Some new projects on the former Interstate 195 land have heightened concerns about incentives that favor new development in certain areas of Providence at the expense of other areas, particularly the city’s old financial district.
One example: Bank Rhode Island, which on Oct. 5 announced it was moving its headquarters out of the Turks Head Building into a new office included in a mixed-use project in Fox Point. Bank leaders say swapping out a few rented floors in a stately, 110-year-old skyscraper for a custom-built office gives them flexibility, visibility and room to expand.
But what BankRI touted as the first new office headquarters built in over a decade quickly drew concern for the languishing financial district. The once-vibrant hub for financial services and law firms has emptied over the last decades as companies consolidate or move their headquarters to cheaper or more accessible locations.
The pandemic propelled the downtown drain into high gear, with many companies still not returning to in-office work more than two years later.
“Every renewal [of a lease] that comes up, companies are choosing smaller spaces,” said Michael Giuttari, president of MG Commercial Real Estate Services Inc. “There is a lot of sublease space on the market because big companies are just giving up their space.”
The downtown financial district is a shell compared with his memories from the 1980s and 1990s, when buildings brimmed with office workers and executives gathered for lunches at the Turks Head Club.
Without the vibrancy, the inconveniences of downtown office space – lack of parking, higher prices per square foot – aren’t worth it to Giuttari, who also opted to move his business to the Jewelry District.
Indeed, the 80 BankRI employees in the Turks Head Building over the last 15 years had to find and pay for parking, said Mark J. Meiklejohn, BankRI CEO and president.
The company’s new headquarters comes with garage parking spots and twice as much office space, which will allow the bank to bring together administrative workers scattered in branches statewide and fit new hires.
“We’re staying committed to the city, and to downtown,” Meiklejohn said.
It’s just a matter of redefining what “downtown” means, according to Meiklejohn. Moving I-195 opened up a huge swath of land, which developers are taking advantage of to build apartments, offices, laboratory space and even a new grocery store.
The evolution of downtown was only natural to Cliff Wood, executive director of The Providence Foundation. Before the financial district was a business hub, it was mostly residential, he said.
But Wood didn’t think it was fair that in the I-195 district, developers can bypass City Council review for tax incentives. That’s not the case for downtown, where developers must endure a “rigorous, unpredictable and often lengthy review process” for the same agreement, Wood said.
Joseph Paolino Jr., former Providence mayor and managing partner of Paolino Properties LP, likened it to a Robin Hood scheme, “stealing” from one area of downtown to help another. Paolino worried how the Turks Head Building owners would fill BankRI’s 50,000-square-foot offices without something to sweeten the deal.
Waldorf Sultan GP LLC, the general partner of the Turks Head Building property ownership group, in a statement said it was disappointed by the “mission” of the I-195 Redevelopment District Commission to “relocate keystone tenants from existing downtown properties.”
But Commission Chairman Robert Davis said that hasn’t been the case, noting that many of the projects and groups opening in the I-195 area were not “typical downtown occupants” – Trader Joe’s, the Cambridge Innovation Center and Brown University.
Joe Paolino is correct. Kudos to him for calling out this mere “reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic”.