In response to Rhode Island’s daunting housing affordability challenges, state policymakers have advanced key policy initiatives. They enacted numerous land use reforms, resulting in a substantial uptick in building permits. They transformed the state’s fragmented governance model with a more centralized strategy under a newly established Executive Office of Housing. And they’ve made enormous capital investments over the last several years and dedicated new streams of revenue to housing, addressing decades of historical underinvestment by the state.
While progress has been made, it hasn’t been felt by the vast majority of Rhode Islanders.
Unfortunately, most of the generous taxpayer investments for housing have been funneled into high-cost programs that prioritize secondary goals — like green building mandates and renovating historic buildings — and that focus heavily on units for the lowest income households. By design, these programs produce relatively few affordable units and little or no units for middle-income households. Consequently, these investments have helped relatively few Rhode Islanders and have made no meaningful impact on the state’s overall housing challenges…