Government

Failure is not an option: An exclusive interview with housing secretary Stefan Pryor

Pryor steps into his new position with a clean slate and a low bar. But the literal life and death problems he’s been tasked to solved are enormous, and there are millions, – potentially billions – of dollars at play here.

Rhode Island News: Failure is not an option: An exclusive interview with housing secretary Stefan Pryor

February 22, 2023, 2:23 pm

By Steve Ahlquist

Stefan Pryor is Rhode Island’s Housing Secretary, a position created to help centralize action around the state’s growing problems of housing affordability, eviction and homelessness. Pryor came to Rhode Island in in 2015 to become the state’s first commerce secretary under then Governor Gina Raimondo. He left that position to make an unsuccessful run at becoming State Treasurer, and was then tasked by Governor Daniel McKee with getting the newly established and struggling Department of Housing on track.

Pryor takes over a position and a department defined by opaqueness – a place where questions go to die. Pryor’s first weeks on the job have been marked by an openness uncommon in state government. And even before officially stepping into the job, Pryor was on site at the Cranston Street Armory during a cold snap that taxed the makeshift warming centers’ ancient heating system leading efforts to restore heating.

Rhode Island lost a lot of time under previous Housing Secretary Josh Saal, and housing and homelessness only worsened in that time. Rhode Islanders continue to needlessly suffer and a sense of urgency has been difficult to find.

Pryor steps into his new position with a clean slate and a low bar. But the literal life and death problems he’s been tasked to solved are enormous, and there are millions – potentially billions – of dollars at play here.

Failure is not an option, but success is not guaranteed.


Uprise RI: I saw you at the Grow Smart Transit Oriented Development conference and I remember you said that by some measures, Rhode Island has the worst record for building houses right now. I will add to that: Not only are eviction rates rising, but more and more people are cost burdened by their rent and housing costs. So my question is open-ended: Can you explain to me what you see as the scope of the problem that you’ve been hired to address, and what are the important things you hope to accomplish in the short, medium, and long term?

Secretary Pryor: It’s a broad question and appropriately so. First of all, let me ground us in the data that you’re referring to. In the Rhode Island housing market, we are seeing a decline in the number of housing starts. If you look at the figure for 1988, the number of building permits for residential purposes was in excess of 5,500. By 2005, that figure was below 3,000, and last year, the figure was just above 1,200. So we are producing too few housing units. That affects everything in the housing world because with insufficient supply and very high demand, we’re putting pricing pressure on units up and down the market, meaning those that are most expensive, but also meaning those units that ought to be available to the most vulnerable Rhode Islanders.

When there are economic challenges, when there’s tightness in a market, or there are pressures in a market, it is too often the case that the most vulnerable members of our community suffer the most. That is what’s going on. The job of the housing secretary is to assemble the stakeholders, the forces and the resources, in order to affect the totality of the problem. No one person can do it alone. Certainly not under these complex circumstances. The goal is to help catalyze a coalition that can carry out this work on a sustainable basis and [build] an alliance of stakeholders who can, in the near term, get started in earnest. We’ve got to achieve an impact in the near term.

Now I’m toggling a bit here between the big picture and the [immediate] action steps before us. These problems have accumulated over decades. I’ve just given you figures dating back to the 1980s. We won’t solve these problems overnight. We must take real steps by working at it every day. Just to complete my answer for you: We need to find ways to increase production in the housing market so that we relieve pressure up and down and all around. We must also focus with intensity on the most vulnerable Rhode Islanders, including our unsheltered brothers and sisters, including lower income Rhode Islanders who are struggling the most. That needs to be a centerpiece of our work.

Uprise RI: Oftentimes I hear people say things like, “We need housing at all income levels,” but my heart doesn’t really go out to the potentially homeless millionaires so much. So when I hear “all income levels,” I think, “Why are we talking about all income levels? Why aren’t we just talking about the most vulnerable Rhode Islanders, because housing them would bring upward pressure on housing, right?

Secretary Pryor: I’m glad you frame it that way. That is why I express my answer the way I do. It does matter that we achieve production at all price points for rental units and for units for purchase. And in all parts of our state it is important that we accomplish new production so that the market lessens its pressure throughout, so long as we remain most intensively focused on the least well positioned and that when we devote our public resources, we disproportionately focus on the most vulnerable.

