With Shekarchi gone, what did lawmakers do on housing in 2026? | Providence Journal
Patrick Anderson | June 15th, 2026
Housing was a policy afterthought in the General Assembly before Rep. K. Joseph Shekarchi became speaker in 2021.
The Warwick Democrat and land use attorney passed more than 50 bills on housing policy, most focused on removing procedural barriers to construction, since taking the speaker's gavel.
When Shekarchi stepped down as speaker to pursue a state Supreme Court judgeship in May, it was always going to mark a shift from the six-year push on housing legisaltion.
New Speaker Christopher Blazejewski hasn't said anything to make people think he disagrees with Shekarchi on housing. But it isn't his legal specialty, and it would be reasonable to expect a new speaker would want to carve out his own policy niche.
How did the new political dynamics at the State House translate into legislation this year?
Of the nine bills in Shekarchi's final annual housing legislative package, only four passed the Assembly, an unusually low percentage. One of them didn't even pass the House. (More on that later.)
It's not necessarily apples to apples, but a dozen bills of the Senate's 17-bill health care package passed the legislature, for some sense of comparison.
At the same time, the Senate, which took a back seat on housing policy when the late Dominick Ruggerio was president and Michael McCaffrey majority leader, is now more active on the issue, particularly Housing and Municipal Government Committee Chairman Jake Bissaillon.
This year the Senate passed several aggressive pro-housing bills sought by affordability advocates, but they didn't become law, so it's unclear how engaged leadership was on the issue.
The last Shekarchi housing agenda
Perhaps the most surprising bill to die was an expansion of the state's Homeless Bill of Rights.
It was sponsored by Shekarchi and would have amended an original Rhode Island Homeless Bill of Rights sponsored by Blazejewski in 2012.
That wasn't enough to get it a Senate vote.
Cranston Mayor Ken Hopkins objected to making police give the occupants of encampments a 15-day notice before their makeshift settlements are cleared. Sen. Todd Patalano is second in command of the Cranston Police Department.
"The Senate version of this legislation was introduced relatively late in the session, and several concerns were raised in committee," Senate spokesman Greg Pare wrote about the demise of the Homeless Bill of Rights bill.
Another high-profile piece of Shekarchi's package would have extended the state's primary tax break for low-income housing − known as "8 Law" − to commercial conversion and adaptive reuse projects.
Progressives, including Rep. David Morales, who is challenging Smiley in the Democratic mayoral primary, argued that it was too generous to developers and lacked strong requirements for them to rent below market.
It passed the House and died in the Senate.
A lower-profile bill in Shekarchi's package that would have allowed property owners to divide lots in single-family zoning districts with water and sewer connections also passed the House and died in the Senate.
So did a bill that would have made it easier to redevelop vacant state-owned buildings and closed schools.
What did pass?
The biggest thing to pass the Assembly on housing this year was the $120 million housing bond included in the state budget and up for voter approval in November.
Subsidized affordable housing development accelerated after the COVID pandemic, thanks to infusions of federal and state spending. This bond would help keep that going amid rising construction costs.
A few things from Shekarchi's housing package did pass.
The biggest was a 51-page bill, H8004, full of tweaks to zoning laws that aim to clear red tape and restrictions on development. It squeaked through the Senate 22-16, suggesting numerous Democratic senators were given a hall pass from leadership to side with development-wary constituents in an election year.
Legislation to make it easier for cities to build emergency temporary shelters such as ECHO Village in Providence passed this year after failing in 2025.
Lawmakers prohibited cities and towns from requiring more than one parking space per unit in apartment buildings near mass transit, although they rejected a much more aggressive effort to reform parking minimums.
And for those looking for excitement, there will be a new study commission next session investigating potential changes to condominium law.
What were housing advocates looking for?
While senators threw cold water on some of the House housing bills, they advanced several pieces of legislation championed by Neighbors Welcome! Rhode Island, the state's pro-housing "Yes In My Backyard" (YIMBY) group.
They included a series of changes to the state's new accessory apartment law that would have allowed granny flats to be built on smaller and irregular lots while closing a loophole allowing property owners to build two new accessory units.
