Multiple time boarded loser here. Check out the picture from the city of Providence’s 2001 survey. Looks to have been traded by faceless developers and out of town property conglomerates lots of times over the years. I marked it as revisited because technically we have bookends from eight years of “progress” between ’01 and ’09.
Anyone surprised to learn the copper is gone? The same local woman is listed* as owning the adjacent lots on either side. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Currently for sale at $45K
* listed meaning “publicly listed” meaning best guess—dusty city hall records are not considered public
Nearby Houses:
None yet photographed. Please take a picture if you see one.
What caught my eye was the tax valuation of $278,000. Full application of the RE tax of around $30 per thousand would result in a tax bill for over $8,000. There are all sorts of lovingly crafted “exemptions” which prevent that, but, talk about cutting the heart out of taxpayers!
Interesting Providence statistics from Yahoo. Population decline, .9% annually. Median income $31,000. Median house 226,000. Vacant housing stock 6.1%
First, you have declining population. Then, you have a median house value which is 7 times the median annual income. All of this while vacant units stand at 6% of total. Talk about a prescription for disaster. When I moved back here in ’96, you could still buy a pretty good pile of bricks off Blackstone for about $150,000. Values were depressed by very high tax bills. Now those houses have an “ask” of about $700,000. That is a miracle.
I have a farm in North Carolina.
County tax 7.90 per thousand (there is no city tax, there is no city)
The median value of owner-occupied housing in Duplin County in 2008 is $96,840.
Duplin County’s median household income has increased to $42,757. (I don’t know if the Yahoo Proividence median income is per person, or family.)
Do you wonder why almost 1,000,000 people have moved to North Carolina in the last 8 years? Maybe that is where the disappearing Rhode Islanders are going. The Carolinians think so, they are very upset about it.
Just ran across a pretty interesting web article on the history of Providence: http://www.rilin.state.ri.us/studteaguide/RhodeIslandHistory/chapt8.html
Here is one tid-bit that caught my eye “In the census of 1950 Providence had a population of 248,674; two decades later that number had dwindled to 179,116, the largest proportionate out-migration of any major city in the United States.” So far as I know, population has stabilized at near the figure for 1970.
This sounds like Vienna, Austria. Most people visiting there notice that it has very large streets and next to no traffic. The reason is that Vienna was built for a population about 3 times the current level.
It may be some explanation for the level of vacant units in Providence that the city was built to house a population about 30% larger than the current level. There should be a surplus of housing. So, the question resolves itself as being a lack of “affordable” housing, rather than a lack of housing units.
If housing is in surplus, why are rents high? Part is the deterioration of housing units which make some uninhabitable, or undesirable. I suspect more has to do with the astounding run up in values (since housing should be in surplus, one wonders why this occurred). Higher values mean higher mortgages, higher mortgages necessitate higher rents in order to service them. There are probably further reasons. As neighborhoods become less desirable, people attempt to move to more desirable locations. The more desirable neighborhoods are probably contracting, creating artificial shortages, that drives up the rents in the more desirable neighborhoods. Another factor would be a few generations of a housing surplus, and therefore low rents. Low rents do not encourage renovation and repair. Consequently, the housing stock deteriorates. The situation that existed in Providence from the 1940′s forward is referred to by urban experts as “preservation by poverty”. Buildings continue to exist because there is no economic impetus to knock them down.
The article I read corrects me on a point I made before about Doris Duke renovating college hill and altering it from a “red light” district to desirable housing. A great deal of credit is due to Mrs. Malcolm Chase, she purchased over 40 buildings for renovation and resale. This was in the 1960′s, and later.
Another comment on this building. I notice the fenestration on the third floor has been altered. For some reason third floor window sizes have also been altered, that could be as simple as those windows were gathering dust somewhere. More likely there was an attempt to add a third floor apartment. A small window usually indicates a bathroom.
I am also wondering why, with a 30% decrease in population, there is not more vacant housing than the figures suggest (an awful lot was destroyed to create Route 95). I am wondering if “non-reporting” aliens are severely undercounted.
Gotta turn comments off on this one—getting hit by major spam bots. Email forgottenprovidence@gmail.com with comments and we’ll get them up manually. Sorry for the inconvenience.