PPS: Old multifamily homes worth preserving

COURTESY PPS
A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: The foreclosed house at 90 Pleasant St. is one of the 
multifamily units included in an entry on the PPS most-endangered-properties list.
COURTESY PPS A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: The foreclosed house at 90 Pleasant St. is one of the multifamily units included in an entry on the PPS most-endangered-properties list.

For those who’ve spent their lives in them, Providence’s triple-deckers, Victorians and other multifamily houses might not seem too remarkable, or even desirable.
But in the wake of the foreclosure crisis, the turn-of-the-20th-century apartment buildings that make up so many city neighborhoods have transitioned from real estate afterthoughts to preservation cause.
Joining monuments to industry like the Narragansett Electric Lighting Building and tributes to worship like the Cathedral of St. John, the city’s hundreds of foreclosed apartment buildings were placed as a group this spring on the Providence Preservation Society’s Ten Most Endangered Properties List.
“A lot of them are great houses, but ordinary houses: these are not places that are going to get plaques,” said Preservation Society Executive Director James Hall about the decision to place an entire segment of the housing market on the endangered list. “We had such good turn-of-the-century housing stock and it has worked for so long. It is really the fabric of neighborhoods.”
By identifying foreclosed, multifamily houses as endangered, the Preservation Society singled out a maligned force within the economy more than a particular building or architectural style that needs to be preserved.
Between 2009 and 2011, 964 two- and three-unit buildings went through foreclosure, according to a Housing Works Rhode Island analysis of figures from The Warren Group. Those foreclosures affected 2,414 apartments, Housing Works estimates.
Of all of the residential foreclosures in the city during that three-year period, 58 percent were two- or three-family homes and 92 percent of all multifamily foreclosures were two- and three-family homes, Housing Works said. In addition to the downward pressure on the overall real estate market since the bubble burst, Providence’s multifamily market has also been affected by recent property tax increases and penalties for investor-owners.
Many of foreclosed properties have been sold and reinhabited, but others have stayed vacant and deteriorated with no one to maintain them or protect them from thieves and vandals.
The problems caused by vacant apartment buildings go beyond the loss of places to live or the loss of structures that may have had unique features.
“The whole process creates a downward spiral when, in the process of reselling a property, it loses so much value that it makes less sense to rehab and impacts the house’s around it,” said Clark Schoettle, executive director of the Providence Revolving Fund, which funds historic-preservation projects in the city. “We see where the appraisals are being affected, you can’t get a loan from the bank to get it back up to code.”
To reverse the affects of multifamily foreclosures, community-development corporations have worked to restore old apartment buildings using money from nonprofits like the Revolving Fund and the state and federal government.
The Smith Hill Development Corporation has been particularly active and received an award last week from the Preservation Society for bringing back to life 19 vacant multifamily houses.
But even with these efforts and foreclosures slowing from the crisis pace of a few years ago, Schoettle said rehabilitation projects are still struggling to keep up with the number of buildings being abandoned or sitting vacant after bank repossession. He estimates that about 50 or 60 houses are being redeveloped each year while more than 200 multifamilies in the city go through foreclosure. Through the state-funded Building Homes Rhode Island program, community-development corporations have created 526 affordable-housing units throughout the state between 2007 and 2011, 377 of them through the rehabilitation of previously foreclosed properties, according to HousingWorks RI Executive Director Nellie Gorbea.
“I think the older, multifamily houses are an important source of living space for the city workforce,” Gorbea said. “They are also part of the character of the neighborhoods.” Providence is far from alone in seeing its older multifamily houses ravaged by the foreclosure crisis.
Several cities and preservation groups have launched efforts to protect their 19th-and-early-20th-century apartment buildings, especially the boxy triple-deckers that give so many New England neighborhoods their unique character.
While Providence has more than its share of triple-deckers, Philip Marshall, coordinator of the historic-preservation program at Roger Williams University, said the city is probably best known for the Victorians, Greek Revivals and Queen Anne-style properties built between the 1860s and 1910s.
“The period post Civil War that extends up to the turn of the century is a very character-defining feature of the historic districts and Providence at large,” Marshall said.
Since PPS started compiling the Most Endangered list in 1994, 22 properties appearing on it have been preserved and removed, 12 remain threatened and 12 have been lost to the wrecking ball, including the Grove Street School and Outlet Garage in the last year. •

No posts to display