Providence Mayor Brett Smiley vetoed the city’s rent stabilization ordinance just one day after the City Council passed it. His alternative is a $1 million emergency rent fund that, by his own estimate, will help 300 households. Providence has seen 24,000 evictions since 2020.
State Representative David Morales supports the ordinance. What he won’t tell you is what a 4 percent cap covering less than 44 percent of the city’s apartments actually does to housing affordability over five years. Nobody modeled what it actually does to housing. The fiscal notes that exist — from the sponsors’ consultant Tom Sgouros and the city’s chief financial officer — analyze revenue effects and administrative costs. Neither projects what a 4 percent cap does to Providence’s housing market over five years: supply, rents on uncapped units, displacement, gentrification.
This is a campaign, not a housing policy. Here is what the ordinance actually does and doesn’t do.
It does not lower rents. Its own sponsors acknowledge this. It provides some stability to some renters in some apartments — the covered minority — while doing nothing for the majority of Providence renters, nothing for new arrivals, and nothing for the 24,000 evictions the city has seen since 2020. The people most in crisis are not the ones a 4 percent cap helps. They are already gone.
It does not address effective affordability. Your rent may be capped. But if your neighborhood fills with luxury condos, your grocery store leaves, your dry cleaner closes, and the social infrastructure you depended on gets replaced by amenities designed for people with Boston salaries, you have not been protected. You have been stabilized in place while the world around you becomes unaffordable. You didn’t get evicted. You just can’t contribute to a 401(k) anymore.
It may accelerate the gentrification it claims to prevent. Providence is about 50 miles from Boston, one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. A rent-stabilized Providence is a relatively cheaper Providence. That is a welcome mat for higher-income Boston transplants who can pay the capped rate comfortably while outcompeting local residents for the controlled units. They work in Boston or remotely for Boston companies. Rhode Island captures limited income tax benefit from their presence. The neighborhoods absorb the displacement.
It has no answer for unit reconfiguration. If you own a three-bedroom apartment on the East Side and you are unhappy with your rent checks, the ordinance allows you to add a wall, create a four-bedroom, sign a new lease, with the base rent reset to market on each new tenancy. New configuration, new base rent. The ordinance has no registry, no configuration tracking, no penalty for conversion. The family housing disappears. The student rooming house appears.
The supply-side critics are not telling you the whole story either. The argument that the answer is more construction and tax stabilization agreements is reasonable in theory. In practice, Rhode Island is 50th in the nation for new housing construction despite years of trying and hundreds of millions spent. The most honest illustration sits in downtown Providence. The Superman Building at 111 Westminster St. has been vacant since 2013. In 2022 the city and state assembled a $41 million public subsidy package — grants, loans, tax stabilization agreements, exactly the tools the supply-side advocates recommend. The developer stalled. The building has produced zero housing units. The original completion date was last spring.
Providence has a genuine housing emergency. Rents rose faster here than anywhere else in the country in 2023 and 2024. According to HUD’s Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy data, nearly half of Providence renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. Homelessness has more than doubled since 2019. These are not political talking points. They are the conditions under which two candidates are staging a fight about an instrument that addresses none of them adequately.
The council is expected to vote on a veto override on Friday. As the debate continues, Smiley gets to be the fiscally responsible adult. Morales gets to be the progressive champion. Providence gets another political performance in place of a housing policy.
The question neither of them will answer: if supply-side solutions work, why aren’t they working here? And if rent stabilization is the answer, why does it leave more than half the city’s renters unprotected, have no mechanism to prevent unit conversion, and offer nothing to the 24,000 households already evicted?
You deserve a mayor who will answer those questions. So far, neither candidate has.
This commentary has been updated to include information from a fiscal note about the rent stabilization statute prepared for the city by Tom Sgouros.
Liam Freaney is a Rhode Island native and analytics professional living in Providence. The author used generative AI to help draft this commentary.