Housing Crisis Task Force - Monday, September 15, 2025 - 5:30 o'clock P.M.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Tonight, we are at the Providence Housing Price Task Force. Tonight is September 15. Madam clerk, please call Federal name, Mary Kay Harris.

Present. Vice chairman Pedro Espino.

Present.

Vice chairman Pedro Pedro Espino. Vice Pedro Let the record show that we also have our legal department here, which is I'm gonna call Leo Linoa, police. And we also have our people from policy. We have Joan Rose and Miguel Young. And as always, we have our wonderful, wonderful clerks.

At this time, I'm going to ask that one. Read item number one. Yeah. That's right. What yeah.

It's been a long time. I know. Yeah. I see the. But, madam clerk, please read the item and read the record, please.

Item number one, discussion involved on

your housing crisis passport report.

Thank you. It was easy. At this point, I wanna ask for a motion to cover two exhibits. I'm a get this out of the way. I know we've got a lot of discussion.

One is this report, and I would like to get a motion, to identify it as nine I in the records. Okay. Councilwoman Gray, second by Councilman Escamore. All in favor? Aye.

Ayes have it. The second one is a testimony. It's only one testimony from Dave Sison, and it is read into the record at ten j. Oh, it's two? Yes.

Two.

Okay. Two. Alright. At the senior department. And.

And it's read in at ten j? At eleven k. Eleven k? Mhmm. Okay.

Eleven k. Eleven k. So 10 j and 11 k. It's 10 j and 11 k. Okay.

Now that we got that all out of the way, may I have may I have a motion, please, the exception Second. Of Motion made by Roy, second by, Saddam. All in favor? Aye. Aye.

Alright. Just to begin this report, I would like first to start with Miguel Young. And the reason we wanna start Miguel Young, we just want Oh, that's right. That's right. I forgot we have Rose at the table.

So You guys gotta stop, dear. Yes. And we have Joan Rose, and Joan is gonna give us, like, a highlight of how we all started. Okay? This this Okay.

Thank you. Of course.

Hi, everybody. I'm June Rose, chief of staff for the Probable City Council. When I started with the council last January, I was told about this group of councilors that we had this task force with a couple of landlords sitting on it and some young homeowners, that there were new councilors who had just been elected and then longtime legislate legislators pushing, their last term, and that they were deeply engaging with experts, from throughout the city. And I was told that those experts were coming in with binders of information, with research and data and polls and ideas and strategies that there was kind of comparative analysis of what's going on in other cities when it comes to the housing crisis, how are other folks addressing it. And then that there were landscape analysis of of what the housing market and housing crisis looks like here at home.

And when I heard this right when I started, I I thought, wow. That is exactly what we need. And I saw, you know, this task force dig deep into the multilayered housing crisis, which as we all know is a crisis of cost and of supply and of safety. And in doing so, I saw the task force put forward tons of information that we can use to turn into a report. And we've spent many months digging through all that information that came out of the meetings this task force has held.

The task force worked with and heard presentations from the Providence Housing Authority, Providence Redevelopment Agency, the Rhode Island Continuum of Care, the Rhode Island Department of Housing, Center for Justice, mayor Smiley's administration, Crossroads Rhode Island, and your own policy staff. And this was all done in this written out in the open in front of the cameras, in front of your constituents. And I think that that deserves to be uplifted as a model for good bill good governments in public research. What you have in front of you today in this report summarizes the deep work that you all did in your time on the task force. It explores the statistics that we've heard in those meetings when we looked back, such as that Providence experiences the experienced the highest rent increase in the nation from March 2023 to March 2024, or that Rhode Island ranks fiftieth nationwide in new housing permits.

The report highlights the extraordinary work this council has already done, such as putting zoning reforms and anti displacement measures in the 2024 comprehensive plan, making a massive, massive investments in the affordable housing trusts, and banning rent setting algorithms most recently. And it captures the policy recommendations that we heard in this room that resonated the most with task force members. I especially wanna uplift the leadership and the exceptional work of chair Harris for whom this beautiful report, and it really is aesthetically beautiful as well as beautiful at a content level. You know, I really think that this is a true legacy piece for the chairwoman, and so I wanna uplift that. She put a ton of time into getting this right.

We saw it as staff. And, you know, so did vice chair Espinal and every member of the task force with whom we've all had conversations with over the the months and and years that this task force has met. I think that deserves a lot of praise. The report demonstrates that the housing crisis is complex, that there's not any one singular solution as much as we might try to find one, that creating a more affordable city and stopping the tide of displacement as pushing working class residents out of their homes and neighborhoods requires a full buffet of approaches. Not everyone is going to agree with every single recommendation.