Uprise RI: When I hear the term “affordable housing” I roll my eyes because I know it’s BS. I’ll point to the Superman building downtown where Channel 12 did an expose and showed that “affordable,” in this case, is something very different from what people assume. At the Grow Smart conference you expressed, to my understanding, some doubt as to the definition of affordable housing as it is commonly used. Should we even be talking about affordable housing at all? How do we talk about affordable housing in a way that makes sense to everybody, because the term, to my mind, is at best meaningless and at worst deliberately misleading.

Secretary Pryor: It is confusing. I will say this: I think we need to draw a distinction between affordability and affordable housing. Our mission ought to be to accomplish greater affordability throughout the market as I explained in my first response to you. But that point shouldn’t be conflated with our pursuit of investments in truly affordable housing. It ought to be the case that we look at price points relative to area median income [AMI], and that we aim for the production of units starting at very low income strata inclusive of 30% of AMI and 60% of AMI. Truly low income. Also, strata including permanent supportive housing for currently unsheltered individuals, i.e., individuals and families experiencing homelessness. In some instances, income levels may approximate zero.

That needs to be a heavy focus of our efforts. But it is important to include investments in housing stock all the way up to 80% of AMI, 100%, and even the 120% AMI band. It’s important to include such investments because we’re talking about folks who are still struggling to get by. By the way, people up and down the bands that I’ve described work. We need to include professions in the 100%, 125% of AMI who are in the civil and public service spheres who put their lives on the line or work tirelessly in classrooms and in hospitals. It’s important that we have housing stock for all of the above.

Now, your question was one of definition. I do think that when we’re talking about the housing that’s in these ranges that I defined in accordance with AMI, it’s legitimate to call these affordable housing. But we must be more specific about what our targets and our focuses are. When we’re engaging in investments, we should be clear as to what we mean and always be transparent as to who’s truly going to be able to purchase or rent.

Uprise RI: At the very least it’ll keep me from rolling my eyes I hear it.

Secretary Pryor: Exactly.

Uprise RI: Getting into some specific policy questions, What are your thoughts about using Medicare dollars for housing as proposed by Senator Joshua Miller?

Secretary Pryor: We have begun to review the possibilities. I have spoken on a very preliminary basis with Senator Miller. I have viewed some of the potential legislative language and have started to look into other jurisdictions that have gone this route. I do think it’s an area that has promise. I say that with the following conditions and caveats: The Executive Office of Health and Human Services would probably have some interest in the subject and want to weigh in. We are not in dialogue about it yet. The governor’s office, of course, would have high interest in considering the question, as would legislative leadership. Having said all of that, I think it’s a creative solution. I think that if we’re leaving [federal] dollars on the table that we can deploy for housing purposes, especially for vulnerable Rhode Islanders, we ought to explore it. So I’m very interested in dialoguing about it. I do think it’s a worthy area of exploration.

Uprise RI: What are your thoughts about Senator Meghan Kallman‘s legislation establishing publicly owned housing? I know you’re overseeing the $10 million pilot program, for instance.

Secretary Pryor: Senator Kallman and I have had a chance to meet, along with Senate President Ruggerio. We’ve had some preliminary conversations about her concepts. I know she’s still refining her newest version of the bill for introduction during this session, so I’ve not seen any language yet. I have tuned in as Senator Kallman has expressed her vision. I commend her for it and was able to take a look at the preexisting legislation. Here’s the main thing: I think there is merit in government and quasi-governmental agencies leaning into the development process. One version that Senator Kallman may be re-expressing in her new legislation is [for the government] to serve, in effect, as developer. I haven’t yet drawn conclusions about that idea. What I can say is that I do think that in Rhode Island, if we assemble high quality professionals, which I know we can, and set up governance and administrative structures, whether in state government proper or in a quasi-governmental entity, we can help to frame development projects more than we currently do.

What that means is we can help to identify available parcels for development. We can help to deploy funds for brownfield remediation and other site cleanup activities. We can help to frame the specifications for a new project or set of developments that attracts developers interested in serving our most vulnerable populations [and] entices developers looking for certain features in a development solicitation. So I think there are ways we can set the table for development much more actively. There, and in many other ways, Senator Kallman and I see eye to eye.

Uprise RI: And the $10 million pilot that you’re going to be doing, what is that going to look like?

Secretary Pryor: TBD. I’ve started to get into that pilot with my team, i.e., what’s required, what’s possible, how to optimize it. But no news on that today.

Uprise RI: As an aside, I’m a big fan of co-ops. And I think that co-op development might be a really interesting direction to go with state aid.

