RI is starting to move the needle on affordable housing. But more needs to be done | Opinion

Jennifer Hawkins is the president and CEO of ONE Neighborhood Builders, one of the state’s leading community development corporations, and a member of the Housing Network of Rhode Island.

For too many years, a bubbling housing crisis was overshadowed by other priorities. Governors, speakers, and mayors came and went, and the state made little meaningful progress to confront a crisis that was quietly growing into a catastrophe. While they focused on important issues like economic development, education, and health care, they failed to recognize that access to safe, secure, and permanent housing is foundational to each of those priorities.

As the crisis grew, our neighbors in Massachusetts outpaced us in their prioritization of expanding access to housing that is affordable for all families. Fortunately, Rhode Island is starting to move the needle and close the gap. Rhode Island’s leaders — from the local level, to the State House, and in our federal delegation — have recognized the importance of housing and have made it, arguably, the most urgent policy priority of the first half of this decade.

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And no one has been more instrumental to that than House Speaker Joe Shekarchi.

Since taking the gavel of the House in 2020, Speaker Shekarchi has led efforts to direct much-needed funding toward affordable housing and championed a comprehensive overhaul of state laws and regulations to clear red tape and accelerate development. The speaker’s reforms are designed to streamline the construction of new housing and level the playing field from town to town with unified zoning rules. Additionally, the speaker’s legislative package established a Rhode Island Low Income Housing Tax Credit program which will help attract private investment for affordable housing and accelerate development.

Taken together, these reforms will make the production of housing easier for developers and communities who welcome smart growth development.

To be clear, Rhode Island still has a long way to go to catch up to the types of monetary investments Massachusetts has made toward their housing crisis. Our neighbors in Massachusetts are confronting an equally daunting crisis, and Gov. Maura Healey is putting forward a $4-billion housing bond to spark new construction and expand housing problem solving services. An equivalent bond in Rhode Island would be approximately $600 million, an investment we should strive to make.

Despite progress, we cannot afford to pull back. Rhode Island’s housing crisis is as urgent today as it was five years ago, especially with news released earlier this month which show that Rhode Island ranks nearly dead last in the United States for new housing starts.

Another report released earlier this year and commissioned by the Rhode Island Foundation and Partnership for Rhode Island made clear that past inaction has put us more than a decade behind where we need to be. In order to meet the needs of the lowest income households in Rhode Island and provide the security of affordable housing to every person in our state, we need to build more than 20,000 additional affordable apartments. As a state, we’re only building about 1,000 new homes each year, and only a fraction of them are truly affordable.

We cannot make a dent in that gap without meaningful public sector investments in affordable housing.

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While a $600-million bond question may likely be too much all at once, there is precedent for splitting necessary once-in-a-generation investments over multiple bond cycles. Rhode Island voters approved $500 million over two elections for school construction and another $145 million for URI’s Bay Campus over two cycles.

As the General Assembly prepares to return in January and the McKee Administration readies its FY2025 budget, we need all our leaders to stay vigilant and focused on the housing crisis. Rhode Island has the opportunity to continue to lead on housing if we all pull in the same direction. Through the speaker’s leadership on common-sense land use reform, we have laid a strong foundation and now anything less than a full and unwavering investment in affordable housing could put that foundation at risk.