Rhode Island House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi visited Newport on April 27 as the keynote speaker at a panel discussion about the need to develop more housing on Aquidneck Island.

Shekarchi was joined by Middle­town Town Administrator Shawn Brown, Raytheon government relations and site executive Tim DelGuidice, and NOAA relocation project manager Matthew Hill.

On an island where the largest employers are Naval Station New­port and the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center, and over 20,000 people work in defense-related jobs, the need for workforce housing is a particularly acute component of the crisis. A report published by the Greater New­port Chamber of Commerce said Newport and the surrounding re­gion need to build 6,000 to 9,000 housing units to keep up with workforce demand.

NOAA broke ground in 2024 at the future home of its Marine Op­erations Center-Atlantic base on a five-acre site on Naval Station New­port, and the $150 million project is scheduled to be completed in 2027. Hill said upwards of 250 fed­eral employees and their families will be relocating to Rhode Island after their current base in Norfolk, Virginia, is closed and NOAA’s new facility at Naval Station Newport is completed.

“That provides justification for these developers to go out and secure funds,” said Hill. “You have 250 people coming here for cer­tain, with stable incomes, so these developments can start to move forward.”

Shekarchi spoke about the adaptive reuse bill signed into law by the state legislature three years ago, which was intended to make it easier for municipalities to convert old hospitals, factories and schools into housing.

“There’s a lot of municipal land, a lot of municipal buildings that could be converted into housing, that for whatever reason has been resisted by local communities,” he said.

The Oliphant and Green End proposals voted down by the Middletown Town Council in 2024 would have been such adaptive reuse projects. Shekarchi did not explicitly mention those proposals, but he suggested the Newport Jai Alai site, which he described as “desolate” in its current state, could be ideal for mixed-use commercial and residential development.

“There is so much opposition in all of our communities,” Rep. Michelle McGaw told Newport This Week. “I don’t think people recog­nize that it’s their children, it’s their grandchildren, people who grew up here and want to stay here and raise their families here but cannot afford to do so.”

“We’re not only looking at people at 80 percent of Area Me­dian Income (AMI); there is a huge gap between what people are earning and what they can afford.”

Rhode Island AMI is approxi­mately $112,000. So, a one-person household earning about $65,000, 80 precent AMI, would qualify for affordable housing.

DelGuidice said Raytheon’s workforce, especially its younger employees, would benefit from new development on the island.

“In five years, I’d love to see that we’ve closed that gap of 9,000 units, and we’ve got more of our employees able to live closer to work and not have a 45-minute or hour-long commute,” he said.

Stressing Aquidneck Island’s need for housing across all income levels, Brown highlighted Middle­town’s approach of purchasing 6.2 acres of land in order to de­velop 36 middle-income housing units across the street from town hall. However, he said 36 planned new homes is a fraction of the island’s collective need, and he highlighted the importance of the island’s municipalities, the Navy, and private industry cooperatively maintaining and improving the island’s infrastructure in order to be able to build new housing de­velopments.

He pointed to Middletown and Newport’s cooperative efforts on wastewater management as an example of the unseen infrastruc­ture work necessary to maintain and expand the island’s housing supply. He cited shared island in­frastructure as a critical area where state support is necessary in order to create new housing stock.

“We’re land-restricted, and we have a lot of conservation ease­ments on Aquidneck Island, which is another challenge,” Brown said. “It is going to be these areas that are either infilled or redeveloped. That is where additional housing is going to come from, and we are going to need that wastewater management capacity in order to do a lot of these developments.”

“The speakers today were very strong on the fact that we need all kinds of housing, not just higher income or middle income,” Rep. Lauren Carson told Newport This Week following the meeting. “We really need to address the broader issues here. I have confidence that policymakers, myself, the speaker and city leaders across the island know what has to happen.”

With all the talk of right wing men having a hard time finding a partner, I really was surprised to discover that Stephen Miller, the inspiration for many of Trump’s cruelest immigration policies, had a wife. But, I then was unsurprised that his wife, Katie Miller, has an anti-feminist podcast. Also no surprise: she has been lamenting that the US fertility rate is falling rapidly. But here is the true shocker: who can we blame for that rotten news?

“Since 2007, the teen birth rate has fallen 72%. Hormonal birth control isn’t just poison for women’s minds and bodies — it’s killing population growth. For the first time ever, birth rates for women in their late 30s have surpassed those in their early 20s.”

And to add to the horror of it all, according to Marc Siegel, a talking head on Faux News masquerading as a senior medical analyst, the following actually qualifies as a social problem, and we should be very worried: ”We’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait ‘til they’re in a more stable life situation, ‘til they’re more financially secure, maybe they haven’t found the right partner.”

Yes, the very idea of waiting until you have met someone you can see raising a child with, maybe you even deeply love, have enough financial resources to live independently of your hard working parents or parent, and even a high school diploma, is too much for the MAGA crowd in the face of a worse crime: a declining fertility rate.

I guess I missed something: have not the good Christians of the past been horrified by teen sexual activity? In the very recent past, within even the memory of the youngest voters, did teens who engaged in wanton sexual activity not face punishment? Did I imagine the many demands for “abstinence only” sex “education”?

Maybe the push to accept and welcome children having babies is something else altogether: more “Handmaid’s Tale,” and less allowing the kids to relax about sex.

I have to wonder if part, or even all, of this hand wringing is directly related to the rape culture ushered in by electing a president whose followers thought it was cool that he had bragged about grabbing a woman by the “pussy,” and was convicted of molesting a woman in a department store dressing room. Secretary of War Crimes, Pete Hegseth, is mad full of the teachings of a raving lunatic, Doug Wilson, pastor of possibly the most misogynist sect in a country full of weird allegedly Christian teachings, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

At the schools associated with this cult, Amanda Marcotte writes: “Students at ACCS schools who said they were sexually abused by teachers reported being blamed for causing the older men to ‘stumble.’”

And of course, the cherry on the pie for the pro-natalist crowd, Planned Parenthood is the devil and always being deprived of funds that could help women and families actually have some agency in choosing when and if to have kids. And abortion is the worst sin! Senator Josh Hawley is currently attempting to make safe abortions illegal by pressuring a corrupt FDA to declare that mifepristone is unsafe for use —with Republican Senate enthusiasm.

So this push for teen pregnancies may actually not be condoning sex between consenting teens as much as acknowledging the number of young girls who are victims of men who are family members, employers, teachers, politicians, and all the men who see Donald Trump and his ilk as role models. The drip, drip, drip of information about the Dear Leader and rape of a 13-year-old girl continues. Trump acolyte Matt Gaetz has been very credibly accused of child trafficking and statutory rape. While he resigned from Congress, he continues to hold his Florida law license.

This is a dangerous moment for girls — we who grew up with the feminist movement understand and lived what we hope we left behind. Rape was taken as a joke until women forced the issue. I do not need to remind anyone of the many challenges of teen pregnancy. I raised three children — as a full grown adult. I can’t even imagine having taken on the day after day parenting struggles as a 17-year-old, much less at age 14. While the trumpers are doing their best to create a dystopian society, we cannot forget what we, and the suffragettes before us, have achieved in the struggle for women’s rights. No ambiguity 3 — our rights are being challenged by men who believe that the worst elements of the past must be the future. Well, we say no!

Nancy Braus is a long-time political activist who writes from Guilford. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.