I think we all know that. But what this report is captures all those various recommendations that that may very much help her city and sets us on a course for the real work ahead, which is the legislative. This task force demonstrated how to work together to put out something powerful, but I think it's important to note that today, no law is gonna be changed. No incentive is gonna be created. No bad.

Behavior is gonna be curved. That work is everything that follows, and it will have to be done in a smart way that is tailored to the very specific needs of our very diverse city. And with that, you know, as a Providence resident and renter, I just wanna say I'm I'm very personally grateful to the hard work of this task force. And I'm gonna hand it over to Miguel Young. So

Oh, no. Before you hand it over to Miguel, thank you so much for that presentation, and definitely letting us know how far we came. And and you just led right into what I would love to say to this committee. There's nothing more committed to than being around people who really care about the issue that we have. You guys really I have never worked I've been here ten years with a crew of people or a group of people who have seen the need and know that we're in a crisis right now and really taking it serious.

This work would not be what it is today if you guys wouldn't have been committed to the table. I wanna thank you for all that I had already eaten from you. I wanna thank both of you, councilwoman Gray, and vice chair of Esplanol for making it clear that it's more than just just building shelters as well, but we also have to think about landlords, rentals, and all of that. So you guys were very clear on how the education you brought to the table and you really embarking on the fact around, you know, the encampment and how important it was that we really take care of people. The dive that you did and so many other things, even coming out with a policy already.

So we are really, really fortunate to have such great workers here in the city of Providence, especially here in the city council who have taken this work very, very serious. So that's my skill. Now we're gonna dive right into what is in here, and we're gonna take care from Miguel Young to do that. You have the tools, sir.

Great. Thank you very much, chair. And members of the task force, thank you for letting me come before you again to talk about this. I was trying to think of the last time. I I think I presented it now a few times to this task force and just sort of what I hope to do now is sort of jog your memory and how I review my work and when it's whether it's task force or other matters of council business is I try to reflect back what I hear from you all and even, like, respond to questions, input.

And, I'd say, of all the work I've done with this council, this has been one where I've gotten so much detailed feedback, and it's actually been really good. It felt so collaborative. And I hope each of you, when you sort of flip through this, you you see a bit of your own perspective reflected back at you. Because I heard from all of you, and every single thing in here is either something that was presented to you or something that you all generated on your own individually and then discussed as a group. If you remember, I was before you.

It was in March, and we had an outline. And we really broke down the outline, and I had a red pen with me that day. And I think I remember sitting right here, and I left this room with so much red ink on the page just based on the feedback. So I guess we can just kinda move through what you have before you now and, you know, discussion, questions, anything can sort of blossom from this overview. But you'll see right at the beginning, there's a really nice table of contents that kind of breaks it down.

Basically, this is all of it in four sections. The executive summary, I would encourage all of you to sort of read on your own if you haven't. That covers it all. We do get into the numbers. And think about numbers, think about statistics as they obviously always change year by year.

And these numbers have helped True. And some of the precise figures, especially dollar amounts, have frankly increased since this was written last year, but that's sort of the nature of statistics. I think that it really captures the trend and all of sort of Rhode Island has been either first or last in a lot of lot of categories. First in, like I guess it depends on how you look at it. Like, last in new housing development, first in, like, increase of housing cost, value, rent, all of that sort of trickles down.

So it's it's going to be question that Rhode Island has to find itself on the sort of fringes of all these designations. And you see that in housing prices by the mountains. And as we flip through, we begin to see I think an important clarification that was made, and this this is something that was came out of the amount of presentations you all reached, which is acknowledging that a lot of these recommendations are some of them are long term actions. I think that to address a housing crisis, it is a balance of health. There was a oh, it it took a lot of years to get us to this point, and it's not unreasonable to realize that it may take a lot of years to fix some of the sort of hole we found ourselves in.

So that clarification becomes clear. And then you get into well, I think I just missed an important part that actually you talked about the comprehensive plan just for a second. Kinda wanna acknowledge that part of this report and that page number. Use the page numbers. Page 10.

Yeah. Nine and ten. So I thought it was also very important because this comprehensive plan process, as we were working on the outline of this report and as you all were receiving presentations, you're also working on a comprehensive plan. I feel like every time I bring up the comprehensive plan, I see, like, you know, like, eyes like, oh my god. Because that was such a process.

And many of you said on the ordinance committee, I know we have the chair of ordinance committee. The comprehensive plan was took up so much time, and what was produced was this, like, sort of really incredible collaborative work and a plan that when I was looking at the presentations you all received in the housing first task force, it really dawned on me that the work that went into the comprehensive plan really addressed exactly what you heard. So I thought it was very important to acknowledge that, that, like, work has been done, that you all have done a lot of work. And so this sort of acknowledges that. This is where you get into things like the sort of zoning, the I think the word that always went in that conference of planning was, like, thoughtful density.

