You know Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse. You know The Procaccianti Group. But deep in the neighborhoods, they’re not the big players, the developers to watch.
Instead, it’s community development corporations such as SWAP (Stop Wasting Abandoned Property), the Olneyville Housing Corp., and on a smaller scale, Greater Elmwood Neighborhood Services and Smith Hill Community Development Corp.
They’re the ones building and rehabbing whole rows of houses, even bringing in some retail to areas where, until recently, no one would have considered opening a store. They’re the ones changing the feel of the neighborhoods, weaving a new social fabric.
And while most people who don’t live or work in Olneyville, South Providence or Smith Hill, and aren’t involved in affordable-housing development, or might be hard-pressed to name any of the projects the CDCs have taken on, city leaders have taken notice.
Last year, when boasting in his State of the City address about the $3 billion in “brick and mortar” investment going on in Providence, Mayor David N. Cicilline specifically noted that well more than one-third of that investment was happening in the neighborhoods, much of it led by CDCs. He also spoke about how much affordable housing was being built – again, by CDCs.
Barbara Fields, senior program director of the Rhode Island Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC), a nonprofit that provides financial and technical support to CDCs and shares their goal of revitalizing neighborhoods, said she’s seen a major change both in how CDCs approach their work, and in how they’re perceived.
“When I came here 15 years ago, nobody even used the term CDC,” she said. Most of the organizations were tiny and did only very small, scattered projects, she noted, individual houses with just a handful of units. “Nobody had done development at scale.”
Compare that with the multimillion-dollar initiatives the nonprofits are taking on today.
SWAP, for example, was chosen as Citizens Bank’s first “Housing Heroes” award in 2005 for its “25 Homes in 25 Months” project in the Potters Avenue area, an effort to not just fix up individual houses, but change the feel of that community.
Now SWAP is developing a $13 million, three-story building at Broad and Pine streets, on property formerly occupied by Tire King, that will include 35 affordable apartments as well as 14,000 square feet of commercial space on the ground to be sold as condominiums.
Olneyville Housing, for its part, has been rebuilding an area near the Woonasquatucket River that had been ravaged by years of neglect but has new appeal because the city is building a nine-acre park along the river.
When the park project first got under way, said Frank Shea, executive director, the nonprofit did a review and concluded, “it’s going to be this beautiful park, but nobody’s going to go there,” because the neighborhood was so blighted.
So Olneyville Housing is pumping about $13 million into the area, transforming property that had been abandoned for almost two decades, since a mill there burned down in 1988. Last December, the nonprofit completed 31 affordable rental units; now it’s finishing 20 townhouses that will be sold at prices ranging from $104,000 to $140,000, all within a land trust structure that ensures they will continue to be affordable even if they are later sold.
Shea said Olneyville Housing has taken on increasingly ambitious projects because “the demand for affordable housing is so great that we just have to look at things on a totally different scale.”
In the 1990s, he said, “our organization would do one or two houses a year,” versus the 51 units that it will have completed in this 12-month period. “But given the pressure on the neighborhood,” he added, “we might have been closer to meeting the needs of the community back then.”
Given Struever Bros.’ high profile in Olneyville, and its expressed interest in the health of the whole neighborhood, the CDC has found the company’s presence “very advantageous,” because Struever Bros. has provided financial and staff support; the two are working together on the redevelopment of the old Polish Home. But at the same time, Shea noted, Struever Bros.’ developments are changing the area in a way that doesn’t always help residents.
Carla DeStefano, executive director of SWAP, also has mixed feelings about the for-profit entities buying properties in South Providence. It’s good to see the city becoming more vibrant, she said, but many people coming now see the neighborhood as a profit-making opportunity, and that won’t necessarily benefit low- and moderate-income residents.
“Whereas 10 years ago, we were trying to stabilize parts of neighborhood so they wouldn’t go back to blighted mode,” she said, “now we’re fighting gentrification. Our mission is to preserve affordable housing for the people who’ve lived here for a long time.” •
