Few people can drive around their town, point out neighborhoods and homes, and say, “I built those.”
Evelyn Smith can. In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s she and her late husband, John, built about 800 homes, mostly in Charlestown and South Kingstown. Smith says about 800, because she stopped counting somewhere around house number 780.
Today, she can still rattle off the names of their subdivisions and other projects: Black Pond, Beechwood Park, homes built with help from the old, federal Farmers Home Administration, and houses along Route 2, mostly modest homes for working-class families. Even a couple members of the Charlestown Town Council now live in homes Smith constructed.
“We wanted to build year-round, permanent housing for the households that lived and worked and built the communities that we were working in,” Smith said. “Not summer estates, not vacation homes – we built houses for people to live in.”
The trajectory of Charlestown’s housing market has changed dramatically since Smith and her husband were building homes, and today Smith looks on with concern as she watches more homes being bought up by out-of-state buyers looking for investment opportunities through short-term rentals in a coastal town, or places to live three months in the summer before heading back to permanent residences in places like Connecticut or New York.
People in Charlestown say they’re also seeing more and more out-of-state homebuyers with higher incomes setting down roots full-time since the pandemic opened up opportunities for remote work in a place, like Charlestown, that’s easily reachable from New York and Boston, and also has amenities like beaches, coastal ponds, miles of hiking trails and large swaths of protected conservation land.
“They have a higher income. They’ll pay more,” Smith said of newer homebuyers. “And I don’t know whether they then will enter the fabric of Charlestown society, or if they’re really still the fabric of the New York City society, where their work and their work relationships are.”
‘It’s not a plan for growth’
Just how much Charlestown is contributing to its own affordable housing crisis is a matter of debate in town.
The state of Rhode Island has set a goal for municipalities to have at least 10% of their housing stock be affordable through government subsidies and cost restrictions. At just 3.92%, Charlestown lags behind all but one of its neighboring towns, all of which are short of the 10% goal. Charlestown would need to create 212 more affordable units to reach the threshold set by the state, according to data from HousingWorks RI.
In 2021, the median price of a single family home in Charlestown stood at $500,000, a 30% increase in just five years. And many people who do have housing are stretching their resources thin to afford it, with about a quarter of all home-owning households cost-burdened, and 43% of renters cost-burdened, meaning more than 30% of their incomes go to housing costs.
While broader trends in the housing market are driving Charlestown’s unaffordability, some people in town say actions taken by town leaders in recent years are contributing to the problem and standing in the way of solutions to the housing crisis.
“When it comes to building affordable housing, we encounter problems when it comes to the planning commission,” said Thom Cahir, a member of the Charlestown Affordable Housing Commission. “[It] seems like there’s always some sort of exclusionary zoning that we encounter. The planning commission doesn’t really plan. They seem to be an obstruction to most things in the town.”
Cahir is also critical of another strategy by the town that’s been in place for a couple decades now to buy up undeveloped, open space in Charlestown, to keep it from being built on. According to Charlestown Town Council President Deb Carney, since 2000, the town has approved $7 million in bond money for open space and recreation, the majority of which has gone to open space acquisitions.
“Their plan there was to keep young families out and to keep the town from having to pay for students in the schools,” Cahir said of the open space purchases. “And that’s a plan, but it’s not a plan for growth.”
In that same time, the town has approved only $1 million in bond money for affordable housing projects. Almost all of the housing money was spent to help pay for three projects – Edwards Lane, Shannock Village Cottages, and Churchwoods – that created 42 affordable units.
Conservation versus development
But some in town leadership roles in recent years push back at the narrative being put forward by critics like Thom Cahir. In Charlestown’s Comprehensive Plan, the town says it’s made “significant progress on affordable housing,” but the town is “constrained by the lack of public infrastructure, the rural traditions of the community, and the fragile coastal environment.” The Comprehensive Plan says that, with Charlestown’s population aging, the “trend may suggest a greater need for housing designed for and more suited to elderly occupancy and needs.”
Ruth Platner, a local conservationist and chair of Charlestown’s Planning Commission, defends decisions made by the town in recent years, saying that people in and outside of the town benefit from the limited development by using the open space the town has acquired, and enjoying the dark night sky over Frosty Drew Observatory, where stargazers go for views of the Milky Way, eclipses, and other celestial events.
“They’re all open to the public, and they create incredible recreation opportunities,” Platner said. “I don’t think we have too much, and it’s not interfering with affordable housing.”
Platner argues that, if the town didn’t buy up hundreds of acres of open space, that land would be more likely to get developed into high-priced, market rate housing, rather than homes affordable to people living on low or moderate incomes.
She says development is being appropriately controlled in town to protect natural habitats, bird species, and water sources, an important consideration in Charlestown, where residents draw their water from wells and property owners rely on septic systems, because there is no town sewer service. Some homeowners along the shoreline even use water driven in by trucks and stored in cisterns on their properties, and the drinking water challenges are expected to get worse as sea levels continue to rise.
Platner argues state lawmakers are the ones getting in the way of progress by pushing initiatives that increase market rate housing and undermine affordable housing efforts at the local level. She and other town officials in Charlestown say a newer state law meant to expand the use of accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, has actually invalidated the town’s existing ordinances on family and affordable accessory dwelling units by setting requirements for ADUs the town’s current guidelines don’t meet.
