A silver lining of the big recession cloud.

Can’t blame him for backing out.

Yeah the city really doesn’t need any more housing, especially not high density housing.

The city desperately needs housing. It does not need luxury housing.

I'm absolutely fine with more housing, I just didn't want some wavy Miami skyscraper standing at odds with the entire skyline. It also wasn't exactly affordable housing they were trying to build. The superman building is a better hope there. Heck give it a couple years and the providence place mall is a better hope there. Let's make what we have work for us.

Thank god

came here to say that! yes to housing but not this kind of bullshit.

Big surprise.

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It appears luxury housing is the only damn thing being made and allowed to continue. It's fuckin stupid the shit that's being pulled everywhere with housing. Here in EP the mayor made a big photoshoot before election of "breaking ground" on a housing project, that's been sitting for years. A percentage of which is supposed to be affordable. That pile of dirt that they literally brought in instead of actually just digging some up from this empty lot is still there, untouched. While on the other end of the street a nice apartment or condo building is put in. Then there's the Kettle Point development that literally paid a fine just so they wouldn't have to do a percentage for "the poors". Then up the road more where there was gonna be a huge waterfront development with a bunch of housing, a percentage affordable, and shops, restaurants and what not. Straightened out the land and now just sitting there some years, long empty waterfront strip. Then there's Exxon that owns the most land in the city and most of it empty now and they don't pay property taxes on any of their land, I looked it up. It's all valued at $0.

What a loss that would have been. So much history - gone.

Good. What an ugly, obnoxious pos.

Exactly! It's much healthier for cities and the environment to make sure the upper classes continue to live in outer suburbs and commute in for work.

Smilin' Bobby loves his photo shoots!

Luxury housing is housing. It’s not rocket science. Somebody who would move into the building moves down from Boston. But we don’t build luxury housing. That’s fine - they get a nice place in fox point. The person they beat out for an apartment looks somewhere else. And so on down the line. The people at the top aren’t the ones feeling the pain.

Superman building has huge subsidies. This was all private with modest tax break. This is a tragedy.

Yea enjoy the further housing shortages and continued sprawl of SFHs. Well done NIMBYs

More housing is affordable housing. You’ve been brainwashed by NIMBYs.

Yes. It really fucking does. Supply and demand is still the driving factor and there's still going to be people getting price out of Boston who move here and if we're not adding units for them, they're just going to outbid for what's already here.

That's already been happening for years. We need to increase housing at every price point otherwise anything that isn't section 8 is guaranteed not to stay affordable.

It's insane to me that you're being downvoted for this.

>I'm absolutely fine with more housing, I just didn't want some wavy Miami skyscraper standing at odds with the entire skyline. It also wasn't exactly affordable housing they were trying to build. The superman building is a better hope there. Heck give it a couple years and the providence place mall is a better hope there. Let's make what we have work for us.

This response perfectly encapsulates the thinking holding Providence and RI in general back.

Sure, there’s a housing crisis pricing people out of the area, but is this solution I don’t need to spend a dime on pretty enough?!

I’m totally ignorant about the economics of this and another unrelated project but I have strong feelings about it and those feelings matter. Also, turning disused malls into residential space is an awesome idea I just had that completely ignores the fact that there are malls that have been dead for decades and if it was even remotely viable it would… exist.

GOOD.

Luxury housing tower = affordable? For whom?

What does "affordable" mean

>It appears luxury housing is the only damn thing being made and allowed to continue.

I think the problem with that is we either need to invest a LOT of public money to subsidize housing or rely on what private developers are willing to pay for.

Anyone willing to build a building full of sub $2000/month apartment when they could be do one thats changing more is probably too stupid to afford it.

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Wasn't there a shooting not too long ago in prov?

“I support housing in general, just not in this particular case. Or any other case. Just not in my backyard.”

wow something went right for a change around here

That’s okay we don’t have a housing shortage anyway

More housing means there’s less of a shortage which means landlords and home sellers can’t just charge whatever they want. Supply and demand.

Which is not what anyone is actually saying here. Build units here but take the vanity project tax sucking luxury part of it. There’s better ideas for that would house more actual people who need It here than providences take on Gherkin building.

You need to take a basic economics course that covers principles of supply and demand. This is attitude is straight NIMBY!

