‘We need more production’: 1,000+ housing units planned for Warwick in coming years
by: Kate Wilkinson
WARWICK, R.I. (WPRI) – What was once a parking lot near T.F. Green Airport will be 214 apartment units next summer.
It’s just one of several projects happening across Warwick, as city leaders expect more than 1,000 housing units to be built there in the next few years, the majority of them apartments.
Developer Wood Partners bought the parking lot to construct two four-story luxury buildings that will sit on the former parking lot site, located between the airport and I-95. Mark Seck, of Wood Partners, said the city’s willingness to work with them was critical in their decision to move ahead with the project.
“Everyone in the city was behind it,” Seck said. “They know that they need housing. It’s an empty parking lot. So I think they were glad to see this area transformed into what will become a really beautiful community.”
Warwick City Council President Steve McAllister said there are several projects underway, many of them near T.F. Green Airport.
“We have all that property around the airport, it’s time to invest in that,” McAllister said. “It’s tough to build anything so the city wants to be a partner.”
Just down the street on Post Road, the site of a shuttered Sheraton Hotel will become a 200-unit apartment complex. McAllister, who is also on the board of Rhode Island Housing, said the agency played a role in the project.
“We approved some middle-income funding, which is going to allow 20% of those units to be affordable housing,” he said.
Data provided by the city of Warwick shows there are over a dozen projects across the city in various stages of planning, with 361 units going through the permitting process.
McAllister said everything from luxury apartments to condos to single-family homes are being built in the city, including 39 homes going up on Vera Street where the old John Wickes Elementary School once stood.
“The construction is there, the permits are there, and they’ve taken down the building,” he said. “And now they’re starting that the framework to build the homes.”
In February, then-Housing Secretary Stefan Pryor told Target 12 the state needed to build thousands of housing units each year to keep up with demand and provide relief to skyrocketing housing costs, but said that’s not happening.
“We have the worst housing production rate in the continental United States, the worst,” he said.
Local homebuyers and renters alike are seeing the effects firsthand.
In June, Rhode Island’s median home price hit $494,000, according to the R.I. Association of Realtors. And Zillow reported Providence saw the highest rent increase in the country in 2023.
McAllister said he wants Warwick to be part of solving the housing crisis.
“The city’s going to stay on top of them and make sure that they’re building in the right way,” he said. “But we need everyone to come together because there is a housing crisis in this country and here in Rhode Island as well.”
In the last two years the General Assembly has passed 27 housing reform bills, a priority for House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, D-Warwick.
Many of the laws passed relate to how cities and towns handle zoning and are aimed at streamlining how they handle new construction requests. But Shekarchi said what’s happening in his hometown is not necessarily because of a legislative shift.
“It takes about a year to build a house, not to mention a lot of these bills that we have passed don’t go into effect for six months upon passage,” he said. “Some cities and towns have embraced this, and they’ve done a great job doing it.”
For Wood Partners, Seck said the city’s willingness to streamline the zoning process helped make the project a reality.
“They did the rezoning, for this intermodal zone,” he said. “And so that’s what attracted us.”
Shekarchi hopes the new laws that are set to take effect in January 2025 will further simplify the process for developers to build across the state, but said as long as Rhode Islanders continue to feel the effects of the housing crisis, reform will be a legislative priority.
“This is an issue that’s not going away,” he said. “We need more production, production and more production.”
Kate Wilkinson (kwilkinson@wpri.com) is a Target 12 investigative reporter for 12 News. Connect with her on Twitter and Facebook.