Published on August 15, 2022 By Steve Ahlquist

Cuervo was joined by members of the progressive advocacy organization Reclaim RI, Providence City Councilmembers Rachel Miller (Ward 13) and Mary Kay Harris (Ward 11), State Senator Ana Quezada (Democrat, District 2, Providence) and other supporters of his campaign for mayor.

“As Mayor, I will take immediate steps to address our housing affordability crisis and ensure that everyone in Providence can find a safe, affordable place to call home,” said Cuervo, who chose to hold the press conference at 23 Baxter Street, in front of a home currently owned by the Providence Redevelopment Agency. “For too long, we have stood by and watched this crisis fester. The City of Providence has the resources and tools to take action. We can no longer wait for the state or the federal government to solve this crisis for us. My plan takes bold action to address our housing affordability crisis.I’m proud to have worked with Reclaim Rhode Island on several of its bold initiatives.”

Cuervo predicted that the home he was standing in front of will be assigned to a developer or investor who will likely flip the home for a quick profit. The new owner will invest some money, flip it again, and by the time it gets to a potential homeowner, thousands of dollars will have been extracted from the dwelling without adding value, and those costs will be borne by the final buyer.

“We at Reclaim RI are proud to stand with Gonzalo Cuervo and offer him our support in taking on these visionary solutions to the housing crisis,” said Miguel Martinez Youngs, Reclaim RI’s Organizer Director. “We believe that the inclusion of the policies we’ve developed here, combined with Gonzalo’s already strong housing platform, will help make Providence a model for cities across the United States that want to ensure that their communities remain affordable for all their residents. For too long, the City of Providence has abandoned the entire housing market to private developers, and the result is today’s terrible affordability crisis. It’s time for the City to step up and take action directly.

“We are looking forward to working with Mayor Cuervo to advocate and implement these policies.”

Cuervo’s 14-point housing plan includes the following proposals:

“My housing plan puts the people of Providence first, both those who live here presently, and those who will live here in the future,” Cuervo said. “Providence’s most important resource is its people, and we have centered the needs of our residents in every neighborhood first when it comes to housing. We have the tools, skills and ability to do this, and I’m proud to have worked with Reclaim RI on developing these initiatives.”

Cuervo answered questions from reporters about the process of instituting rent control, the speed at which new homes could be available on the market and the process of getting landlords into eviction diversion courts.

Also speaking at the press conference were Providence City Councilmembers Rachel Miller and Mary Kay Harris:

Here’s the plan with annotations included:

The majority of Providence residents are renters and generally poorer than their home-owning peers. Moreover, for decades, renters have been subject to increasing costs and a disappearing housing stock. Per the US Census’s Building Permit Survey and like other municipalities statewide, Providence has built and is building far too little housing to meet demand. Over four decades, the city has issued an average of 135 building permits annually, with a peak of 765 in 1988.[1] In 2021, the city only issued 54. While private developers have failed to sufficiently expand market-rate housing, the nonmarket responses to those failures warrant discussion.

Presently, Providence has few options to fund affordable housing, the majority of them public-private partnerships of some variety. Traditional public housing through the Providence Housing Authority is limited in capacity, reserved for the especially vulnerable, and marked by dilapidation. Vouchers and other housing supports are also budget-limited and may have difficulty in being accepted, even with the enactment of source-of-income discrimination laws at the municipal and state levels.[2][3][4] Because Section 8 and Section 9 HUD-funded housing programs provided by PHA are constrained by limited federal funding, long waitlists have developed for these programs, indicating the high level of need. The Division of Housing and Community Development administers federally-funded programs like the HOME Investment Partnership Program, the Emergency Solutions Grant, and the Community Development Block Grant. 

Nonprofits, though exceedingly valuable actors in addressing the housing shortfall, have neither the capacity nor the authority to vastly expand Providence’s housing stock. Aside from their ties to federally-funded limited programs like the HOME Program and the CDBG, they are also limited by the generosity and motives of their donors and sponsors.[5] Community development corporations, such as ONE Neighborhood Builders, are similarly disposed and restricted, resulting in exceptional but limited building in their areas of interest. The Providence Revolving Fund, as a CDFI, is dependent on strong fundraising to maximize funding for home preservation efforts. 

State resources for improving housing affordability are fewer, and are either structurally or fiscally incapable of meeting the scale of need. The current Office of Housing and Community Development oversees municipal uses of federal funding for the CDBG and bond-funded low-income housing programs such as Building Homes Rhode Island. RIHousing provides down payment assistance through the FirstGenHomeRI pilot program, but that assistance is only applicable to Rhode Island’s urban core and excludes Providence’s East Side.[6] Home purchase assistance programs are of great benefit to households on the cusp of homeownership, but do little for the many renter households across the city. To meet those households’ needs and let Providence grow, we must massively increase the amount of high quality public and affordable housing. 

