When the Woonsocket-based non-profit NeighborWorks Blackstone River Valley began redeveloping the Clocktower building in Burrillville, the old wool-weaving mill was far from move-in ready.
Vegetation on the property had grown wild, once-expansive exterior windows were filled in with cinder blocks, and the inside was being used to store car parts.
“These mills had seen their best years behind them,” Joe Garlick, executive director of NeighborWorks, said. “In fact, the Clocktower was storage for transmission. There was like 70,000 square feet of transmission lying on the mill floors.”
It took several years and a $19-million dollar budget before the Clocktower Apartments redevelopment was completed in 2011.
Today, about 130 people live at the property in the Harrisville section of town. It’s home to 47 one-to-three bedroom apartments, 80% of which are affordable housing. Some of the units have patios with riverfront views.
“This was the first rural project that we’d ever done. So there was sort of the fear of the unknown – you know, if you build it, will they come? And they certainly came,” Garlick said. “Everything rented out. People wanted these apartments, in this town, in this village.”
NeighborWorks has since developed other housing projects in Burrillville. In the Pascoag village, the group built 21 units deliberately integrated into two downtown buildings.
Nearby, the organization built a 75-unit townhouse development and community center surrounded by deed-restricted open space. That development is a short drive from a homeownership project where families build their houses together and then move in.
Garlick is quick to credit the town of Burrillville for helping make the housing developments happen.
“You don’t often think of sort of cutting edge planning stuff coming out of small places,” Garlick said. “And I think they punch way above their weight class in the planning/revitalization division here in the state, for sure.”
Burrillville’s success in expanding affordable housing speaks for itself. With the exception of Exeter, no other rural town in the state has as much designated affordable housing relative to its total housing stock. And while a third of renters are cost-burdened, Burrillville is the only city or town in Rhode Island where the state’s median household income for renters is enough to affordably cover the average cost of a two-bedroom apartment, according to the HousingWorks RI 2023 Fact Book.
Burrillville didn’t become an outlier by accident.
“We were trying to employ, kind of, a European growth model, growth style,” said Tom Kravitz, who worked as Burrillville’s town planner from 2001 to 2016.
Kravitz said the town did a lot of strategic thinking in the run up to the 2008 financial crash, when home prices were high, like they are now.
Burrillville steered new development and foot traffic to the historic villages of Pascoag, where more people could spur business activity, and Harrissville, where the town was locating a new public library. Town officials loosened zoning requirements where they wanted development and blocked projects in other areas.
In one case, they convinced a property owner who had a proposal they didn’t like to sell the land to the town to connect a bike path between Pascoag and Harrisville.
“I look back – we were doing it selfishly to try to really generate little dense pockets, again, around these villages where we wanted people to live, because we wanted a small restaurant to take root here or there. So we wanted it to be walkable,” Kravitz said. “Location, again, was number one for us. Affordability kind of came in after.”
In other parts of the state, like South County, rural and suburban towns say they want affordable housing, but creating it isn’t simple.
For decades, the state has set a goal for municipalities to have at least 10 percent of their housing stock be affordable through subsidies and cost restrictions. Most rural and suburban communities fall far short of that, with residents pushing back against proposals they claim are out of sync with their town’s character or a threat to property values.
But Brenda Clement, of the advocacy group HousingWorks RI, says Burrillville is proof that towns can find affordable housing solutions if they think strategically about where to build and seek out partners that can help.
“Towns really need to – if they want to control what their community looks like, in the community context and character – they need to be proactively planning for how to protect that, but also how to grow the housing base to meet the needs of local residents,” Clement said.
Burillville had consistently been above the state’s 10 percent goal for affordable housing stock but recently slipped just below it after RI Housing updated its formula with new Census data.
The town council’s president, Don Fox, says Burrillville has a project in the pipeline he expects will get it back above the state requirement.
