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Title
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Analysis of Providence's Anti-Displacement and Comprehensive Housing Strategy
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Creator
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Oscar d'Angeac
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Date
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2022
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Description
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2022 student presentation on the impacts of Providence's anti-displacement and comprehensive housing strategy
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Contributor
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Kaita Igarashi and Mary Arend
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transcript of
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Speaker 1 [00:00,278 - 01:08,020]: All right, so we wanted to just start quickly with a couple of acknowledgements that this analysis of the plan is in conversation with community partners who have come as guest speakers to our class, as well as the pre-existing critique formulated by the housing group of the African American Ambassadors Group. And so as a brief introduction to the plan, The anti-displacement and comprehensive housing strategy was published in 2021. It is a 10-year plan for investment in housing development in Providence constructed by the city in consultation with public and private interest groups. And the plan begins by stating this goal. The city of Providence is committed to preserving existing housing affordability, promoting development of new affordable housing and increasing housing choice to provide safe affordable housing citywide. And the plan primarily aims to address housing needs in Providence through the construction of market rate and affordable housing with mechanisms for incentivizing this development.
Speaker 0 [01:11,307 - 06:18,289]: All right, so in terms of analyzing and critiquing the city's plan, we wanted to use a few different frameworks to guide our analysis. So overall, we wanted to use a social justice framework that's very similar to many of the groups that have already gone. We wanted to center those who are most affected by Providence's housing crisis. So looking at tenants and residents rather than landlords and developers. And also, we were really inspired by, in defense of housing, specifically their radical right to housing that's proposed in the conclusion section that states that everyone should be able to have a right to a house, basically. and that this should be a political lens through which we can advocate for housing in the future. We also were heavily inspired by Eve Tuck's Suspended Damage, which was already described prior. But in particular, we were very inspired by her desire-based framework, which states that we can, instead of you know, dwelling on these harm-based narratives that only focus on the historical harm that's happened. We can also begin to look at transformative demands and reforms that can change these conditions for the future. And then finally, we were also inspired by this interview article called Housing Activist, Assata Tigray, on gentrification in Providence, which argues that a more broad economic and political context is needed in order to fully analyze displacement and gentrification. Gentrification is not some natural tide of the marketplace, but in fact has targeted historical actors and mechanisms through which it occurs. And so that's why we chose to spend a good amount of time on describing the historical background. of the plan. The plan itself has about one or two pages that details redlining. However, we found that this was pretty insufficient in order to fully grapple with the history of displacement in Providence. So as other groups have already discussed, redlining was a discriminatory practice through which banks could say, that they would not give primarily black homeowners mortgages or at the very least subprime mortgages, which were much less profitable and cost efficient for them. And this really created a massive discrepancy in terms of wealth and also in terms of neighborhoods, which neighborhoods had resources available to them, which led to a massive increase of disinvestment from Black communities in Providence. And then Specifically, we wanted to look at two different examples in Providence's history for how this disinvestment really affected displacement. The first of these is Lippitt Hill. So Lippitt Hill was disinvested from and then labeled as blight by the Providence Redevelopment Agency. And in 1959, it was designated as slum clearance. And unfortunately, over 650 homes were totally destroyed during this time. And then also, we want to point out the interstate I-95 construction, which was a federal highway project that went all the way through the Fox Point community, through primarily Cape Verdean neighborhood. And this really caused a massive displacement to happen in the destruction of a community. And it's for these kinds of reasons why there have been massive reverberations. Some statistics show that by 1965, 80% of African-Americans in Providence, Rhode Island were forced to move at least once because of these racist urban renewal and displacement policies that were being instituted. And then also this continues on today. So we wanted to focus on gentrification displacement, especially giving attention to the displacement that Brown University has caused as we are Brown University students. And we feel like Brown especially has a very big impact role that it needs to play if it wants to rectify these historical and ongoing harms, specifically Brown student vacation, as well as reducing new projects such as the jewelry district has massively increased rent in the area and forced out previous residents.
Speaker 1 [06:23,730 - 11:55,176]: All right, so next we're going to talk about the approach that the city took in creating this plan. So the city reports that they partnered with public and private interest groups in the formulation of the plan. The bulk of the data presented in the plan is from a nine month study conducted by RKG Associates, which is a real estate and economic planning consultant firm based in Boston. And the RKG consultants also interviewed housing advocates, developers, city staff, and other interest groups about Providence's housing needs when they were forming their recommendations. So this method of data collection is notable in that the recommendations come from a consulting firm and not from primarily or directly from community members. While they did interview some community members and housing groups, their analysis of Providence's housing needs is primarily rooted in market feasibility and cost analysis. And there have been some opportunities for public comment throughout the process, but we found that the plan was not rooted enough in community knowledge as a lot of this knowledge is existing in the community right now. And it focused too much on the data collected by the consulting firm. And then the plan also states that they took into consideration recent reports and studies from some different housing groups. And this includes United Way of Rhode Island's 2016 Housing Summit Report, Housing Works 2018 Housing Factbook, among others. And all of these reports stress the need for new and preserved affordable housing in order to prevent displacement. All right, so the plan itself, its primary goal for addressing housing needs is to incentivize housing construction, as well as rehabilitation. The RKG investigation found that in order to meet the housing demands over the next 10 years, the city would have to develop and rehab more than 850 price-appropriate rental and ownership units each year. And these units for families earning less than 100% of the area median income. The city reports that comparatively 512 income controlled units were built during the last decade. So there would need to be a significant increase in the development of these units. The plan reports that rental choice is incredibly limited for households with very low incomes. The majority of rental units are priced appropriately for households earning between 50 and 100% of the area median income, but the majority of renters in Providence earn below 50% of AMI. Additionally, 40% of Providence renters earn less than 30% of AMI, but only 20% of units serve this demographic. And the most underserved demographic is very low income households earning this lower percentage of AMI in need of multiple bedroom units. And so we talked about how this deficit in housing that is truly affordable to renters who own less than 30% of AMI is related to the method by which affordable housing is defined and Emery kind of touched on this as well. But in calculating affordability, according to HUD standards for rent burden and using area median income, more affordable units are constructed for households who make a higher percentage of AMI, leaving fewer options for the households earning less than 30% of AMI. Then a significant portion of the plan centers around funding for housing construction. And so affordable housing demands would far exceed the current city funding allocated for housing development. The plan states that the city has at least $3 million allocated for housing development each year. They estimate that in order to adequately address the affordable housing demands over the next 10 years, the city would have to devote more than 225 million annually. So that is 75 times what they have available. To fill this gap in funding, they turned to nonprofits and corporations to form public private partnerships. The city identified several different financing strategies, one of which is to use city funds to grow. So from that 3 million, to grow currently available capital using this to attract investors. And then they also suggest working with community development finance institutions to identify target investment areas. And so some of that 3 million, which is much less than they need, would be used to subsidize private development.