Secretary Pryor: I do think we should look at different ownership structures – co-ops, condos and other collective methods.

Uprise RI: At the Grow Smart conference, I think the only person to speak meaningfully about gentrification issues was Central Falls Mayor Maria Rivera. How do we build new homes and prevent gentrification, and also prevent wealthy landlords from buying up the property for high profits or Airbnbs? I live on a small street in Providence on the east side. When my wife and I first moved there it was all neighbors. Now there are at least three buildings that are completely devoted to Airbnbs and the parking on the street is insane. That’s about nine family units off the street. That’s nine people or families who don’t live in Providence any more. That’s nine less apartment units to help solve the problem you’re tasked with. What do we do about this?

Secretary Pryor: Several things. I want come back to short term rentals as a very specific problem. General points: In order to ensure that we’re not inadvertently gentrifying when we produce new housing, one method is to utilize spaces that don’t currently involve housing at all. Speaking of the Grow Smart conference, one of the things we ought to be doing is looking to build around train stations and bus hubs where there isn’t currently housing. It might be an industrial section of a city. It might be the commercial section of a town. In addition, as to the specific properties, there are new opportunities emerging where you have older fashioned, now outmoded commercial space on top of retail, on main street stretches. Those are often spaces that can be converted to residential, and can be that can be done very effectively.

By the way, if you invest properly, these can be affordable units or at least mixed income units with affordable units built in. So all of these possibilities exist and they, to a substantial degree, avoid gentrification because you’re not displacing anyone at all. Not to mention new builds on vacant land, wherever that land may be – new tracks, new individual parcels that are likewise not disturbing or displacing. Those can be very good measures.

Dealing with challenges related to short term rentals in particular, these are profound challenges. Just last week, in a conference room across the way from where we are right now, we met with the League of Cities and Towns. 25 different Rhode Island communities were represented, 25 city and town mayors and town managers spoke of their interest in building new housing and specifically highlighted the developments that are underway in their municipalities.

It was very encouraging. There were numerous projects underway. Some were market rate, some were mixed income, many were affordable, by the definitions that we are discussing today. Some were focused on senior citizens, some were focused on veterans. There was a lot of housing in the pipeline. Mayors and town managers also identified the barriers they’re facing. There may be infrastructure barriers – water, sewer, roadways, sidewalks. There may be investment barriers, a hole in the project proforma or project budget. There may be other challenges that they’re facing within their own zoning and planning processes. We need to continue to work on those things.

One of the most frequent challenges brought up was short-term rentals. Several elected officials or town managers spoke of Airbnb, or a competitor, bringing in an owner that was taking over an entire property and turning it into a partially utilized, therefore partially dark during the year, development, decreasing [the municipality’s] capacity for growth. In many instances, there’s at least the risk of, and as you just described, the reality of, displacing residents. That’s a big problem. We’ve got to work on it. It was very clear to me that local leaders want to work in partnership with the state to take on that issue and we are happy to partner with them.

Uprise RI: Maybe starting with a short-term rental registry and working from there?

Secretary Pryor: Registry is one feature, and I think model local guidelines and regulations and perhaps some other state interventions.

Uprise RI: Given all that we’ve talked about, is a concept like rent control an option?

Secretary Pryor: At this time no solution is off the table. I think the magnitude of our problem is such that we need to be open to any version of a solution. And there may be different answers for different parts of our state. Different cities and towns, even different sections of some of our municipalities. So I wouldn’t rule anything out. I will say that I want to ensure that we look at the evidence and the data on how such measures have worked in other places. I’m not prejudging any solution, but some would argue, and I’m just putting it out there, that landlords are disincentivized to maintain properties when rent control measures are implemented in the wrong way. I’m not expressing that this is true for any version of a rent control system, we just need to be careful and mindful of the lessons of history. But no ideas are off the table.

Uprise RI: Would you, in your capacity as housing secretary, support the right for every person in eviction court to be represented by a lawyer?

Secretary Pryor: I’m very interested in this subject and I’ll say this: I’m not prepared to make an announcement today, but one of the things that is a priority for me, and for our team here at housing, is to ramp up the availability of legal representation in eviction matters. We are working with intensity on that subject and we’ll have more to say soon. That is the kind of measure that even in the absence of legislation can happen and can truly affect the market, especially as pertains to the residents who struggle the most.

