When Rhode Island voters approved a historic $120 million housing bond in November 2024, they endorsed a strategy designed to address multiple housing challenges simultaneously through a coordinated portfolio of targeted programs.
While increasing housing production remains essential, Rhode Island recognized that housing shortages are driven by a range of barriers that cannot be solved through a single funding stream alone. Infrastructure limitations can stall otherwise viable developments. Smaller communities often struggle to attract affordable housing investment. Existing affordable housing requires ongoing preservation. Permanent supportive housing (PSH) serves populations with distinct needs and financing challenges.
Rather than concentrating resources into a single funding pool, Rhode Island’s housing bond is structured around targeted set-asides for production, preservation, infrastructure, supportive housing, acquisition, municipal planning, and small-scale development—each designed to address a specific gap in the state’s housing system.
Two programs in particular illustrate this approach: the Housing 2030 Permanent Supportive Housing Program and the Housing 2030 Small Scale Program. Together, they show how public investment can be deliberately structured to reach housing types and communities that are often underserved by traditional financing tools.
Supporting Housing Stability Through Permanent Supportive Housing
The Housing 2030 Permanent Supportive Housing Program dedicates up to $12 million in capital funding to the development of small-scale permanent supportive housing paired with wraparound services.
Nationally, PSH has proven to be one of the most effective tools for addressing chronic homelessness and helping individuals with significant service needs achieve long-term housing stability. However, these projects often face challenges that set them apart from conventional affordable housing development.
Supportive housing typically requires coordination among housing developers, healthcare providers, behavioral health systems, and social service organizations. These projects are often smaller in scale and depend on more complex financing structures than traditional multifamily developments.
As a result, they can struggle to compete in funding programs primarily designed to maximize total housing production.
To address this gap, Rhode Island established a dedicated set-aside that recognizes supportive housing as a distinct and essential component of the state’s housing ecosystem. By creating a targeted funding stream, the state acknowledged that addressing homelessness and housing instability requires more than increasing the supply of units—it requires housing intentionally designed and supported with services that enable long-term stability, recovery, and success.
Housing 2030 Permanent Supportive Housing Program funded projects to watch in Rhode Island:
183 Washington Street, Women’s Development Corp. This project received $8.2 million to support the adaptive reuse of the long-vacant former Ocean State Furniture building in West Warwick, creating 30 PSH units for individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Additionally, this project is leveraging project-based vouchers and Faircloth units from two housing authorities to support a building that serves tenants with extremely low-income.
Addressing the Financing Gap for Small-Scale Housing
The second set aside program is the Housing 2030 Small Scale Program, which dedicated up to $12 million to support affordable rental developments of five to 30 units.
The program was designed to address a persistent gap in housing finance: Many affordable housing funding streams are structured around larger developments, leaving smaller-scale projects with fewer viable sources of capital. Smaller developments can only fit into use of the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) program when combined with other small developments, adding complexity for development and management. This creates a particular barrier in rural communities, small towns, and infill locations where modestly sized projects are often the most feasible path to new housing.
Yet these small-scale developments can be among the most effective tools for expanding supply. They are well suited to vacant lots, adaptive-reuse opportunities, and sites where zoning, infrastructure, or market conditions make larger projects impractical. They also allow communities to add housing incrementally, in ways that align with local context and existing neighborhood patterns.
Even so, the economics are difficult. Core development costs—such as design, legal work, permitting, underwriting, and compliance—do not scale down with project size. As a result, smaller projects often face disproportionately high per-unit costs and struggle to compete within traditional affordable housing financing models. Even where smaller projects are competitive cost-wise, forgoing use of the LIHTC or other tax credit programs meant for larger developments leaves a larger per unit funding gap.
The Housing 2030 Small Scale Program is designed to correct for that imbalance. By creating a funding source specifically tailored to smaller developments, Rhode Island is expanding the range of projects that can realistically move forward, particularly in communities where larger-scale development is not feasible. By forgoing LIHTCs, we also reduce complexity, legal and financing costs, reduce time to closing, and have greater flexibility in terms of what income levels the units will serve.
In doing so, the state is reinforcing a broader principle of its housing strategy: increasing supply requires more than one model of development. Large multifamily projects are essential, but smaller-scale developments are equally important in ensuring that housing production is distributed, adaptable, and responsive to local conditions across Rhode Island.
Housing 2030 Small Scale Program funded projects to watch in Rhode Island:
Wunnaunt Apartments, Mt. Hope Community Center and Omni Development Corp. This project received $4.2 million for the new construction of 12 affordable homes supporting the advancement of health equity and community development in the Mount Hope neighborhood and surrounding areas in Providence. All units will be affordable at 80 percent Area Median Income (AMI), which is below market rents in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood.
55 Pine Street, 51 Pine St LLC. This project received $2 million for the mixed-income adaptive reuse of a historic downtown Providence building, currently vacant office space, to create 24 homes, including 13 affordable units. Twelve of the units are affordable at 80% of the area median income (AMI) and one at 120% of the AMI, with the remaining market rents initially set at levels equal to the 120% unit but not restricted for income or rent going forward. The project also benefits financially by the existence of a long-standing restaurant on the ground floor.
A Different Approach to Housing Investment
The significance of Rhode Island's Housing 2030 bond extends beyond the amount of funding involved. Its most notable feature may be the way the funding was structured.
Rather than treating housing as a single policy objective, the bond recognizes that different housing challenges require different solutions. Supportive housing, small-scale development, infrastructure improvements, preservation efforts, and traditional housing production each face distinct barriers and require different financing tools.
By creating targeted set-asides within a larger housing investment strategy, Rhode Island sought to align public resources with those specific challenges rather than expecting a single program to meet every need. The result also brings potential new developers into the space of working with the state on affordable housing and to encourage existing developers to consider different models.
For housing finance agencies and state policymakers, the Housing 2030 bond offers one potential lesson: The effectiveness of public investment depends not only on how much funding is available but also on how intentionally that funding is deployed.
In an era of persistent housing shortages and increasingly diverse housing needs, the structure of an investment may be just as important as its size.
Deborah J. Goddard serves as Rhode Island’s secretary of housing, leading the state’s Executive Office of Housing. She brings more than four decades of experience in housing across both the public and private sectors.