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“ They always try to pit the landlords and investors against everybody else,” Nonis says.“ They say they want affordable housing, yet they do nothing to support it. They don’ t want auxiliary dwelling units, or duplexes; they don’ t want any additional construction. Bottom line: They don’ t want more building.”
The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates that the United States is short four to seven million homes, a national crisis decades in the making. Among its main drivers are zoning laws.
First established in the 1920s, these laws have become more restrictive over time, says Alex Horowitz, project director of Pew’ s Housing Policy Initiative. Design, lot size and parking requirements, stricter building codes and restrictions on multifamily housing— enacted to raise property values and keep communities at higher income levels— have squeezed low-income, working class and now middle-class residents out of many communities and boosted homelessness.
“ Essentially housing works like an escalator, and when there’ s a shortage, the escalator is going down. People are looking for places they can afford; old housing gets bid up and there’ s a crunch at the bottom,” says Horowitz.“ When lots of housing gets built, [ the escalator ] is moving up: People trade up into nicer homes and locations that work better for them. The shortage has meant the escalator has been going down for years now.”
In May, Pew presented statistical evidence of the state’ s downward trajectory to the General Assembly: Rhode Island is fiftieth in the nation for new housing construction, the median price of a home is up 57 percent in five years— from $ 303,000 in 2020 to $ 476,000 in 2025— and inventory is down 78 percent since 2016. In addition, median rents have soared from $ 941 in 2017 to $ 1,480 in 2025, and homelessness increased by 107 percent to an all-time high in 2024.
After bottoming out in the 2008 recession, Rhode Island is now in its eighth year of a seller’ s market, says Chris Whitten, president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors.
“ First-time homebuyers looking for something in the $ 300,000 to $ 400,000 range, those go very quickly, because
46 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY I OCTOBER 2025