Uprise RI: Unhoused people in Rhode Island die. We know, shortly after bulldozing homeless encampments in Woonsocket and Warwick, people were discovered outside, alone and dead in both cities. Given that, should encampments of unhoused people be cleared at all, without a gigantic amount of social services being brought to bear? Also, why do you think that we, as a state, are so bad at this? I’ve covered homeless encampments being cleared for years. Whenever we clear encampments, people suffer. Sometimes people end up dead. This is an open ended question, so whatever you feel like saying, please.

Secretary Pryor: I think you you prefaced your question in a very important way and you framed it in a way that we all need to consider. So thank you for the question. In my early days our team and I are focused on ensuring, as pertains to the locations where individuals and families are experiencing homelessness, that we are understanding the scenarios and we are leading with, or at least aiming to lead with outreach and support. Whether relocations can voluntarily occur following outreach and support I think is the right second question. But the first question ought to be what can we do to meet individuals and families who are currently unsheltered where they are? [We need to] identify their needs and attempt to match them with supportive alternative locations and environments.

To share a little more, even before I arrived on the job, my incoming assistant secretary, Hannah Moore and I, connected with House of Hope and we went out on an outreach round with professional outreach workers. We were planning to do it on the weekend that turned out to be the severe cold and wind stretch but we stuck with our plan. We went out that Friday night. It was at negative three degrees out. We thankfully found that in a lot of the locations that the outreach worker was accustomed to finding folks that people were in fact elsewhere because the message had gotten out, thankfully. We did find a couple who wished to relocate, wished to of their own volition. To the credit of the professional outreach worker, relocation ensued. I won’t reveal anything more about them, but my point is that I thought it was important that we be present, that we connect with individuals experiencing homelessness where they are, and that we witness the presentation of options and see what we can do to support that going forward.

I also participated in the Point in Time count with another outstanding social service organization. What I want to say about this is that it’s important that we weigh all the factors when there is a gathering of individuals experiencing homelessness in encampments. I think that we need to be guided by our hearts, be guided by the right thing to do, be focused on the most vulnerable participants in a situation. And yes, take into account hazards such as public health risks and other features of a given scenario. All of the above. But we should start with what’s best for the most vulnerable individuals involved, the most vulnerable families involved, if at all possible.

I referenced public safety hazards and public health risks because there are scenarios such as proximity to traffic and transmission of virus and illness that are things we have to take into account. Once we begin with compassion, authentic outreach, presentation of options, then I think we can take all the factors into account and sometimes we can assist with relocations. I think the approach matters. I think the genuineness of our intent and our centeredness around the most vulnerable matters a lot. I think that’s what Rhode Island hopes for and expects. Then we can carry responsibly carry out our work.

Uprise RI: A lot of my early work in this space was just trying to get the police to be more polite to people during the process of serving them notices of eviction. Oftentimes it was done in a very cavalier and even cruel way. I would hear these reports and eventually I got audio of some of these and it was just terrible. At a minimum I wanted police to be better at that part – just treat people like human beings.

Secretary Pryor: Let me just say this in defense of law enforcement officers, Were they put in an impossible position? In other words, were they the first point of contact? Can we all do a better job so that our devoted police officers and other municipal and state frontline workers can do their jobs well and they don’t have to stray into terrain that they ought not be involved with to begin with? Can we ensure that we lead with outreach and support and housing or shelter options? Can we work in unison? Because I think that police officers and others are being put in very, very difficult positions.

Uprise RI: Police are just not the right people to be doing this kind of work.

Secretary Pryor: Or not solo, perhaps in tandem with outreach workers.

Uprise RI: I have found that sometimes outreach workers don’t want to do this work with because they don’t approve of the way the eviction is being done because they know that needed services will not be provided.

You re-hired former Housing Secretary Josh Saul on as a contract worker to help with your transition into your role.

Secretary Pryor: I quibble with that ever so slightly. As a function of the dialogue regarding his departure, he was retained, temporarily, for up to a certain period of time. I think it’s important that during a transition, especially one that’s rather abrupt like this one – and it was rather abrupt. I didn’t expect to be in this seat – that there be an open opportunity to find out where things were left, what conversations were had, how a program was being pursued, especially when we have as small and thin a team as we do.

That’s very common among transitions, to overlap and ensure, for the purpose of the mission, that there is forward movement. I think what we ought to be focused on here is not the optics or the politics or the perception, we should be focused, with greatest intensity, on what will move the needle to produce housing for Rhode Islanders, especially those who are struggling within our current housing market. I think this does that. And again, this was not a rehire, it was a function of the dialogue that occurred as the departure was being negotiated and it ultimately resulted in a departure.