“We have all these resources that we need to protect, and so everything the legislature does to increase density for market rate units makes it harder to increase density for affordable units, because we have a limit on how much density we can add,” Platner said. “Zoning here is actually based on science. It may not be in every community.”
If state officials want to see more affordable housing in towns like Charlestown, Platner says, they should be sending more funding to municipalities to take on housing projects, like fixing up old mill buildings to create more affordable units.
“We’ve provided our own funding – most communities haven’t done that,” Platner said. “We’ve tried really hard, and it would just help.”
A concerning demographic shift
But advocates for affordable housing in Charlestown say the town needs to act with more urgency and initiative, regardless of whether more help comes from the state or not.
Evelyn Smith, the former home builder, now serves as chair of Charlestown’s Affordable Housing Commission. She says she’s worried about the effect the town’s affordable housing crisis will have on its future. Smith says, if young people can’t find housing, the ripple effects could mean fewer people creating and running businesses in town, providing the workforce needed for the tourism industry, filling volunteer positions in areas like firefighting, or serving in elected or appointed roles in town.
“The problems, as I see it, are the potential loss of the next generation of leaders,” Smith said, “because those who are inclined and desirous of coming back to their hometown to live, they can only stay with their parents for so long. And then they have to find a place that they can actually live in.”
Smith and other advocates for affordable housing point to demographic evidence that suggests Charlestown is already feeling the effects of increasingly unattainable home prices, with a loss of young families that could transform Charlestown from the type of small town young people move to for a well-regarded school system to a virtual gated community for wealthier Baby Boomers.
Between 2010 and 2020, the population of people under 18 in Charlestown dropped from 1,500 to 1,160, a roughly 23% decline, according to Rhode Island Kids Count, and the number of students from Charlestown in the Chariho regional school system – 731 – now make up only 24% of the student population in the three-town school district, according to numbers compiled by the district.
The other towns that send students to Chariho schools, Richmond and Hopkinton, have seen their enrollments increase, while Charlestown’s numbers have declined.
Creative solutions
Smith says the solution to the town’s housing crisis probably isn’t for developers to build more houses for young people to purchase like she and her husband did. Instead, she says, the most promising path forward is finding a way to provide more long-term rental housing for young people and older people who are ready to move out of their homes, pass them onto their kids, and live somewhere smaller that’s better suited to their circumstances.
Smith says solutions with promise are ideas like allowing people to build more accessory dwelling units on their properties, or setting aside larger, undeveloped properties in town for something like a tiny house park, where young people could live while they get their feet under them and get ready to start their own families.
But, she says, the town would need to make a greater commitment to pursuing new ways to create more housing, despite the barriers that may exist. It’s something other towns need to do as well, says Brenda Clement, executive director of HousingWorks RI.
Clement says towns need to be more open-minded and creative about finding ways to build more affordable housing. She says local zoning ordinances need to be reviewed. At present, most of Charlestown is either open space or zoned for one house per every two or three acres of land, and property owners need special permission to build multi-family units.
“Every single one of the communities say they’re unique and have this issue or that issue,” Clement said. “When communities tell us, ‘Well, we can’t build anymore. We’re all built out’ – no. I said, ‘You’re zoned out. You’re not built out.’”
Clement added, “My guess is that there is some place where some level of density, or some buildings, could make sense – some repurposing and reusing of existing buildings.”
‘They have no clue’
Developer Tim Stasiunas says he’s an example of someone who came forward in Charlestown with an affordable housing proposal that could have had a significant impact but was thwarted by an exclusionary planning commission.
He wanted to build an affordable housing development called Village Walk, modeled after another project he built in Charlestown called Village Farm. The plan was for 20 condominium units, with 12 of them being affordable housing. 
Stasiunas lined up septic and stormwater permits from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and approvals from the state Department of Transportation and Coastal Resources Management Council. But when he came before the Charlestown Planning Commission, its members wanted Stasiunas to change the density of his development, alter the buffers, adjust the landscaping, use different siding, reduce parking, and resolve questions they had about whether a unit would still count as affordable if it were to go into foreclosure.
“They gave me, finally, a disapproval by approval,” Stasiunas said. “They throw up as many barriers as they can, thinking the developer or the applicant will just throw their hands up in the air and walk away, because they’re spending too much money. This is in their playbook. It’s exactly what they do.”
When asked about Stasiunas’ proposal, Ruth Platner, the chair of the planning commission, said commission members didn’t accept the original plan from Stasiunas because it was “out of character” with the town.
“Aesthetically,” she said, “it was too dense.”
Eventually, Stasiunas took his case to the Rhode Island Housing Appeals Board. But after investing about $150,000 into the proposed housing development, the project died anyway because the property owner Stasiunas was working with wouldn’t renew a purchase and sales agreement because of the uncertainty around the project.
Stasiunas attributes the fate of his housing development to an attitude of some people in Charlestown who, he says, are out-of-touch and unconcerned with the situations facing working people:
“Life is good for them. Their check shows up every month, or every two weeks – boom, it gets into their direct deposit, into their account. They’re living life large. They don’t care about some guy who’s working paycheck to paycheck, trying to make ends meet, looking for a place to live. They have no clue about that segment of the population.”
Stasiunas added, “I’m going to be okay. I’m not worried about where I’m going to lay my head tonight on a pillow. But there’s a lot of people in the town of Charlestown, and the local communities, that don’t have a place to put down their head and call their own. And that’s unfortunate.”
Alex Nunes can be reached at anunes@thepublicsradio.org
