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CityState: Reporter
The proposal would also eliminate a
duplicative tax on affordable housing and
strengthen the state’s housing bureaucracy
by creating a coordinating council and
hiring a deputy secretary of housing.
“This is an overly tight market; that
affects affordability for Rhode Islanders of
every income level. And, in the last few
years, we hear regularly from employers
about the challenges of our housing market
these days,” says Secretary of Commerce
Stefan Pryor. “Homes are where jobs go to
sleep at night. It’s essential we have housing
available to our workforce at the various
price points.”
Builders are hard-pressed to meet the
demand. Long gone are the days when
residential home builders could put up a
subdivision on septic systems, says Fisher,
a homebuilder for forty-four years. The
national average cost of a single-family
finished homesite — after zoning, engineering,
legal, permitting, road construction
— is about 18 percent of the sales price.
“In Rhode Island, however, the minimum
cost of a finished homesite is 25 percent of
the sales price, due to the limited quantity
of available home sites and the cost to
develop each one,” he says. “It becomes a
math problem. Sewers are a great cost.
There are still parcels that have them, but
they are scarce.”
The sewers dried up with the federal
funding. According to a 2015 report, in the
1970s and 1980s, the federal government
carried the load, making substantial grants
for water and wastewater utilities before
switching to mostly subsidized loans. The
funding levels have stayed steady, but inflation
has diminished their purchase power.
State and local governments have assumed
the burden, accounting for 96 percent of
such spending by 2014.
But the cost of capital investment
might be less of a hurdle than an attitude
problem.
“As an industry, we only get to build
the local community’s plans, and in Rhode
Island, the local plan is designed to be
unbuildable for the middle income. For
the last thirty years, they have passed
regulations that reduced density. We have
some of the largest lot size requirements
in the country,” says John Marcantonio,
executive officer of the Rhode Island
Builders Association. “Towns would rather
put up solar panels, decimating residential
32 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l JULY 2020