And the Senate passed a bill, sought by the AFL-CIO, that would have created a new state Commerce Corp.-managed development incentive to co-invest with union pension funds on adaptive reuse projects.
The bill was meant to leverage money from the national AFL-CIO Building Investment Trust, and projects that tapped it would have to pay prevailing wage and have apprenticeship programs.
Rhode Island AFL-CIO President Patrick Crowley said his organization had previously explored possible Building Investment Trust use on the vacant Superman Building, but that was no longer on the table this year.
Finally, a bill known informally as "Yes In God's Back Yard" would have given religious organizations the ability to build rent-restricted housing on their property under the state's affordable housing law, limiting local officials' power to block it.
The House excommunicated it.
"We fought to let churches and other faith institutions build affordable homes, modernize parking requirements to create more flexibility, and allow underused office space and other properties to be renovated for housing, and more," Kristina Brown of Neighbors Welcome! RI wrote in an email. "We saw several housing bills move through the Senate, but these commonsense proposals died in committee in the House. It’s a missed opportunity to continue progress towards meeting Rhode Island’s housing needs."
The Senate typically gives committee chairs and top members of leadership more leeway than the House to pass bills they like even if they aren't priorities of the whole chamber.
Case in point: while the senate passed several Bissaillon YIMBY bills, it also passed a bill introduced Majority Whip David Tikoian, D-Smithfield, "by request" for the Smithfield Town Council that would have gutted Rhode Island's decades old affordable housing law for all communities.
As it did last year, the House killed the bill.
Public developer
Within the $120 million housing bond, $25 million is set aside to help build homes intended to be sold to occupants rather than rented.
And $10 million "may be used" for public housing development.
This is the third time that lawmakers have set aside $10 million for public housing in pilot programs since state officials began to explore public-sector home development.
Without fanfare, the Executive Office of Housing last June approved $7 million for the Newport Housing Authority's $22 million Park Holm 5 project. The project, now under construction, will build 45 apartments for residents making 30% to 60% of the area median income in Newport's North End.
It is the first time Rhode Island has ever put state funds toward public housing construction, which typically relies on federal funding.
Rhonda Mitchell, executive director of the Newport Housing Authority, said public housing projects like Park Holm can tap sources of federal funding unavailable to private affordable developers and offer tenants lower rents.
Park Holm 5 is slated to open in April 2027.
The Newport Housing Authority is looking to build a Park Holm 6 project and may look to the new bond money, Mitchell said.
Daniel Denvir, co-chair of Reclaim RI, which has promoted public development, said it demonstrated "that we don't need to outsource solving the housing crisis to the private sector."
"This funding, however, is just a modest down payment on the public development program that will be required to ensure that everyone in the state has an affordable and dignified home," he said.
Stairway to nowhere
Arguably no legislation flamed out as spectacularly as Rhode Island's latest attempt to modernize the building code requirements around stairwells in new construction.
A national movement to legalize buildings with more than three stories and one stairway instead of two has been sweeping the country. The idea behind it is to make small-lot apartment buildings feasible, reduce costs and create family-friendly units with more windows.
Shekarchi included a bill in his housing package that would allow four-story single-stair buildings.
Connecticut approved four-story single-stair buildings in 2024 and repealed the change before it went into effect. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is studying the issue.
Change is hard in Rhode Island. Fire services wield substantial political power and hate the concept of single-stair buildings.
Rep. June Speakman, sponsor of the stair bill and the House's housing policy guru, appeared nervous testifying in support of the legislation at a committee hearing as fire chiefs from around the state lined up to torch it.
They were successful. The House didn't try to pass the bill, and the Senate didn't bother making its own version.
And the General Assembly passed a bill sponsored by Speakman and Senate Majority Leader Frank Ciccone that will freeze the state building code until at least 2030. So if even if national code writers loosen stair rules, they won't change here without another law change until then.
"We definitely need more time to perfect the concept," Speakman said this month about single-stair buildings, which are common in New York City, Seattle and outside of North America. "I have never been in a fire or been a firefighter and seen the damage fires do, so I feel very uncomfortable questioning them when they talk about safety."
