Tackling The Housing Crisis With Public Power
(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Rhode Island is using COVID stimulus money to become a public housing developer — a monumental first step towards building a just housing delivery system.
In June, Rhode Island passed a $10 million pilot program that will use COVID-19 stimulus money to build mixed-income public housing. By acting as a public developer itself, Rhode Island would be the only state to acquire its own land and build housing directly, cutting out profit-gouging developers — a model approach for the rest of the country amid a housing crisis that has only grown more dire since the start of the pandemic.
The state’s pilot housing program is already shaking things up at the local level. On Monday, Providence mayoral candidate Gonzalo Cuervo added a municipal public developer plan to his housing policy platform as Reclaim RI — the progressive organizing group that backed the state’s pilot program — endorsed his campaign. Cuervo also adopted a rent stabilization plan that would institute a four percent cap on year-over-year rent increases.
In a housing landscape dominated by private equity, federal divestment, and the failure of “public-private” programs, the fight for public housing at the state level is increasingly urgent.
In Rhode Island alone, 1 in 3 renters cannot keep up with rent. A recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimated that more than 60 percent of renter households in the U.S. are struggling to afford basic living expenses after paying rent and utilities. Rather than letting markets drive housing development outcomes, the public developer model creates a foundation for a housing system not driven by profits.
The pilot program is just one part of the state’s Create Homes Act, which would use $300 million in American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to create a new state housing department, realigning public spending with public good. Designed to confront the housing crisis head-on, the new department would have two central capacities: building housing and acquiring land for public ownership.
State Sen. Meghan Kallman (D), who introduced the Create Homes Act, told The Lever that the bill “is designed to equip the state to do everything that it could possibly need to do in support of a robust, just, multi-income, well-planned, well-connected housing vision.”
Public Development For Public Housing
Public housing is popular, and some states — Colorado, California, Hawaii, and Maryland — recently passed legislation to build more of it.