Providence College presented its Institutional Master Plan (IMP) to the City Plan Commission (CPC) at its meeting Tuesday, May 20. The plan outlined proposals to renovate some of its existing facilities, add a 330+ bed dormitory, and expand the institutional zoning boundary to include part of a city block to the north of campus.
The IMP also included proposals for several building renovations and a new parking garage.
The CPC continued the matter, asking PC to provide a traffic study and further information on bicycle parking and the school’s enrollment numbers by class year compared to housing available on campus. Prior to Tuesday evening, the proposed plan for PC was presented to residents for feedback at three public meetings — two in Wanskuck and one in Smith Hill.
The CPC did not set a date for the university to return and present this additional information. Here are the highlights for those who missed it.
Providence College’s Expansion: I-2 Zone Expansion, Proposed Demolitions, Traffic, Off-Campus Housing
PC is proposing an extension to their institutional boundary to include a portion of the city block bounded by Dante, Ceres, and Grapes Street. PC already owns the homes in this area, and is proposing to demolish those structures so the college can build a new facilities building. At least four houses would be demolished.
The college would have to obtain City Council approval to extend the Institutional Zoning, and then would need to apply for demolition permits from the city before construction could begin on “the physical plant building,” a facilities building that would replace some of the homes on the block. A parking lot would take of the majority of the lot cleared by demolition. The area would be fenced around the perimeter to maintain the hard border around the campus.
The design of the building, Assistant Vice President of Capital Projects and Facilities Planning for Providence College Mark Rapoza, explained, is meant to be residential-esque and harmonious with the surrounding neighborhood.
Some commissioners raised concerns about the extension of the I-2 zone, questioning whether this will just allow PC to further encroach into the neighborhood.
CPC Chair Michael Gazdacko said he worried about this extension becoming home to a multi-story residence hall later down the line, which would be disruptive to the community fabric. Deputy Director of Planning Development Bob Azar clarified that there are dimensional limitations at the periphery of I-2 zones — and that height allowances only increase the further you get from the border of the college, so this would not be likely.
“My question is about long term expansion, in 12 years it looks like you integrated two city blocks into the campus, and there’s one coming in now and then there’s all the other property that you have around the school,” Gazdacko said. “It seems like it’s growing and it’s going to keep growing.”
“We have no long term plan to bring the properties that are presently out of the I-Zone, for example, into the I Zone, except for those properties that are mentioned in this Institutional Master Plan,” Rapazo said.
“I hear you saying that now, it’s exactly the same answer you gave us the last time you were here, not two years ago, when we talked about the new nursing school expansion,” Gazdacko said. “Our concern is the encroachment into the…neighborhood, and this is definitely pushing your barrier out into the existing residential neighborhood.”
Currently, PC owns 39 properties in the immediate vicinity of the college, but some of these properties are comprised of multiple lots.
“I understand your desire to push out the border, it makes sense,” Gazdacko said. “You’ve been acquiring these properties, and you want to compile your campus and continue to expand, but that’s our concern every time an institution comes in, is the further leaching out into the surrounding community.”
“We have 39 properties off campus, and the College is pretty selective. We tend not to go after properties. Most of the properties that you’re seeing there, we’ve purchased after the owners came to Providence College,” Rapazo said. “There’s a lot more folks than what you see there that come to Providence College asking if we want to buy their property, and we tend only to seriously consider properties that make sense for the college long term, and that planning could be as far out as 10 or 15 years.”
Maurano noted that PC is one of the three colleges in Rhode Island that require undergraduates to live on campus for their first three years (some juniors are granted exemption to live off campus). “I believe we’re the only college in the city with a hard institutional border. Brown, RISD, Johnson & Wales, their institutional zones are all intertwined with city streets,” he said.
Commissioner Cyd McKenna asked the college to provide more information about how much on-campus housing would be opened up with the addition of a new dormitory, and asked for more in-depth discussion about the college’s encroachment in the neighborhood.
“I just have yet to see a real plan with teeth about how to try to get some of the juniors and seniors back on campus that prove year in and year out to be a problem in the neighborhoods, nevermind the rest of the housing crunch across the city,” she said. “So I think that if we don’t critically look at that right now, we really miss an opportunity to hold the university’s feet to the fire about how to be a partner with the city in terms of quality of life for the people who live in the neighborhood and housing in general.”
Ward 14 Councilor Shelley Peterson echoed this sentiment during public testimony. “If you see the expansion of student housing that has come up over the past three years, it’s been undeniable and really a gentrification to the neighborhood around in a very small, working class community,” she said.
The addition of a new dormitory “shouldn’t be interpreted as so much for increasing enrollment beyond much of what we are now, but it will certainly offer some relief for some of the density [for] students living off campus,” said Rapoza.
“All I can tell you is that as we are looking for places to put residence halls, we are not going to put a resident hall on the edge of campus… If we have to take a single story building down a footprint in order for us to be able to put up a four-story residence hall,” that would be the more likely strategy, he said.
Currently, about 875 PC students live in the immediate vicinity Associate Vice President for Community and Government Relations Steve Maurano said. But the cluster of student housing near PC is not just home to PC students. “There are students from Johnson & Wales, Brown, RIC, Bryant, CCRI, who all live in the off campus neighborhood,” he said. “Our student body, our 875, probably makes up about 60% of the total student population in the neighborhood, and obviously we have no control over non-Providence College students.”
Of those PC students, Maurano estimated that 80-85% of them rent from 02908 Club. PPS placed the 02908 zipcode on its 2025 Most Endangered Places list in part because of the hyper-local monopoly that has arisen among a handful of student landlords in the vicinity of the college. A 2025 map created by PPS revealed revealed that roughly 200 parcels in the immediate vicinity of the campus are owned by two developers.
The IMP states that PC had 4,383 full-time undergraduate students enrolled for the 2023-24 school year. The IMP lists PC’s on-campus available beds at nearly 3,120. The new dormitory would add 331 on-campus beds.
Peterson emphasized that PC’s growing student body also contributes to traffic congestion, especially around events such as hockey games or commencement. She noted that while PC had a remarkably smooth commencement weekend this month traffic-wise, she still wanted a more fleshed out traffic study in the plan.
“For additional context, over the past year and a half, my community has been meeting to create student housing policies surrounding what’s happening not just in Ward 14, but surrounding the city,” she said, adding that they are hoping to implement some ordinances and policies surrounding student housing.
Azar noted the difficulty of regulating off-campus students. “We’ve had ordinances speaking to the number of students who are allowed to live together in a dwelling unit. We have some small regulations in that regard, other attempts that have not been successful,” he said. “The more colleges can house students on campus, I think it would alleviate some of that pressure.”
But building on-campus housing requires more land. “What’s the best solution for student housing?” he asked. “Is it for colleges to buy land and take them off the tax rolls? Or is it for for-profit developers who pay a lot of money in taxes to build apartment buildings? Or is it the model today, which is 14 bedroom houses?” Azar said he believed student apartment buildings are a good solution. “They’re always better controlled than houses.”
PC will return to the CPC in the coming months to present again on their IMP with specific focus on the issues that the Commission flagged.
By Katy Pickens / Planning & Preservation Writer / kpickens@ppsri.org