The long-awaited 45 shelter beds at ECHO Village, Rhode Island’s first pallet shelter community, will soon be available to the state’s rapidly growing homeless population, according to testimony from Rhode Island Housing Secretary Deborah Goddard at a senate hearing on Tuesday afternoon.
“I’ve not given a date in the past because we’ve disappointed so many people,” Goddard said. “But I would say probably [in] three to four weeks we will be opening.”
The temporary housing was expected to open last spring, but has faced delays.
Goddard said Rhode Islanders can expect to see homeless people living in the pallet shelters before the end of February.
“I’m quite confident we’ll beat that,” she said.
Goddard answered questions about ECHO Village and other issues at a special joint hearing of the Rhode Island senate’s Oversight and Housing committees on Tuesday afternoon. The hearing followed pressure from lawmakers across levels of government for Gov. Dan McKee to declare a state of emergency in response to the growing homelessness crisis.
“The reality is that we are in this situation because year after year, a number of things have gone wrong,” said state Sen. Jake Bissaillon (D-Providence), chair of the Housing and Municipal Government committee.
Michelle Wilcox, CEO of Crossroads Rhode Island, the state’s largest service provider for people experiencing homelessness, and Laura Jaworski, the executive director of House of Hope, the organization developing ECHO Village, also testified.
“I know it’s been really frustrating,” Jaworski said of the delays in opening the pallet shelters. “You all have visibly seen those pallet structures having been constructed a year ago, almost to the day.”
Jaworski said the organization wasn’t able to clear regulatory hurdles until June of last year. Ever-shifting leadership at the Department of Housing, which was established in 2023, made it more difficult to push the project forward, Jaworski said.
“We didn’t have any consolidated or centralized place of leadership, or at least one that has been established,” Jaworski said.
Clarifying leadership roles is a priority for Goddard, she said. Currently, certain functions fall under Rhode Island Housing, the state’s quasi-public housing finance agency, others under the Department of Housing, a state agency. Goddard expressed frustration at what Bissaillon called “redunancies” in the system.
“There are a number of players, and this is critical to understanding how we all mesh and sometimes don’t mesh,” Goddard said.
Goddard said she’s considering moving the Continuum of Care, which controls certain federal funding streams for homelessness response, under the purview of the Housing Department. Currently, Rhode Island Housing runs the Continuum.
Several senators also pressed Goddard on the $10 million of the state housing bond that passed last fall was set aside to pilot a new approach to housing development in Rhode Island: a publicly-owned and operated housing developer.
“This is a thing that we’ve been exploring and that other parts of the country have been exploring with great success,” said state Sen. Meghan Kallman (D-Pawtucket).
Goddard said she has questions about what model would best suit the local context, emphasizing her interest in considering where already-existing public housing authorities might fit into the picture.
“Let’s all identify the various forms of public development, public ownership we’re talking about,” Goddard said. “There are a variety of models, so let’s be clear, as we talk about each of them, what we see the pros and cons being.”
The hearing concluded just hours before Rhode Island began the federally-mandated annual census of unhoused people taken every January. According to federal data, Rhode Island saw the second largest percent increase in chronic homelessness in the nation last year.
“I can honestly say that in my 30-plus years in homelessness services, I have never seen the level of people experiencing homelessness that we are experiencing in Rhode Island today,” Michelle Wilcox of Crossroads said.
To Goddard, the worsening crisis points to the need for more affordable housing, but also for better coordination between stakeholders in Rhode Island. Last month, she reconvened the Interagency Council on Homelessness for the first time since 2017.
“This really is an attempt to bring all of the state agencies together to really speak to the role and the capacity and the ability of these agencies— whether it’s the Department of Health, Department of Elder Services, the VA — to contribute to addressing the issues of homelessness,” Goddard said.
