In Rhode Island, the pieces are there. Don’t squander them.

The smallest state in the union by area, Rhode Island straddles the coast of Narragansett Bay and a bunch of islands between Connecticut, Long Island and Massachusetts. Protected from some of the worst Atlantic storms by Long Island and Cape Cod, the beautiful waters are some of the best sailing waters in the country. But the many rivers flowing down from the higher interior of New England produce a number of waterfalls in the northern part of the state.

These falls attracted early entrepreneurs, who built grist and lumber mills. Later, they attracted men like Samuel Slater who brought the technology of British cloth mills to start the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Towns like Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Woonsocket grew up around them and formed some of the earliest American industrial towns. They had commercial and civic uses in the centers and often workers’ homes clustered around the mills. Later railroads connected the towns to each other and streetcar systems filled out interiors and ferries took tourists and vacationers to places like Block Island and Newport. The result was a rich and industrialized state with towns that had matured by 1920, built around people moving on foot, in streetcars or by ferries.

Today, of course, the mills and streetcars are all gone and the ferries mostly carry cars, but the legacy of towns built before the automobile means that Rhode Island ought to have very good bones to build back from and replicate. Yet, despite a depressed state economy suffering from many structural issues and the effects of many scandals, this enormous resource remains curiously undervalued by the political powers that be.

Woonsocket City Hall. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Woonsocket, a city of about 40,000 to the northwest of Providence, is an old milltown on the Blackstone River. It’s industrial base long gone, Woonsocket is mainly known for two things these days: its French-Canadian heritage and for being the headquarters of CVS Health, a pharmacy chain that also operates Pharmacy Benefits Manager CVS Caremark and health insurance provider Aetna. Since 2015, Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt’s administration has operated a “Blight and Density Reduction Program” targeting abandoned and neglected properties for demolition. “Our blight and density reduction efforts have slowly but surely enabled Woonsocket’s cityscape into one that is less congested,” the mayor wrote in a press release in Decemer 2019.

Given what we know about property taxes, it seems that a city ought to do everything it can to get those properties back into top condition, not demolish them. Like far too many cities across the country, Woonsocket has focused its development efforts on free parking, stroads and “green space,” while ignoring its walkable bones. In contrast, nearby Providence is focusing on the rehabilitation route.

It’d be too simple to just blame Woonsocket’s leaders as ignorant or misguided. Many cities are pursuing this sort of development very strongly and too many cities are finding it impossible to maintain the abandoned buildings they have taken over. Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit and others demolish entire blocks of old homes they cannot afford to maintain and in which neither developers nor aspiring homeowners seem interested. Indeed, Baltimore, Detroit and Woonsocket are still losing population. Some cities do demolition out of a lack of ideas; activists have criticized Chicago’s program as being part of a disjointed approach to decline and blight, which all work together to eliminate the vacant homes and businesses, but fail to redevelop the neighborhood, with the properties the city is able to sell going to speculators who don’t do anything with them. Chicago’s Commissioner of Planning and Development told ProPublica that planners were just reacting to blight without thinking about how to redevelop the neighborhoods.

It’s true that vacant buildings can become hazards and often need to be torn down, but Woonsocket’s program seems based on the idea that it’s better to have vacant lots than even rehabilitated buildings, even though vacant lots pay no taxes and the holes they make in the street-frontage can make neighborhoods less nice to walk in. Evidence from before the pandemic suggested that cities that supported walking and biking attracted new businesses and customers better than cities that didn’t.

According to ProPublica, Chicago has seen numerous programs put together at the city, state and federal level designed to assemble land parcels for developers, demolish vacant buildings and provide tax breaks or grants to businesses or non-profits, all designed to bring businesses or affordable housing to unprivileged neighborhoods—but efforts were unfocused and there was no real commitment to rebuilding, so all the efforts amounted to demolishing large swaths of the city until there were no more buildings where a new business could start in some neighborhoods.

It’s true that there are many differences between Woonsocket and the problems experienced by Chicago neighborhoods over several decades, but the Baldelli-Hunt administration’s apparent belief that having buildings on land is a bad thing does not bode well for the City of Woonsocket in the long-term.

Further afield, the extension of the MBTA’s Providence Line to Wickford Junction did not go so well. Supposed to be built with transit-oriented development that would provide a rider base of about 3,400 a day, instead it got a parking garage and average daily riders of fewer than 250. Since the tracks are owned by Amtrak as the Northeast Corridor, the MBTA should have either used Amtrak’s nearby West Kingston Station or not extended the Providence Line out so far.

Image via the city website of Pawtucket.

And in Pawtucket, city and state officials are falling all over themselves to provide a developer with as much as $90 million in subsidies, plus build infrastructure and public parks, so that the developer, Fortuitous, can build a soccer stadium and some mixed-use buildings. The developer would spend about $300 million to build the project, taking advantage of federal opportunity zone tax credits. Of course, Pawtucket would be on the hook for the infrastructure improvements, though it’s not clear from the article linked above exactly what those would be, beyond the parks and a pedestrian bridge over the Seekonk River. More worrying to the viability of the project is that the developer doesn’t have a team for the stadium, which is designed for a minor leagues soccer team, and the Major League Soccer New England Revolution play close by in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

Rhode Island suffered much as a result of the 2007 financial crisis, as well as from various scandals related to promising private companies subsidies if they located in the state, notably 38 Studios. Many Rhode Island cities and towns have the bones of solvent development—existing infrastructure, walkable neighborhoods and affordable, well-built buildings. They could choose to take advantage of it instead of work against it by supporting transit, walking and biking. Not only can these things alone strengthen local economies and local businesses, but in combination with the good bones, businesses will face lower costs since they won’t have to build parking lots or new infrastructure.

Rhode Island has all the pieces needed for a revival, it just needs a vision to put them together, a Strong Towns vision.

Image of Providence, Rhode Island via Sean Foster on Unsplash.

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About the Author

Matthew M. Robare is a Boston-based freelance writer specializing in urbanism and transportation. Follow him on Twitter @MattRobare. His website is www.mattrobarewrites.com.