Once again a Providence artist–maker community is faced with destruction, as the much-loved Atlantic Mills in Olneyville, the Big Top, changes hands. We’ve been here plenty of times in the past. In the mid-1980s the owners of Pilgrim Mills at 101 North Main Street shuttered the decrepit building, closing the studios that had been occupied by Dan Gosch, Francesca Woodman, and others. In the late 1980s, the Guerra family, after decades of modest improvement to the retired Brown and Sharpe Foundry on Holden and Promenade Streets (then called the CIC, now the Foundry and the Halstead), did a multi-million dollar renovation to the building and leased it to an insurance company, displacing a creative community that included Peter Diepenbrock, Barnaby Evans, Howard Ben Tré, and many others. In 2000, the dramatic eviction of the artists at the internationally recognized Fort Thunder from what is now known as Eagle Square in the Valley was a cause célèbres for artists and anti-gentrification activists. Why does this keep happening?
Providence is blessed with an excess of beautiful old buildings, a brick-and-mortar bounty from the good times of its past. These sturdy buildings declined much more slowly than the population of the city and many ended up at best partially occupied, with owners eager to find rent-paying tenants of any kind. Providence has more students per capita than Boston, including one of the world’s premier art and design schools, so it is only natural that young artists and entrepreneurs have found their way to these beautiful, declining buildings with their low rents.
But eventually, something must give — without decent rents a building will not be maintained. The building may just deteriorate to the point that an owner, under pressure from the city or state, their bank, exploding insurance requirements, a declining rent roll, or perhaps their own decency, says enough is enough – this building has too many problems; we’re closing it down.
The building may or may not survive this stage. Perhaps the land is worth more than the building and the structure gets demolished to make way for a parking lot or big box store. Or the owner may find someone to buy the building, someone who plans a dramatic re-making of it into something entirely different. This change of use, as it is known in the trade, triggers an avalanche of building, fire, civil, zoning, and environmental requirements that make it almost impossible to do a low-cost, light-touch renovation that can allow for modest rents. A change of use renovation generally only happens when the building can be bought for something far below replacement cost and when the area in which it sits is being revitalized. Unless, of course, significant public and/or philanthropic support is provided.
What happened to affordable construction? How did we get here?
Almost all of Providence lives in homes that don’t meet the code
During the 20th century in developed nations, and America especially, almost everything about our buildings has become safer, more convenient, and accommodating, to occupants and tradespeople alike. But buildings have become much more complex. Engineers continue to advance materials and equipment and to understand the causes of building failures and ways to prevent them. Industry trade groups are eager to promote improvements, and legislators are usually happy to vote more safety and greater ease into law. Consumers also expect improvements and the latest technologies.
The codes and regulations didn’t come from nowhere. As a Fire Marshall said to me recently, “Mark, everything in the fire code is written in blood.” But these layers of regulation — which arise from a natural desire to make buildings better and safer, come with a cost. These costs chase some people out of the business. Less competition among property owners pushes rents higher and creates less supply. Those landlords that remain feel the need to squeeze every dollar out of their property, sometimes by upgrading to a higher level of finish and amenity, exacerbating the affordability issue. Onerous non-owner occupied municipal tax rates encourage condo conversion. Needless to say, complicated requirements and higher costs make it more difficult to build and operate needed housing, and we all know scarcity drives property prices and rents higher.
At this point, we can’t afford to build for people with ordinary incomes. Gone is affordable construction (and by extension, naturally affordable housing options), in part because of the complexity, strictness, and rigidity required to maintain the level of safety, liability protection, and convenience expert opinion has determined we need.
Very few people in Rhode Island, and in Providence in particular, live in a fully code-compliant home, but we are rarely dying in them. The hazards of our non-compliant homes pale in comparison to the hazards cars represent, whether to the driver or passenger, to pedestrians, cyclists or even to roadside property. They pale in comparison to the harms of homelessness or housing instability, or the perils middle schoolers with no after-school programming face. Some school sytems can’t afford after-school programming but manage to build oversized new schools at $450 per square foot.