Uprise RI: I will say that I think Joey Lindstrom and Hannah Moore are good hires.

Secretary Pryor: I agree with you. We are blessed with some high quality professionals and talented people who know what they’re doing.

Uprise RI: Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?

Secretary Pryor: Part and parcel with our work in the early going is an effort to reach out to stakeholders proactively and ensure that the many outstanding housing professionals and advocates, as well as individuals with lived experience, as well as members of the public, have a chance to shape our process. I know there has been a sense, in the previous era – not to dwell upon it – that there was some opaqueness. Maybe that was unintentional, I’m not passing judgment, but we’re starting with outreach. We saw each other a couple times, even before I was official, during the severe cold and wind stretch.

I wanted to be in the places where operations were 24 hours or overnight so that I could see that it was happening, but also to meet the clients, as well as the operators, to ensure that they were getting what they needed. Embedding in the system and starting to hear what they’d need going forward. We’ve taken some deliberate steps, with help from some of these very same team members that we’ve talked about.

We held a session at the United Way a week ago where about 30 different stakeholders were represented across the advocacy community, including the homeless advocacy community, including professional developers as well as non non-profit leaders, home builders, and civic leaders – all in one room to ask the question: How should we go about outreach?

We’re meeting with folks everywhere to be sure, but we wanted to ask, “Should we have a single summit, multiple mini summits? Should we be geographically specific? Should we be topic specific? Let’s not reinvent the wheel here. There’ve been a lot of reports and a lot of summits. Let’s make sure we pour that information in rather than starting as if from scratch. We got great feedback. And the preliminary determination – and we’ve continued to dialogue about it with these stakeholders since – the preliminary determination was let’s do a small number of convenings, not a single one, but a small number of plural convenings. We launch in about a month.

Uprise RI: I’ll be there.

Secretary Pryor: Thank you in advance for being there. We’ll have breakout groups on the key subjects, homelessness, traditionally defined affordable housing, market rate housing, and naturally occurring affordable housing. Housing focus on priority and specialized populations including seniors and veterans, public housing and vouchers, and then move on with some lessons learned from that very session to have other geographic specific or topic specific sessions. We’re doing that in concert with our partners and stakeholders, ensuring that we have voices from them in the process by which we solicit more voice. We’re doing that as a lead up to the state strategic plan and then in the course of the planning process, we’ll have even more public input.

Uprise RI: And next year, as we get into the cold winter months, do you think we are going to be better prepared?

Secretary Pryor: Winter occurs annually. We know that now. We’ve always known it, but let us have that fact register with us. The planning begins now. We need to acknowledge that all of the aforementioned problems, including homelessness, have accumulated over decades. We won’t solve any dimension of it overnight, but we can do better. We can work at it every day and we can do better every year. And that’s what we’ve got to do, especially when lives are at stake. We’re going to work at it with great energy.

Uprise RI: You know, when it gets very cold out, I sometimes have trouble sleeping. If I wake up for any reason, I am now awake thinking it’s 20 degrees and someone’s outside freezing.

Secretary Pryor: I feel the same way and experience the same thing. I very much do. And for individuals experiencing homelessness, let’s do better. What we need to do is to ramp up emergency and interim solutions as we work with real intentionality to build permanent solutions. We can’t lose sight of that second part. We must build more permanent supportive housing. That’s the long-term solution.

Uprise RI: It’s called the Coalition to End Homelessness, not the “[Coalition] to decrease [it] marginally”, after all.

Secretary Pryor: A crucial side of the solution to end homelessness, or at least getting close to ending homelessness, is the prevention side, what you were getting at with evictions. Let’s see what we can do to prevent them so homelessness doesn’t happen at all. That’s why we are already heavily involved in the process of exploring legal services solutions.

Uprise RI: I see it a lot like a health issue. We have hospitals, not because we’ve wiped out sickness, but because we know people fall into sickness, so we have hospitals to help them. We also have health initiatives, to keep you healthier longer so you don’t go to the hospital as often. We say keep in shape, eat right. Keeping evictions down as best we can, giving the people the money they need to stay in their apartments when they need it, that’s the health part. And then, when every once in a while people do fall through, we have a hospital, or a shelter ready to take care of them for the short amount of time it takes them to get better or find permanent housing. Homelessness in this model becomes something that we know how to handle so well that it’s almost like you’re not homeless at all. You just access the system and the system rehouses you.

Thank you so much for your time.