Next Monday, Providence’s City Council will host a public hearing on the city’s new Comprehensive Plan, outlining its development goals for the next ten years. The goals include increasing housing production and supporting historic preservation throughout the city.
In July, Councilman John Goncalves introduced a signature drive in support of creating a historic district in Fox Point. The proposed historic area would include about 300 properties between Brook Street and Governor Street south of India Point Park.
The drive builds on the passage of laws that allowed “a six-month demolition delay and new notice requirements to protect these properties,” Goncalves wrote in an op-ed to The Boston Globe. Goncalves did not respond to The Herald’s request for comment.
In recent years, Fox Point residents have voiced concerns about the demolition of historic East Side properties.
According to the Providence Historic District Commission, historic districts are “protect(ed) and preserv(ed) special areas of historic and architectural value.” There are eight continuous and one non-continuous historical districts throughout Providence. College Hill, which encompasses Brown’s campus, is a continuous district.
The Providence Preservation Society, an organization dedicated to neighborhood revitalization and preservation, responded to the City’s plan, recommending that the plan “redefine” the scope of “historic districts” to be more inclusive.
Currently, the plan only recognizes existing local historic districts, which PPS believes “overrepresent affluent white neighborhoods.” Instead, PPS advocates adding all federally recognized historic districts to the plan, as they “tend to be more inclusive, diverse and deserve equal protection.”
“Through preservation, what we’re doing is creating a public narrative of history,” PPS Executive Director Marisa Brown told The Herald when asked about the importance of preservation. “It’s a narrative that you encounter every day. It’s not a narrative that’s printed or in a book, but it’s a public narrative that’s spatial.”
But a petition circulated online opposed the historic district overlay for Fox Point, arguing that among other things, it makes housing more expensive. A 2024 study done in Florida found that historic properties often experience higher rates of increasing value compared to the other properties in the area.
Still, Brown believes that the data on historic homes and higher costs for buyers is so “site specific” that it does not implicate preservation to be a “tool for gentrification.”
A “both/and” approach is needed to “balance development with preservation” within the state, Goncalves wrote in his Globe article.
In 2021 — the most recent year for which data is available — Rhode Island ranked last in the nation amongst the states for housing per capita production, according to the Rhode Island Foundation.
Over the summer, Mayor Brett P. Smiley announced that the city has now committed over $55.6 million to “affordable housing construction” since 2022.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has experienced record high renting and buying costs, according to the Providence Journal. Data from the Rhode Island Association of Realtors shows that the median cost of a single-family home in May had increased by 67% since April 2019.
For renters, the situation is no better. As of April 2023, almost half of all Rhode Island renters were cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, according to a study by the Rhode Island Foundation.
Vincent Scorziello, the owner of Campus Fine Wines in Fox Point, lives on the East Side of Providence and rents one unit out of his two-family home.
“I’ve noticed that the rents have gone kind of insane,” said Scorziello. While he tries to keep the cost of rent consistent for his tenants, Scorziello finds what others are charging to be “kind of crazy.”
But building housing and preservation don’t have to be an issue of one or the other, Scorziello added.
“While I feel that we definitely need more housing in the city … I don’t think the answer is giving developers a blank check to tear down buildings and put up what seems like luxury units for wealthy students,” he told The Herald.
While Brown stressed the importance of preservation, she acknowledged that “we need more density, we need more housing.”
In 2023, many Fox Point residents pushed back on plans “to tear down two existing buildings on Wickenden Street to make way for a five-story mixed-use property,” The Boston Globe previously reported.
Peter Phipps, a Fox Point resident and part of the Fox Point Neighborhood Association, said that there are ongoing discussions in his community surrounding preservation and development.
“There’s places, like New York City, for example, where everything gets torn down and something else is put up all the time,” said Phipps. Providence’s “identity is being one of the oldest cities in America that still feels and looks like an old city.”
Sanai Rashid was raised in Brooklyn and now lives in Long Island, New York. As an English and History concentrator, she is always looking for a way to amplify stories and histories previously unheard. When she is not writing, you can find her trying new pizza places in Providence or buying another whale stuffed animal.