It's sort of imagining what the city can look like and what it should look like, stuff like that. So that is also reflected in this report. And then you get into what I would say on page 14 is a part of this report that really talks about supply and housing supply. Something that came up a lot in the presentations around housing, talks a lot about housing supply. Department of Housing talks a lot about it.

And at one point, I'm trying to remember which of you. Think it might have been the new counselor, right, has really had this real idea about an affordable housing portfolio, something that really mapped out what the trends are throughout the city. And when I think about this now, I can think about sort of this budget cycle that we just went through. And we have this big document that showed trends in housing prices in each ward. And I think that is a step in the direction of what an affordable housing report.

That's the type of information that would be inside of that. And, of course, it'd be expanded, but I think you all remember that big sort of packet of tables. And you're looking through how are the tax rates? What are the valuations, how do they impact each of your wards? And I remember watching each of you, like, flip to your own ward just to, like, see what's happening in your neighborhood.

And that to me, I think, is emblematic of what an affordable housing report could look like. So that really sets the stage for seeing the city, seeing what's happening around the city. And number two in this section on page 16, I think also came this especially came out of the presentations you all reached. This was a perspective of builders, really reflecting back what we're hearing from builders in this city and how challenging it can be to go through the sort of permitting process. And I also find that this perspective is shared by members of your community.

And when I say that, it's because I think when the process is clear about how an affordable how a development comes to be, it helps everybody. I've also been at a lot of community meetings with you all, and people are like, when did this when was this approved? How was this approved? Those questions coming from the community, I think, can also benefit from a clear permitting process and incentives for affordable housing. And then inside this, number two, I think something that's very, very, very interesting that has come up a lot.

And you'll see it's about halfway down the page. It's in bold, a bridge TSA. This, I can personally state being in the office, is something that is requested a lot because the what we hear from builders, we hear from developers is the even the ability to plan out a project with the random increases. I wouldn't say random. You know, things like suddenly tariffs all of a sudden or in our life, and the cost of bills suddenly changes dramatically and really impacts the plan to finish a process to finish a building.

And it puts them in this sort of weird place where all of a sudden they're getting a tax bill that and a bridge TSA would be a short version of a TSA that'll allow a project to come to, fruition before, you know, it really the tax rates really land on it. And, I've been in ordinance committee meetings when this sort of tension has come up a lot throughout the city. So that's something specific I wanna point out. But moving along, another conversation that has been had a lot by this task force is the aspiration of a mandate. And I think this conversation often comes up when hear all of you talk about places in your ward where you've had just sort of land that's sitting there, and it's, like, it's this frustration that I hear reflected out of community meetings at committee meetings where you say to yourself, okay.

When you have this lack of affordable housing but I see places in my board where there's, like, there's there's there's, like, possibilities elsewhere. This this land bank is a way of sort of organizing that and sort of preventing speculation, people sitting on land until it's, like, good to build on, stuff like that. So that's where this came in. You know, when you read through this, another thing we really try to integrate are examples from other cities, something I think you know is very important to all of you. Here, Atlanta.

Atlanta does a lot of really interesting work similar to this. And, you Atlanta is one of those metro areas that's the size of Orion. So, you know, they're keep that if they're able to do it, it's the type of thing that, you know, Providence feels really well positioned to be able to accomplish. So moving even further in this section on supply, we've got public developer, solar housing. This is a really big conversation.

This is a really big plan. We spent a lot of time working on this in the report, a lot of conversations even in previous task force meetings about this idea. There's it's in fact, it's a conversation that happens in the state house a lot as well. And if you go to the State House and you bring up Montgomery County, that Montgomery County, Maryland alone sort of evokes this concept of a public developer. And it's just one approach that the city could take to sort of take control of the housing supply, specifically the affordable housing supply.

And this is a very detailed section. And a case study in Montgomery County in Atlanta, I think, is really it's just, like, really profound and insightful. And it's as you can see, it's one of the longer ones, three three pages. And last but not last in this section, but I think something that I've heard counselors talk about, I think something that this council can be proud of is many of the city the council with the administration, I think, can be really proud of the Providence Housing Trust Fund in the last couple of years. I know that the department our planning department and housing came before you all and spoke about the housing trust fund and how money sort of moves through it and the amount of gap funding that went into various projects.

And, I guess, speaking personally, I've been working with y'all since 2023. And from when that conversation happened of Providence Housing Trust Fund, ARPA dollars, gap funding projects, from that point to now, we can now walk into neighborhoods and see full on developments that are done, affordable housing developments. Chairman, we've got some great ones on Broad Street over there that are amazing. And it's like, before our eyes, they were built, and it's like using these tools the city has. So I think that's really kind of worth celebrating for the city.