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Providence The facts:
Click here for footnotes. Affordable homes in Providence:
Smith Hill Community Development Corporation partnered with Crossroads RI to rehab cottages into permanent supportive family apartments
Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services' (GENS) Adelaide Avenue revitalization project restored 14 historic houses and built 1 historically compatible building
Mixed-use building, part of a major neighborhood revitalization initiative completed by the Elmwood Foundation
Olneyville Housing Corporation revitalized a 3-block area by replacing vacant lots and abandoned houses with 32 new apartments
Adapative re-use of the former Rao Fastener mill complex into mixed-income apartments and commercial space by the West Elmwood Housing Development Corporation
Formerly a home for young, female immigrants, renovated into elderly apartments by OMNI Development Corporation
Another example from GENS' Adelaide Avenue revitalization project, which includes affordable rental and homeownership opportunities
New single family home built by the Olneyville Housing Corporation
Revitalizing Olneyville Olneyville has seen deterioration and disinvestment, but thanks in large part to the Olneyville Housing Corporation, a local nonprofit, the neighborhood is coming back to life. As told by executive director Frank Shea:"Historically, Olneyville Housing would take a house that had been abandoned, fix it up, and have a low-income family move in. By doing one or two houses a year through the 1990s, that was successful for the families but didn’t quite reach our revitalization goals. So we started to do larger projects. Our first project in the core of the neighborhood turned 21 vacant lots and 5 abandoned buildings into 31 new homes for working families to rent. That project actually led to the revitalization of other blocks. We saw private landlords taking the initiative to fix their properties up and make investments. It raised everybody’s property values on the streets and raised the taxes that came into the city. Historically, Olneyville has been home to new immigrants. It’s families moving here for the opportunities this country provides. After 50 years of disinvestment, the housing stock significantly suffered. What we are able to do is return some of that investment and make these homes available to working families in Providence. We work to make the neighborhood a better place – the whole gamut of what makes a living, breathing, positive place for families to live."
Richardson Ogidan is the president of the Board of SWAP (Stop Wasting Abandoned Properties) Inc., a community development corporation that works primarily in South Providence. "To a lot of people, when they hear SWAP, they think about affordable housing. We don’t really see ourselves as just building affordable housing, as much as we see ourselves as restoring neighborhoods. What we’ve done on the South Side, we have built affordable housing that has restored neighborhoods, created hope, and put families together. Neighborhoods that used to be vacant lots are now stable with good homes and stable families. That’s how we see ourselves – building communities through the neighborhoods. As a member of the community, our responsibility to that community is to make sure that not only do we build affordable housing, but to make sure that the character of that neighborhood is restored, maintained, and enhanced. And that’s basically what we’ve done. Something we see on a daily basis at SWAP, for every 10 people who come to work, 7 of them are looking for housing. Even when we build houses, we still have 2-3 years waiting lists. And these are families, with two working people. And yet we still can’t build houses fast enough. The more houses we build, the better we can put working families back into a stable home. Since 1995, we’ve built at least $40 million worth of affordable housing. And it’s still not enough. We could still do more."
"This building used to be the Rao Fastener factory. It closed down in the late 1980s. Someone in the neighborhood asked me what I was going to do about the factory, and I bluntly said, ‘I don’t do factories.’ The resident kept talking to us and convinced the Board that it was our responsibility to look at it. It was a large piece of land in the center of our neighborhood. As she said, ‘It’s your job to do the hard stuff – if it was easy somebody else would be doing it.’ When you have a fire in the belly for the community, you try to do just about anything that could be done. I got a lot of resistance. We had not done a mill before. This was a brownfield site. The Board was thoughtful about the process, and they decided it should be mixed-income and part of a whole approach. It took us quite a while. We had a lot of ‘no’s.’ A lot of people said, ‘you can’t do it, it’s too big, and you can’t do mixed-income.’ But after I got the first ‘yes,’ I took that and ran all the way with it. Westfield Lofts is what the building is called now – 69 mixed-income rental units. We call the entire project the Rao Mill complex, because it will include commercial space and town homes – for people who want to come back and live someplace that’s walking distance to downtown and to the hospitals. There’s a lot of exciting stuff right here in the neighborhood."  | What's Happening in Rhode Island
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