Joseph Codega Jr., a budget officer with the state’s Office of Management & Budget estimated this tax could generate approximately $2.5 million in fiscal year 2025 and $5 million the following year, according to a memorandum sent to the House and Senate Finance Committees on Monday, which was obtained by the Globe.

“My administration is committed to improving the housing outlook for Rhode Islanders — whether they are experiencing housing insecurity, seeking rentals that families can afford or working toward first-time home ownership,” McKee said in a statement.

The budget amendments were considered welcome news by leaders at the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness.

“As the number of Rhode Islanders needing shelter, housing, and Housing Problem Solving grows, funding must also increase to support the need,” said Juan Espinoza, the development manager for the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness.

The news comes as providers and advocates for the homeless are expected to gather at the Rhode Island State House on Tuesday to press state officials and lawmakers to steer $30 million to fund Rhode Island’s homeless response system at the current level.

Simultaneously, approximately 346 winter shelter beds that were funded last fall were expected to be phased out or closed at the end of April when the state’s contracts with several providers were expected to expire. Closing those beds could increase the state’s homeless population and create an additional strain on the state’s “homeless response system, healthcare system, emergency response system, city and town services and other systems,” said Espinoza.

The state’s Housing Department said many of these shelters will receive extensions for the next several months.

In response to questions posed by the Globe, Housing Department spokeswoman Emily Marshall said only 47 shelter beds will close at the end of April. Funding for additional seasonal beds at Providence’s Emmanuel House is being extended through September, while 30 seasonal beds by Westerly Area Rest Meals (WARM) for families in Kingston is being extended through July, she said.

Contracts for a 120-bed program in Warwick run by Open Doors and a 30-bed program by Tri-county Community Action’s Family Shelter in Burrillville are being extended through September, said Marshall.

The state was able to increase seasonal shelter beds by 32 percent compared to last year by leveraging multiple state, federal, and municipal funding sources, said Marshall.

“While federal funding for these efforts was temporarily increased in the wake of the COVID-19 emergency, the fact remains that this one-time federal funding will not be available in the future,” she said. “As the governor has indicated, it is important to identify new recurring funding sources that can help address our housing and homelessness challenges over multiple years — and to partner with municipalities, nonprofits, and advocacy groups to help fund and carry out this work moving forward.”

Data collected by the state’s Homeless Management Information System showed 529 Rhode Islanders experienced unsheltered homelessness at the beginning of April 2024, which is a 645 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness since January 2019.

Even with the new budget amendments that direct funding to tackle the shelter shortage, “there are still over 500 people outside with the existing resources in place.”

The one-time $16.6 million commitment from the governor’s office “is half of what is required to level-fund existing resources,” said Espinoza, who added that providers and advocates will push for a larger, permanent funding stream for the rest of the year, and for 2025.

“These extensions are suitable for the short term, but in the long term, we need to address the root cause of the growing number of people in need,” said Espinoza.

Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com. Follow her @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.

The median sales price for a single-family home in Rhode Island jumped 11.4% year over year in March to $440,000, the state’s realtors association reported Thursday.

For Massachusetts home seekers looking for a break in the Ocean State, the seas are nearly just as stormy. Single-family home prices in both states jumped by double digits between March 2023 and March 2024, according to the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.

The medial sales price of a single-family home in Providence, for example, climbed from $337,250 to $373,750 in March, a 10.82% jump. In Lincoln, the increase was more severe from, $410,000 to $560,000, a rise of 36.59%.

“The available supply of homes remains critically low going into the spring selling season,” the report reads. “At the current inventory level and pace of sales in March, all single-family homes on the market would be sold in less than one month, far less than the five to six months seen during a market balanced between supply and demand.”

Home sales fell by 4.9%, and sales “in process but not completed by the end of March fell by 7.2%, an indication that market activity will remain slow” for the rest of April, the report says.