Changes in Housing Strategy and Focus

The housing crisis and the limited capacities of municipal, state, and nonprofit actors to address it have left Providence with a continuing deficit of affordable housing. Moreover; the involvement of corporate landlords; investment firms; and wealthy nonprofits, such as hospitals and universities, in the real estate market broadly indicate further municipal action is needed to secure a stable housing supply. Rental housing should be the immediate focus of policy changes given its age, limited availability, and relative poverty of its occupants. Concerns about housing costs, availability, stability, and institutional development should be addressed in the immediate term to combat the inflation, gentrification, and nonpayment evictions destabilizing and displacing residents.

Accordingly, Reclaim RI recommends that the City of Providence:

Using ARPA funding as well as other sources, Providence must create a municipal public developer to create sustainable, affordable mixed-income housing. Having the capacity to plan, fund, and build housing would avert existing federal public housing restrictions, offer municipal housing attractive to public employees like teachers and municipal workers, and surmount the low construction of new multifamily properties enough to pressure rents downward citywide. Having that capacity would allow inefficient, fossil-fueled housing to be replaced with environmentally sustainable renewable-powered units. Additional benefits would redound to the city, as a public developer paying tradespeople the state prevailing wage would significantly stimulate the economy and secure the building trades amid recessionary downturns. The state legislature has already taken a bold step in this direction by allocating ARPA funds to a pilot program for publicly developed rental housing modeled after a highly successful public program in Montgomery County, Maryland. Providence can and should learn from its peers, and become a trailblazer in developing tools to address the housing crisis.

Insofar as state law allows, Providence must implement rent stabilization to curb vast rent increases and to ensure neighborhood livability. Year-over-year rent increases must be limited for units 15 years and older to 4%, with limited exemption made for newer rental property. Rental units vacant for 5 years or fewer should be likewise subject to that limit. To avoid loopholes that produced sale-based supply reductions seen in earlier efforts, owner-occupied buildings should not be exempted.

Providence must create an eviction diversion program in which all landlords in the city must participate, with a particular emphasis on reducing evictions stemming from the nonpayment of rent. As the leading cause of evictions locally and statewide, rent shortfalls and arrearages are relatively resolvable issues. Moreover, due to procedurally related costs, arrearages constitute a fraction of the total monetary judgements assessed against renters. Tenant and landlord participation in a supervised mediation prior to an eviction filing, combined with financial support and counseling, centers tenant involvement and may avoid the stigma and difficulties arising from even a mere eviction filing.

        Providence must institute land use changes to allow the city to grow—without displacement. Specifically, changes should increase residential density citywide to 10 dwelling units per acre with a 15 unit per acre minimum near transit stops. Massachusetts has enacted similar provisions for transit-served communities, allowing vast increases in multifamily housing in previously restrictive communities.[7] Additionally, off-street parking minimums should be replaced with parking maximums and more stringent per-occupant limits for nonresidential parking to free land while confronting induced parking demand.[8] However, any upzoning must limit displacement and ensure affordability, similar to that proposed by Cambridge, Massachusetts, including base zoning to explicitly mandate affordability and family units.[9] Finally, public developments and other non-profit affordable developments should receive a density bonus and a streamlined approval process, as in cities like Chicago.

Reclaim RI was founded by a group of volunteers who were determined to ensure that the organizational capacity of the 2020 Bernie Sanders for President campaign in Rhode Island persisted. Its vision for Rhode Island includes the right to thrive, the right to a popular democracy, the right to economic justice, and dignity for all. It seeks to achieve this vision by electing champions for the people and pressuring elected officials; organizing neighbors to work at the local level to build power across the state; mobilizing people who have never thought of themselves as political organizers and empowering ourselves with the knowledge, skills, and relationships to win change; and enacting a culture of strengthening solidarity across difference, developing new leaders, and building community power.

At the state legislature, Reclaim RI has worked to advocate for the Create Homes Act, to successfully win a first-in-the-nation $10 million state-level pilot public developer, and to successfully ensure that Rhode Island’s cannabis legalization law included a first-in-the-nation set aside of cannabis retail licenses for worker-owned cooperatives as well as the automatic expungement of criminal records.

In addition to Reclaim RI, Gonzalo Cuervo’s campaign for Mayor has been endorsed by eight Providence Senators and Representatives and three Providence City Councilors. Gonzalo has also been endorsed by Climate Action RI, the Providence Fire Fighters (IAFF Local 799), the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee, and dozens of community and neighborhood leaders representing the city’s 25 neighborhoods.

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