False equivalence. What history would Fane Tower have eroded? Route 195??

Nobody said that. Just because something is in your backyard doesn’t make it good. There are a lot of other reasons why this project sucked.

Username checks out

Love all the people that don't live in the city coming here to call those of us that do live here NIMBYs because we don't want another Ill conceived piece of real estate built in the city that will sit half empty for years til they come begging for a bail out then it becomes dorms like the buildings they put in downtown near waterplace park.

Address some of the existing buildings that are sitting empty before adding yet another that will be neglected.

But luxury dumb shit like this is very inefficient at accomplishing this goal. This is a vanity project that accomplishes nothing but it's always the same. Fucking luxury housing is the trickle down economics of real estate development.

Yes!!!

Listen I love that people are trying to fix the housing market but we need low-cost housing, not high-cost apartments.

Plus I think the building looks ugly as shit

A) you’re wrong. More housing is the only true affordable housing, period. And B) In case you weren’t aware, developers need profit incentive. NIMBYs doing a great job at scaring big ones away. Good luck finding a charitable development organization. And wait until you see the NIMBY backlash if there ever was a development with all “affordable” housing, which is an arbitrary term that means whatever the idiot uttering the phrase wants it to mean.

What an eye sore that would have been.

“Luxury Apartments” in a skyscraper isn’t going to help the housing problem. The people affected by the housing problem wouldn’t be able to live here.

Exactly. There needs to be better options than just building more luxury/high priced housing and hoping it lowers the cost of other housing eventually. There needs to be housing built that addresses the need for lower cost rentals, not saying that luxury and higher priced properties can't exist as well, I don't think anyone is saying that it shouldn't exist, just that it can't be the only thing people build in the city.

And yes the design of this building was awful it would have stuck out like a sore thumb and ruined the appeal of our skyline.

It's almost like we need good civic planning and not just dumping money on something hoping it'll have a ripple effect.

Yes that would be a good start. I am glad that the Fox Point Neighborhood Association and other groups have been paying attention to this and helping to hold the city and developers to account on this.

Having a cohesive plan for the city and housing would be great.

Here's the thing.

Building luxury apartments can have a pull through effect. In theory. Unfortunately the reality of recent development (since 2005 boom) has not been this. Increase of supply of luxury units has not, in fact, reduced prices for anyone else. The collapse of the national economy did help for a while at least for people that didn't lose their jobs so I guess there is that argument, get enough banks to fund enough stupid overpriced shit and the whole thing will implode again,

There is a reason this argument comes from developers and trade unions and not from housing advocates, and it's not that everyone except some enlightened few are just anti development nimbys.

Regardless one point you fucking people ignore is that this tower required zoning variance and other variations from the CPC. If this tower is so amazing build it where you don't need the variances and you will get a lot more cooperation.

Well said! Anyone that has actually followed this at all would have seen all the shit the city had to deal with with all the revisions the developer was making and telling them they had to make changes, and even then the city was still giving them the variances they needed. This would have been another half full building that has a ton of turn over.

Brown will probably end up buying it for $1

Fuckin stupid. An hour from Boston which is doing GREAT and yet the biggest city in the state of RI doesn’t want to build and instead pretend it’s Newport. LOL Hartford 2.0

so disappointing….

Lol you’re right!! Brown has Providence by the balls

I do not support more luxe housing, you heard it here first.

Yup

Housing shortages? Those apartments were like 3k a month and up. Anyone who can afford that is not participating in the housing shortage.

I agree with the points about housing, but the providence skyline is a crumbling and empty Superman building and a hotel connected to a shopping mall.

Not disappointed

I've posted before about this project. Typical RI/Prov BS. This guy was footing the entire bill for building and infrastructure. But no, the talking heads have pushed the man out. I guess jobs and no cost to tax players isn't of any value to those whom think for us.

I’d love to know if the reason is anything more than “rates went up.”

I think Providence dodged a bullet. That is one ugly-ass building.

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>“Luxury Apartments” in a skyscraper isn’t going to help the housing problem.

Yes. It is. You know what helps a housing shortage? Housing. In the absence of new high end housing, people coming in from Boston / NY will be competing for the existing high end housing stock. The people they’re competing with go down market, and so on.

