WARWICK – On Wednesday, representatives and residents from Crossroads Rhode Island, as well as state and local elected officials, broke walls down at the former Rhode Island Family Shelter to help transform the facility into affordable apartments to provide permanent housing for low- and moderate-income families.
While the project itself is small in scale, Crossroads’ top executive hopes this renovation project serves as a model where adaptive reuse on existing structures is a method for local municipalities to further address the state’s housing crisis and lead to something bigger down the road.
Crossroads CEO Karen A. Santilli told Providence Business News Wednesday the $1.6 million renovation project will convert the Rhode Island Family Shelter building’s first floor shelter facility into four permanent apartments. Apartments in the shelter building – which was a former convent for St. Benedict Church – will have either two or three bedrooms and new amenities, Santilli said.
The project is supported by R.I. Housing and Mortgage Finance Corp., the R.I. Housing Resources Commission and the city of Warwick. The bulk of the project’s cost – about $1.5 million – is covered by a R.I. Housing bond and $36,000 in city community development block grants. Pariseault Builders Inc. is the contractor and Branch Architects is the architect.
Santilli said Crossroads took over the building in 2018 at the state’s request. She said Rhode Island Family Shelter could not “for a variety of reasons” maintain the 10-family shelter program on the first floor and permanent housing on the second floor and ceased operations in 2017, and the state needed Crossroads to step in to help.
“The building was filled with families in emergency shelters and in crisis. The second floor were formerly homeless families that needed supportive services,” Santilli said. Using part of a $5 million Day One Family Foundation grant from then Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos, Crossroads, Santilli said, moved the families out of the shelter into more secure housing.
Over time, Crossroads acquired the building and began applying for bond money and community development block grants from the city to renovate it. Construction is currently going on and the project is scheduled to be finished by September. Families living on the building’s second floor will still receive services from Crossroads, Santilli said.
But, Santilli is emphasizing that this project should be an example of how other cities and towns across Rhode Island should get creative and turn vacant properties into opportunities for affordable housing. She said such creativity is needed in order for Rhode Island to build approximately 3,000 apartments in order to make a significant dent into the affordable housing crisis.
Some examples in the city Santilli noted include a school building behind the Rhode Island Family Shelter building that she says has been vacant for 40 years. She also cited the former school buildings the city closed down a few years ago as part of the school department’s school consolidation efforts.
“There needs to be a lot of remediation to turn [these buildings] into safe housing for families. We’re hoping this [Rhode Island Family Shelter project] serves and an example [of adaptive reuse],” Santilli said.
Santilli said Crossroads has “lots of active” conversations with other cities and towns, including Providence, about turning old buildings into new affordable housing. The organization is also looking at possible properties in East Providence, North Kingstown, Warwick, West Warwick, Central Falls and Pawtucket, eying potential affordable housing, but Santilli said it’s “too soon to say” if another such adaptive reuse project is on the immediate horizon.
“At the end of the day, we want to be in communities where our folks want to live,” Santilli said. “It needs to be convenient and from the communities that they are already coming from.”
James Bessette is the PBN special projects editor, and also covers the nonprofit and education sectors. You may reach him at Bessette@PBN.com. You may also follow him on Twitter at @James_Bessette.
