Driving up Interstate 95 on a recent evening, Richard Godfrey, executive director of Roger Williams University’s real estate program, couldn’t help but notice a U-Haul self-storage facility sitting on the edge of the roadway in West Greenwich.
The building itself isn’t new – it used to be the headquarters of the international gaming company GTECH Corp. that merged into International Game Technology PLC. Now, rather than buzzing with tech workers and executives, the West Greenwich structure is largely devoid of people but holds plenty of objects.
While the storage building does serve an existing need, Godfrey finds it a somewhat dreary symbol, compared with what it used to hold.
It’s also not alone. Godfrey notes that another self-storage facility was recently completed along Interstate 95, near the Thurbers Avenue curve in Providence, and another just north of the curve.
While perhaps harder to miss along the interstate, these self-storage facilities aren’t just cropping up along highways: The facilities are scattered across the state and only becoming more common.
“They are proliferating,” Godfrey said. “The actual data is hard to gather, [but] it’s been happening for a while.”
It’s not an issue that’s unique to Rhode Island, Godfrey says, noting that self-storage units are popping up in rapid succession throughout the country. But the state’s notoriously restrictive land-use ordinances certainly don’t help.
The prevalence of self-storage units ties back to Rhode Island’s housing crisis in more ways than one, Godfrey says. Under the current dearth of affordable residential units, people are renting out small, shared apartments with little room for their belongings.
“There’s just no room for people’s stuff,” Godfrey said. “We’re also seeing a lot of people sharing [apartments], and they have less [space] to store stuff. … And we bought a lot of stuff during [the COVID-19 pandemic].”
Additionally, cities and towns tend to look upon self-storage units favorably, he adds. The landowners have to pay regular property taxes, the units have minimal water and sewer needs, and these businesses don’t generate a lot of traffic.
In other words, “They pay taxes and demand no services,” Godfrey said. Meanwhile, the facilities also appeal to property owners as relatively low-maintenance buildings that they can count on for municipal approval.
But while community leaders have traditionally allowed these facilities with little fuss, that’s starting to change as they become more prevalent.
In Providence, the spread of storage units has become a major area of concern for City Council members Miguel Sanchez, Sue AnderBois and Justin Roias.
Sanchez says the issue first came to his attention when constituents raised questions about construction on land in his Ward 6 neighborhood. On further investigation, he discovered that the parcel was approved to host a self-storage facility.
Little data exists on self-storage buildings, so Sanchez and his team set out to document just how many units exist in the city. In their search, they identified 15 self-storage businesses that have already opened in Providence, with another two under construction. And the 10-mile radius surrounding Providence includes another 50 of these facilities, they found.
That was enough for Sanchez, AnderBois and Roias, particularly considering the city’s housing shortage. They recently proposed an ordinance that would ban future self-storage unit developments within the city. The measure has garnered the support of the ordinance committee and Plan Commision.
Since the ordinance was proposed, a Massachusetts company has proposed a five-story, 1,400-unit self-storage building on Branch Avenue in Providence.
“The central thing we want to accomplish is house people and not things,” Sanchez said, adding that self-storage businesses also don’t offer many jobs for locals. “Most of these facilities have one or two employees working there at all times.”
And municipal leaders may soon follow suit in North Providence, where Town Councilman Ronald Baccala Jr. recently proposed restricting new self-storage units to industrial areas.
Godfrey doesn’t see the facilities as inherently malignant, given that most exist on commercially zoned properties where housing might not be allowed. But Sanchez says his proposed ordinance to prohibit the facilities would serve as a first step toward creating more housing.
“We don’t want to ban them just for the sake of banning them,” Sanchez said. “The next step is to see what we can do as a city to incentivize more housing opportunities … [and] to participate in our comprehensive plan as a city and see specifically what kind of zoning changes we can make.”
Godfrey also notes that even lots zoned only for commercial use can be put to better use. Looking at the former GTECH building, he recalls it as something of a symbol of former innovation. GTECH moved its headquarters to Providence in 2004.
“To have [the company] replaced by self-storage may produce tax dollars and [there] may be a need, but it really doesn’t stimulate the economy,” he said.
“We can’t have all of our land consumed with self-storage,” he said. “We need to have a balance of land uses.”