Speaker 0 [11:57,657 - 11:59,338]: Then if you want to go to analysis.
Speaker 1 [12:01,573 - 14:45,980]: Um, so we, as Kaita talked about a little bit, um, there is a huge need for, uh, substantive, uh, substantive historical awareness, which we found was lacking in the plan. Um, and this limits its ability to repair historic harm. The plan does briefly discuss redlining, um, and the harm that this caused, but it does not, um, discuss any other kinds of housing policy. that caused similar harm, such as urban renewal. And the plan states as a goal that it wants to begin dismantling the decades of racist and unequal housing policy to make housing more equitable in the city, which we support as a goal. But this isn't going to be possible without like thoroughly acknowledging and understanding what kinds of policies need to be dismantled, and then also committing to instituting reparations for harm caused in the past. And so we found that the city's plan to fund affordable housing through public private partnerships is illustrative of this lack of historical awareness. The funding strategies don't address the ways that developers, banks, and private institutions like Brown University have historically and in the present day contributed to housing inequities. And then, Finally, our critiques and analysis of this plan are informed by the response to the plan by members of the housing group of the African American Ambassadors Group. So their response points out that claims to justice have been made in the past when instituting housing reforms, such as urban renewal plans. But then these, even with these claims, these plans have gone on to create unequal housing conditions and primarily affecting communities of color. Um, so they write in their response that quote, we are quite concerned that much of this plan depends on the same strategies to subsidize private developers and landlords that have proved so harmful to our communities in the past. Um, so these strategies could lead to the co-opting of public interests. Um, and they urge the city that if they continue with these partnerships to that, uh, community based organizations. be given authority to coordinate with private companies in order to represent and protect the interests of community members. And then they also offer other policy proposals, such as community land trusts and cooperatives, which we are going to talk about more in our recommendation.
Speaker 0 [14:48,560 - 19:19,872]: Yeah, so in order to remedy some of the shortcomings of the comprehensive strategy, we have four main policy recommendations. The first of which is rent control. So rent control is an extremely powerful tool in maintaining the affordability and diversity of communities. And there have been multiple cities, multiple studies that have all corroborated this point. And particularly, we drew from case studies in Berkeley, Santa Monica and Richmond, which all showed that rent control did a phenomenal job of keeping residents from being displaced. Secondly, we were looking at community land trusts. While there is one sentence in the comprehensive strategy, that talks about community land trusts, it's worded in a way that isn't super clear and makes it sound like it would be an outside nonprofit. We think that community-based land trusts that are rooted in the neighborhood specifically are really great because they create a collective ownership model that can unlink housing from predatory markets. This, for example, has been shown to work in cities like Boston with the Dudley neighborhood incorporated that has maintained affordable housing long term and then also. going back to the kind of the point about an outside NGO, we think that it's very important for the community themselves to be in charge of the land trust because the community ultimately knows what's best for themselves. And also it's a much more stable choice for the community as outside NGOs are always subject to very finicky and unpredictable funding shortages. and price and funding cuts by the city or different investors. Our third policy recommendation is to change the housing development requirement to add more three person unit. So as Mary previously mentioned, three plus people units are the largest gap within Providence's affordable housing market. And the plan does acknowledge this, but however, it does so in a way that relies on a logic of filtering, basically saying that if we just create more and more affordable housing, then the people will eventually filter into whichever housing is best to meet their means. However, this like is, filtering is a very flawed logic. Um, it can take generations for people to go to, um, to, to end up filtering down because people, you know, don't really like moving that much. They create a kind of connection to the neighborhood that they live in. And then also, um, developers at the end of the day do what is most profitable for them, which is not three plus person units because three plus person units have to get like kitchens and more bathrooms, which is less profitable for developers. So overall stricter regulations on the type of affordable housing units will be crucial coming forward. And then finally, we propose to tax private universities such as Brown. Brown University has a $6.9 billion endowment, and they don't pay any taxes because of their quote unquote non-profit status, even though they are a very, very profitable institution. um brown university currently pays 6.7 million dollars in voluntary payment however this is very short of this 38 million dollars that they should be paying taxes and they get to choose where the 6.7 million dollars goes through political pressure and other means and we think that even though This would not cover the $225 million necessary. It would be a lot more of a stable source of income, of a stable source of funding to be put towards the project. And we think that it is a necessity, especially given Brown's history as a gentrifier and displacer, historically and present.
Speaker 1 [19:22,256 - 19:25,460]: And I think that is it. Thank you so much
