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.”