“Sales could remain hampered through the spring market thanks to the recent news that the Federal Reserve reported an uptick in inflation in March, which means no immediate cuts to mortgage rates,” said Sally Hersey, association president. “On the positive side, a recent rise in mortgage rates may help increase inventory, which is desperately needed.”

High mortgage rates affect the buyer’s side, because some will no longer qualify for the home they want or they will opt to sit on the sidelines, Hersey told Boston.com.

Rhode Island condo market

If you are looking for a condo as your first step into homeownership or your housing type of choice as you downsize, the number of listings is up but so are prices.

Calling Rhode Island’s condo market the “outlier,” the report noted that sales in this category were up 0.81% year over year and that the number of pending sales reflected a 7.6% increase.

Meanwhile, the number of condo units on the market (241) climbed by more than 5%.

The median sales price was also up, and by double digits — from $319,950 to $370,000, a 15.64% increase.

Rhode Island multifamily market

Sales plummeted 19% year over year in March in this category, which is often viewed as a way to own a home and help pay off one’s mortgage. The median sales price rose 18.9%, to $535,000.

PROVIDENCE – To people of a certain age, the phrase – “Is it live or is it Memorex?” – needs no explanation.

Memorex famously claimed that its taped cassette recording of Ella Fitzgerald hitting a high note was so good it could break a glass, just as her live singing would do. And no one would know the difference.

With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), that question – is it real or is it fake – has leapt from the advertising sphere to the campaign sphere with a potential so frightening to some Rhode Island legislators that they have introduced a bill to ban what they call “deceptive and fraudulent synthetic media” in the 90-day run-up to any election.

Modeled after a state of Washington version, their bill is up for a committee vote on Tuesday on its way to a full House debate.

What the bill does:

The legislation [H7487] defines “synthetic media” as “an image, an audio recording, or a video recording of an individual’s appearance, speech, or conduct that has been intentionally manipulated … [with] digital technology to create a realistic but false image, audio, or video” that is false.

The legislation would not only ban “deepfakes,” it would give a candidate who felt wronged the right to seek an injunction and damages in court. The exception to the ban: if the spot contains a clearly written or spoken disclosure that the image “has been manipulated or generated by artificial intelligence.”

Why is the bill needed?

Secretary of State Gregg Amore told legislators at a hearing late last month that so-called deepfakes have been used to deceive the public about statements and actions taken by political leaders in the run up to elections, “when there is not sufficient time for candidates to debunk these mistruths before voters head to the polls.”

A recent example, he said, was the falsified Biden robocall in New Hampshire, in which a manipulated version of Biden’s voice told voters to stay home and not vote in the New Hampshire primary.

According to Amore, the legislation creates a balance “between preventing misinformation and protecting the First Amendment, with allowances for Constitutionally-protected speech like press coverage, satire, and parody.”

Rep. Jon Brien, one of the co-sponsors of the proposed new ban, said the ubiquitous cartoon caricatures of yore were clearly fake. Today’s deepfakes are not so easy to spot.

Arguments against the bill

The ACLU of Rhode Island cautioned the state’s lawmakers against “trying to quickly regulate this new world of artificial intelligence and its impact on the electoral process.”

“In order to ensure that debate on public issues is, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, ‘uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,’ the First Amendment provides special protection to even allegedly false statements about public officials and public figures,” said ACLU Rhode Island Director Steve Brown.

“To allow the government to regulate or ban political speech that some might view as misleading undermines the breathing space that robust political speech requires, whether generated with the help of artificial intelligence or not,” he warned.

He gave two examples:

• A political ad that strings together a politician’s comments made at different times that someone could claim is “deceptive” of the candidate’s views.
• A video of a candidate or elected official giving an actual speech where someone, using AI, replaces the real background of the video with an artificial background depicting hell.

Though the bill contains an exception for “satire” or “parody,” Brown noted, the use of AI to make these images or recordings could open a citizen to substantial penalties.

A lobbyist for the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) suggested the lawmakers tweak the bill to make clear the “creator” facing potential penalties mean the person who “deployed” the fake, not “the provider or developer of any technology used in the creation of synthetic media.”