has tasked with being the lead agency on housing in the state,” explained Hamill. “But when it was created, the department was essentially layered on top of the existing institutional structure, which includes the Rhode Island State Housing Resources Commission and Rhode Island Housing. There is no real formal institutional relationship between the three agencies, so there is a little bit of confusion about who is going to control this pot of money.”
“The General Assembly, when it created the Department of Housing, asked them to work on an administrative plan, or governance plan, that would sort out the relationship between the housing agencies,” said Hamill. “The first housing secretary, Josh Saal, submitted a plan in 2022 that did not have all the required elements, and that was one of the reasons that he resigned. There is a new plan that is due at the end of December, so some of this is still to be determined in terms of the departments creating a formal relationship and creating channels for things like bond money to go through.”
Hamill explained the previous housing bonds issued in 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021 were funneled into two programs: the Building Homes Rhode Island Program, and the Acquisition and Revitalization Program (ARP). The ARP program was managed directly by Rhode Island Housing, and the Building Homes RI program was officially under the purview of the Housing Resources Commission, but was also managed by Rhode Island Housing. “Now, I would think there is an open question about what agency gets the lead with this bond, since in 2021 when the last bond passed we didn’t have a Department of Housing,” said Hamill.
Lodge echoed Hamill’s uncertainty about which department would manage the bond money. “For the next steps, the timeline for program priority setting, issuing requests for proposals and deploying the funds ultimately will depend on the Administration’s decision as to who will oversee the funds,” said Lodge via email. “While it was previously suggested that the Department of Housing would manage these resources, ongoing transitions within the Department leave uncertainty about whether Rhode Island Housing or the Housing Resources Commission will take charge instead.”
The Department of Housing was formed in 2023, and has already seen three department heads come and go. The state’s newest housing secretary, Deborah Goddard, just started on Dec. 2, and around 16 staff vacancies in her department remain unfilled.
When asked what immediate next steps are taking place now and when various bond-funded initiatives might be rolled out in the future, Department of Housing spokesperson Emily Marshall did not delve into specifics. She stated via email, “Now that the $120 million Housing and Community Development bond has passed, discussions are underway to determine the specifics of how the funds will be programmed.”
Lodge said HNRI actively campaigned in favor of passing the bond in the lead-up to November’s election, and also played a key role in the ultimately successful advocacy campaign which convinced state House and Senate leadership to increase the governor’s original bond proposal from $100 to $120 million (HNRI had asked for a $50 million increase).
However, she also stated that despite being a historically high investment, this one-time bond expenditure is not enough to solve the state’s housing problems. “While the $120 million housing bond is a historic step forward, it’s not enough to fully address the state’s housing crisis,” she said. “Rising labor, materials, and land costs have driven up per-unit expenses, making significant, ongoing investment essential to meet demand. Continued federal support and state funding are crucial to expanding affordable housing and improving existing stock.”
Hamill went even further, stating that funding alone is not going to make up the gap in Rhode Island’s housing shortage under its current development model, even if the state and the federal government continue to allocate massive amounts of money to subsidize new housing construction.
He said that under current market conditions, increased housing production and housing supply indexed to any income level will alleviate pressure for Rhode Islanders struggling to find homes. “If you have a supply problem, you’re not going to fix that by subsidizing very expensive apartments for people who are very low-income,” said Hamill. “It would make a lot more sense to build more workforce housing for less subsidy, and then provide some form of rental assistance program [to low-income renters], which Rhode Island does not have.”
“People talk about this like a crisis,” he continued, “but when you think about a crisis, it requires decisive action. Do we see a lot of that? Now we’ve invested a lot of money, but subsidizing these things only goes so far…. You’re not going to subsidize your way to 20,000 units. That’s a multi-billion dollar problem. Do the math. You don’t need one $120 million bond – you need 30, to do it this way. So we have to find different ways of doing it.”
Buried within the bond’s largest allocation category of $80 million “to increase and preserve the availability of low- and moderate-income housing” is one potential different way to do it: a $10 million chunk which “may be used to support a new program for public development.”
Many experts agree with Hamill’s analysis that the pace of housing construction under Rhode Island’s current development model is far too slow to meet the state’s acute and escalating demand for housing units across all income levels. Some, like Reclaim RI executive director Daniel Denvir, believe a well-funded public developer could eventually yield a much more efficient return on investment in the face of that staggering demand.
The state commissioned a 71-page report, published in August, entitled Public Development and Ownership of Housing: A Feasibility Study for Rhode Island (often referred to within policy circles as “the Furman Report”). Some of the case studies in the report, including Montgomery County, Maryland’s Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund, have Denvir and others cautiously optimistic about the possibility of establishing a public development entity run by the state government, which would be the first of its kind in the nation.
“There are really exciting public development models taking off all over the country, from Montgomery County, Maryland to the Boston Public Housing Authority, to Atlanta, Georgia,” said Denvir, whose work at Reclaim RI primarily focuses on organizing and advocating for very low-income tenants. Denvir said that in order to meaningfully address the housing shortage, he believes Rhode Island needs to establish a public developer – funded to the tune of $100 million – which would be able to, “scale up and build large buildings with many units.”
“We are rather agnostic on what approach the state of Rhode Island decides to take; our principal hope is that this $10 million be used to do a public development quickly so that the efficacy of public development in Rhode Island can be established,” said Denvir. “We definitely need more than $10 million to build a true public developer in Rhode Island, but $10 million is enough to prove efficacy through one development project.”
Lodge was more cautious in her analysis of the potential merit of a public developer, stating: “The concept of a public developer may have merit as one potential tool, among many, in an effort to address Rhode Island’s housing crisis, but without a clear proposal, it is difficult to gauge its effectiveness. The Furman Report highlights how this model has worked in other places like Montgomery County, but what works there might not work here due to local differences in resources and challenges.”