>The people affected by the housing problem wouldn’t be able to live here.

No shit. But they won’t be able to afford the place they’re living now either if there isn’t new housing built that absorbs new higher income residents.

Sure. The people who would move there aren’t going to be displacing other people who can’t pay what they can for another place in the area.

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>This is not how this functions.

Yes, u/automaton11, That is exactly how this functions.

>Housing price is better represented as a function of objective quality, not of demand. People move, houses dont.

Unironically using the phrase “objective quality” shows just how far you are over your skis here.

>Building high end housing will gentrify an area without elevating struggling classes.

Non sequitur…

>Owners of homes of a given quality level will generally continue to rent to persons of a given income class.

As someone who’s owned several rental properties, that’s not how that works. Landlords seek market clearing rents. They don’t give a fuck about someone’s “income class.”

>Over time this can change, but it changes more slowly than does housing turnover, and because of that, people follow the housing, not the other way around.

I have no idea what you’re trying to say here, and I’m not convinced you do either.

>100 luxury apartments will bring in 100 rich people from wherever. If rich people move out of houses in RI, they move out of houses that will not immediately be filled by people of lesser means. You have the function backwards.

One of us has it backwards, and it is not me. If you’re under the impression that the creation of new luxury housing is what draws economically mobile people to the area, you are mistaken. People are moving down from Boston every week, happily trading the longer commute for the one day a week they need to be in the office for the lower cost of living. If the Fane Tower isn’t built, they’re still coming, and they’ll take the next best thing on the market.

Tell me, where is the new construction low cost housing that folks should look to for an example of how things should be done?

I guess they didn’t grease enough pockets this time.

Doesnt this perpetuate the inflation thats causing the crisis in the first place? The way to treat it is to add housing to the middle of the curve, balancing the function. Adding housing to the right hand side of the curve only pushes everyone down to the left and perpetuates the problem, albeit with richer and richer people. See also: Manhattan

Why is your response filled with insults?

Ding dong the witch is dead

Pointing out that you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about isn’t an insult just because it hurts your feelings.

Youre a landlord lol. Whats your big claim to fame? How much education do you need to be a ri landlord lol

Faine abandoned his own project. Cry some more

Let’s talk about the middle of the curve when it comes to housing. You know what term can almost universally describe it? Used. 10,20, 50 years old. At least that here in New England.

There is next to no economic incentive to build new low cost housing, just like there’s nearly no economic incentive to build new low cost cars. Most consumers would sooner buy a $5,000 used car with AC and power windows than a $5,000 new car with neither.

So it is with housing. New market rate housing (short of those tremendously successful housing projects we flirted with in the 60s / 70s) is always the top of the market. But if it’s never built, then it will never be there in 30 years as a moderate cost housing option.

>Youre a landlord lol. Whats your big claim to fame? How much education do you need to be a ri landlord lol

Reading comprehension not your strong point I guess? Hint - “owned” is what we call Past Tense.

How much education do you need to hold really strong opinions on topics you know nothing about? Asking for a friend.

Why is it that all your comments are downvoted? Are you good enough at economics to figure that out?

I've seen articles here and there, but haven't followed this too closely. What was wrong with the building? Was it flawed or bad for the city?

>Why is it that all your comments are downvoted? Are you good enough at economics to figure that out?

The fact that you think this is some sort of own is in fact what we would call an “epic self own”.

If you think the popularity of a position has any reasonable relation to whether or not it is correct, then you’ve been asleep since 2016.

Damn those NIMB people. This would’ve been nice.

Exactly. As someone who is currently occupying an "affordable" unit, this is very true. it was a big step down from what I was used to living in. When I had to move (within the same zip code btw), the only units available were significantly more expensive and far less quality than places I had been in for the last 20+ years. Virtually everyone in my neighborhood which has been a "lower" class neighborhood for the past 50 years, are middle class salaried, and in some cases, professional workers. The units are mostly duplexes and developed mill complexes, that are still run down junk, but now they cost more than the luxury apartments and rental single family houses costed like 5 years ago.

>Love all the people that don't live in the city coming here to call those of us that do live here NIMBYs because we don't want another Ill conceived piece of real estate built in the city that will sit half empty for years til they come begging for a bail out then it becomes dorms like the buildings they put in downtown near waterplace park.

