- Several city council members are renters, while others have experience in a competitive home buying market.
- Although councilors are tasked with assessing the city’s housing crisis, they are also experiencing it.
- The revaluation of residential real estate last year hit some Council members hard.
PROVIDENCE – Councilman Justin Roias knows what it’s like to go through tough times.
For years he lived with his wife in a small one-bedroom flat on Ledge Street, where they coped with a broken central heating system and a leaky roof, and both took to the habit of setting out buckets to catch the drips.
Despite chronic problems and the landlords’ sloppy repairs, it was an affordable place, but with a baby on the way, Roias and his wife decided to move in search of more space. However, when it came to social worker salaries, it was almost impossible to find anything affordable.
“We got to know the cut-throat competition among hundreds of other potential tenants,” Roias recalls. “In order to stand out, I dressed best on Sundays and articulated my thoughts carefully, treating these interactions with property managers like job interviews. Unfortunately, many real estate managers have taken advantage of the real estate crisis and the high demand. They have informed the hopeful attendees that they are ready. Submitting rental applications and paying non-refundable fees on site had a higher chance of getting the apartment.”
Roias is one of several council members who are renters and find themselves in the same turbulent market as their constituents, giving this year’s council fresh insight into the housing crisis that has been created by personal hardship.
A monthly rent was her only option
Roias said he and his wife had “relentlessly combed Zillow and monitored it daily with eagle eyes” and encountered “snaking” lines when they went sightseeing. They are “exhausted and on the verge of giving up,” Roias said. Neither could afford a home as property prices skyrocketed, and the couple felt left out of the market, not just to buy, but to rent.
They missed a chance to apply for an apartment after they said a property manager refused to pay for lead testing to keep their child safe. Eventually, Roias stumbled upon the third-floor flat on Langdon Street, where they have to carry their newborn and groceries up several flights of stairs and where they are currently renting out on a month-to-month basis – a precarious situation for tenants.
Council President among the city’s long-term tenants
Roias’ problems are not unique. Council President Rachel Miller counts herself among the rented council members, and she worries about where she would go if she ever had to leave her Willow Street apartment.
“I’m lucky to have found a stable situation,” Miller said. “I’ve rented from the same landlord for over 10 years, seven or eight of those years in the same property. I’ve often thought that if he decided to sell the house for any reason, I’d be kicked out of District 13.” It would be extremely difficult to find an apartment in the neighborhood that I would be able to afford.”
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Having also faced issues related to affordability, Councilman Miguel Sanchez is somewhere between renting and owning. He and his partner had been renting a house for two years until the landlord suddenly decided to move into the house last summer.
“We kind of got stuck trying to figure out our housing situation… We started looking for apartments and couldn’t find any,” Sanchez said, adding, “Even some of the places we looked at were below average. ” Condition.”
In July 2022, Sanchez’s partner bought a Rushmore Avenue home that had been on the market for a few weeks for $300,000 before dropping to $285,000 – the amount his partner had bid. Sanchez said the condition of the home may have been a factor in the price drop. He described “dog poop stains all over the house” from the previous owner’s three pets. Basically, the couple had to immediately rip out the carpeting and air out the house.
Sanchez is now making payments to his partner for the mortgage.
Some councilors ‘can’t afford to buy a house in town’
Although the majority of city council members own their homes rather than rent them, both sides share similar frustrations with competitive markets and difficult searches. Councilwoman Helen Anthony has owned a house on Angell Street since 2014, but even then finding property was next to impossible.
Anthony said she traveled all over the East Side when she and her husband were looking for a home, but most offers went quickly. When they finally found the copy they had bought, they refused to leave.
“We walked in practically without our agent that day — because we seemed to go to every open house — and I didn’t go until my agent came in and we immediately made an offer,” Anthony said in an interview with The Journal in early June .
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But that wasn’t the councilwoman’s last problem. Last year’s property reappraisal hit Anthony harder than any other council member, causing the value of her home to increase by a whopping $246,300, resulting in an estimated total value of $927,000.
Anthony said she appealed the first revaluation — which initially added about $150,000 to the value of her home — but the tax officer’s office subsequently added an additional $100,000 to the value. Most council members who own homes have increased in value by about $100,000, making Anthony’s increase relatively large.
But Anthony realizes that she is one of the lucky ones.
“We have new councilors who are trying to get houses … We have councilors who work very hard to make a living but can’t afford to buy a house in the city,” she said. “So I feel very privileged to be able to live where I live.”
“It’s only gotten worse,” says City Councilor Sue Anderbois
Councilwoman Sue Anderbois, who bought a 1,200-square-foot Fifth Street home with her husband in 2015 — a year after Anthony’s purchase — described a similarly wolfish market.
“We felt it was very competitive in 2015,” said Anderbois. “I think it’s only gotten worse talking to friends. Most things were gone within a day.”
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Anderbois spent a lot of time searching nights and weekends, and once lost a bid when a competitor offered a cash payment of $100,000 over the asking price. Eventually, Anderbois and her husband bought their home for around $340,000 but needed a mortgage to afford it.
The “politics of underproduction” created and fed the ongoing crisis
According to Zillow, the average one-bedroom apartment in Providence cost $1,850 a month in June — a $250 increase from a year earlier. The median rent for all properties is $2,167, nearly $70 more than the national average. A renter would have to earn more than $85,000 to afford that rent without being considered rent-burdened, meaning they wouldn’t spend more than 30% of their gross income on housing.
According to Realtor.com, the average home price in Providence in May was nearly $350,000, up more than 6% year over year.
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Councilwoman Jo-Ann Ryan, one of the homeowners who make up the majority on the city council, said the ongoing lack of construction in Rhode Island has fueled the crisis.
“As a city and state, whether out of insensitivity or design, we have systematically pursued policies of underproduction that have brought us to the crisis we face today,” she said. “We just have to work together and build more houses, regardless of the price range, to remedy this.”
Anderbois has seen both sides of the crisis. Initially a renter in the San Francisco Bay Area, she thought she would never own a home because of the cost. Now her old apartment costs a few hundred dollars more a month than her mortgage.
She had one word to describe the status quo: “crazy”.