The codes regulating construction were developed over years and years, one modification at a time. Solving the issue likely requires the same detailed, incremental approach. Every aspect of the code should be reexamined if we are going to solve the housing affordability crisis. One place to start is stairs. A code-compliant stair costs dramatically more today than it did 50 years ago. It requires a larger building — more excavation, concrete, framing, insulation, roofing, etc. It has more stringent requirements in regards to width, steepness, headroom, handrails, handrail extensions, lights, fire alarm pull stations, horn strobe lights, exit signs, doors and door hardware, signage, separation from surrounding construction, including what mechanical equipment and plumbing can pass through it, and so on. There are hundreds of pages in construction code manuals about stairs. I’m in my late sixties now and have lived with the elderly and can appreciate a wide, gentle stair with great handrails. But we must ask ourselves, at what point is a stair sufficiently user-friendly, at what point is it Safe Enough?
The Business of Construction
The complexity we’ve created is pushing small contractors out of business. The result is less competition as larger corporations with much greater overhead and investors to please gobble up smaller firms all over the country. Disappearing is the contractor whose bookkeeping is done at home or in a small local office, particularly in the more technical trades where requirements have become most difficult to keep up with. Until a couple of years ago we had a sole proprietor sprinkler contractor who did small alterations in our buildings when tenants changed up their spaces. Tired of the increasingly difficult and expensive permitting and inspection process, and the ever more onerous insurance requirements, he decided to go to work for a local company, which was recently bought by a national concern whose pricing on small jobs is the same as that provided to large institutions. Every aspect of the shelter industry is affected.
For example, a critical challenge facing artists, creatives of all types, and small businesspeople is the dearth of property owners, banks, and insurance companies that understand how to work with them. Banks, understandably, underwrite owners without strong credit much more strictly, if at all, which squeezes property owners and pushes them towards corporate tenants. Insurance companies similarly mark up premiums for small tenants because, like banks, they see too many badly managed, Class C commercial buildings with a hodge podge of tenants and all the problems those properties sometimes have.
Most property owners don’t want to deal with lots of small tenants, despite the fact that these buildings function more like apartment buildings, with shorter lease terms and greater occupancy than conventional big floor plate commercial buildings. Most owners and their investors don’t have the discernment or patience to help tenants build a sense of community and shared purpose and culture. But a strong culture not only boosts retention, it is in fact the best marketing that can be done. As one developer of creative communities said recently, “Small local tenants are the cementitious material of my projects.”
Safe Enough
My wife Julie walked into the house the other day after a tour of the Cranston Street Armory, that iconic, magnificent, empty building at the center of the Armory District on the West Side of Providence and exclaimed, “It’s nice inside – you could move a business right in, it’s ridiculous it isn’t being used!” The armory is basically empty, so the question immediately follows: is it safe to be in there? “It’s safe enough,” she said.
Safe enough is a bomb going off in my heart and mind, as it must be for every homeless person wondering why it took years to get them off the street, out of the cold, and into the specially built tiny homes off Rte. 146 in Providence that stood empty and finished for months and months because somehow, some way they were deemed Not Safe Enough. It will take a re-orientation of our intelligence and will, and a re-introduction of common sense into decision-making, to look at every aspect of the shelter industry and bring costs back under control. We have created a world that we cannot afford and the lack of affordability is creating a far more hazardous situation for us as individuals, for our economy and for our social coherence as a nation than our buildings present today.
So, back to Atlantic Mills. Does the prospective developer understand and is he willing to work with creative communities? Can the current tenants and neighbors give him time and the benefit of the doubt as he tries? Can the regulatory authorities have the wisdom to help him contain costs so it is possible to run the building with modest rents? Can he find a lender and an insurance company who will go along with him? Can he make use of historic tax credits and other incentives that may be available to him? Atlantic Mills has all the makings of a fantastic project: a much loved, iconic, and eminently useable building with good bones, and a diverse, dynamic, creative community within its walls and in the larger metro region. It is a demographic that desperately needs small, affordable space to get established and flourish. Is the larger community ready to support such an effort? I certainly hope so. These communities are the incubators of so much that is great about Rhode Island.
By Mark Van Noppen
Mark Van Noppen has been building new and renovating old in Rhode Island for almost 50 years. He is a co-founder of The Armory Revival Company (est. 1986) and a former Board President of PPS. He continues to serve on PPS’s Advisory Board.