I'm still upset the plan to put the PawSox there fell thru. Beyond the finances it would have been a great place to have concerts and I think it would have helped the PawSox attendance.

Everyone, because it means people with lower incomes don't have to compete with as many rich people for modest apartments.

>Decades from now people are going to look back at this plan and be as grateful that it didn’t happen

Why wait? This is easily the best local news I've heard in the 2020s 😅

"We need housing! We want jobs!"

'I will bring housing and jobs!'

"Boooooooooo!!!!!!!!"

That’s a developers talking point.

Not in the Fane plans! that’s the point is getting crowed at as being NIMBY reflexively.

I’m not as disappointed at this deal getting canceled as I am at the number of morons who seem to think this is a good thing for anybody. People on both sides of the aisle are shockingly ignorant about basic economics.

Maybe, but it's true.

YES!!!! Agreed. Thank you! So frustrating these people all have that same “luxury housing” line

Hartford is about as “stagnant backwater” as it gets

My sole objection to the building was aesthetic.

Want to build luxury housing in Providence? Think it will have a good effect on the economy? Whatever, go ahead--I'm not an economist, so I don't know what effects luxury/non-luxury/other types of housing would have.

But as a human with eyes, who appreciates aesthetic continuity, the building's proposed design was horrific. It did not fit in at all with the city's old-style skyline. It looked like some random film designer from Star Trek dropped a building from one file into another file for a 1900s historical documentary.

On of the conditions demanded by PawSox ownership what that the taxpayers subsidize a billionaire's already successful business. Now Worcester's homeowners get to pay that.

Yeah. That’s why I said financial/budget reasons aside, it would have been awesome to have a ballpark by the river.

I agree there’s so many empty buildings in the jewelry district and downtown areas with decent infrastructure to handle increased traffic.The Superman building being a glaring example of an empty building which could be used for housing. Hopefully the parcel 9 plan dies too!

That was one big part I did not like. I was sad to see them leave but the cost just wasn't worth it. McCoy needed some updates but was still a fun and decent stadium.

The huge problem with Supes has been that the cost of plumbing upgrades needed to make it all apartments. The new development plan and subsides seems to address that without a ton of variances and code exemptions. As far as I know they have started some of the internal work or will be starting shortly.

I agree with the parcel 9 plan needs to change, there needs to be some changes made there but that just ain't it.

That’s good news! For parcel 9, I think a more modest design that would fit in the neighborhood would be great. However, the current design has way too many units which will create a ton of traffic and is ugly.

What the fuck does it mean to build cheap apartments? Anything brand new in providence is by default luxury because everything else is old as shit.

We need more housing period. Please just fucking build something.

With the SVB collapse and unknown knock on effects + inflation. No wonder. However I think it will now be years we see anything happen (doubt other developers are leaping at this but would like to be proven wrong). Same things that caused them to back out will affect other developers

Just means rich folks can outbid you on your next house. Good luck.

I'm amazed that they're even considering tearing McCoy down. I get that it's functionally useless at the moment, but I wonder what baseball fans would think of the government trying to tear down the site of the longest baseball game ever played. That seems like enough historical reason to keep it, even if you only let local schools use it. Turn it into a museum or something. Especially since the new school they want to build there will probably be shit, given their track record this year of opening new elementary schools...

It wasn't "talking heads" that pushed Fane out, it was the cost of construction labor/materials which made the whole plan economically unviable.

Um, no. The east side money and thier puppy Elorza fought this tooth and nail for 4 years. The "elite" were concerned about "their" skyline.

Except for the fact Elozra isnt mayor any longer and has no sway on anything, that might all be true, but not why Fane pulled out of the deal.

Rich people aren’t competent with poor people for apartments. Corporations are buying up real estate to sell it at a high price point. Rich people don’t need more houses, they buy it for more money. And it’s bullshit. We need to stop playing life to serve the 1%. Tax them at 70% put a cap on the amount of housing units they can own. Allow middle class to buy a home they’ll actuall live in and not have to rent out from some nepo dick head

He tried for 4 years. Proven investor. Dr. Will Smith "the pain, the pain of it all".