Housing Report Gets Mixed Reviews

By Cynthia Drummond for BRVCA
August 29th 2024

RICHMOND – Members of the Planning Board were briefed at Tuesday’s meeting on the feasibility of building additional housing along Route 138, but several members said the report fell short of what they had expected, lacking both data and details.

The draft report is part of the town’s participation in Rhode Island Housing’s Municipal Technical Assistance Program, or MTAP. The program supports cities and towns that are trying to increase the construction of affordable housing.

The Rhode Island General Assembly approved the appropriation of $25 million to address the lack of affordable housing in the state, $4 million of which has been allocated to MTAP.

Town Planner Talia Jalette, who has been meeting regularly with MTAP consultants, Stantech Consulting Services, said she had also held meetings with stakeholders, including Route 138 area property owners.

Jalette introduced the draft report.

“The town is a participant in Rhode Island Housing’s Municipal Technical Assistance Program and received a $100,000 grant to study the town’s existing infrastructure, which includes roads, water systems, sidewalks and the like along the Route 138 corridor, from Richmond’s Town Hall to Hope Valley, as a means to better understand where and what kind of residential density could yield greater affordable housing production in that vicinity,” she said.

In addition to looking at the town’s existing infrastructure to determine the locations and types of housing that could be built along Route 138, the study considered whether adding a municipal sewer system would encourage further development.

Richmond Housing: Current Issues

Stantech representatives Steve Kearney, and Phil Schaeffing and outside consultant, Jeff Sauser, presented the draft report, entitled the Route 138 Corridor Housing Plan. The focus of the report is an “Infill and Growth” area on Route 138, a 2 ½ -mile section of state road from Wyoming to the Town Hall, that is described in the town’s Comprehensive Plan as an area where additional development could take place.

“This is an area, identified through an earlier community engagement and public input process as the place where it makes sense to focus infill and growth,” Schaeffing told the board. “That’s for two primary reasons. One is the public water line that runs along Route 138 in this particular segment, so

unlike the rest of the town, the parcels along here do have access to public water.”

Schaeffing also noted that Northeast Water Solutions, the company that operates the town’s water supply, has said that there is sufficient water to accommodate increased usage. Building along 138, he said, would help to relieve some of the development pressure in the more rural areas of the town.

“It’s an area where growth that happens here can take pressure off some of the rural parts of the town and focus growth in this area, rather than in some of those undeveloped parts of the town,” he said.

Although Route 138 is not seeing traffic that exceeds its current capacity, there is heavy traffic on the road, particularly in Wyoming Village and the approaches to Interstate 95.

The report states that 3.45% of Richmond’s housing considered affordable, far below the state-mandated 10%. The town’s population of residents 65 years of age and older is growing, while the number of younger residents is falling.

The median home price of $450,000 is considered to be unaffordable for households earning the median income of $100,493, leaving most families “cost burdened,” spending more than 30% of their income going to housing.

There is a lack of affordable housing for seniors. Most housing units are single - family and there are very few rental units, leading to the current housing shortfall, which, the consultants estimate, is 660 dwelling units.

(The HousingWorks RI 2023 Fact Book, containing extensive

information on housing in every city and town in the state, is available online. )

What Now?

The lack of public waste water treatment infrastructure
continues to be a major impediment to development. Board members discussed applying for federal and state infrastructure grants that would make it possible for the town to install a sewer system along Route 138.

Board Vice Chair Dan Madnick said that a sewer system would necessitate extensive additional construction.

“In order to support this, you’re going to need to renovate 138, basically from the Town Hall all the way to Route 3, with sidewalks,” he said. “You’re going to need to widen Route 138 in Wyoming, because right now, that’s at traffic capacity there. I think without a public sewer, I don’t even know how we do that in such a small area, how we can accommodate the density that we’ve been talking about.”

More Data Needed

Board Chair Phil Damicis was blunt in his assessment of the report.

“There should be some engineering evaluation behind this,” he said. “… we’ve spent the last couple of years re-writing the town plan, re-writing our ordinances, discussing everything that you presented to us tonight, so we’re all to familiar with this. We’re all looking at this and saying ‘yes, we know that.’ So, what are we going to do about it? Give us something. Give us some help.”

Damicis said there were additional concerns that more development would raise taxes.

“Anything you do with housing, you also have to look at balancing that with economic development,” he said. “… Also, from a tax basis, if we bring in a whole lot of school-aged children, the taxes go up, then, I mean, I can tell you that I have enough people, friends my age that are bailing out of here because they can’t afford the taxes. It’s not because they need to downsize, it’s because they just can’t afford to live here.”

Reached Wednesday, Madnick agreed that the report lacked depth.

 “The board, in general, was disappointed in the draft, because it did not have any tangible actions that we could do anything with,” he said. “And everything we saw was a summary of everything we have in our comprehensive plan, and pieces of additional information from zoning ordinances and other discussions that we had, as a Planning Board and as a town.”

A municipal sewer system, Madnick said, might be an incentive to attract developers to the Route 138 corridor, but the town would have to apply for state and federal grants and the applications would require considerably more data.

“We need the data to support to go out and getting grants, and submitting proposals for grant money from the state and federal government,” he said. “Basically, the Planning Board said ‘hey, we want some actions to chew on. Give us something that we can act upon as a town to make this happen.’ That’s really what we’re looking for, and I think they were amendable to that.”