Three-deckers find footing in past

BUYING IN: Foreclosures have created opportunity for people looking to purchase triple-decker homes in Providence. Above, David Stuebe stands outside the triple-decker home he recently purchased on Ellery Street in Providence. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
BUYING IN: Foreclosures have created opportunity for people looking to purchase triple-decker homes in Providence. Above, David Stuebe stands outside the triple-decker home he recently purchased on Ellery Street in Providence. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

Three-deckers, New England’s signature apartment buildings, are evolving again.
Once factory housing, then immigrant refuges and popular condominium conversions, three-family homes throughout the region took a disproportionate beating during the foreclosure crisis, with many abandoned.
Now three-decker aficionados see high rents and low interest rates making the buildings more attractive for a new generation of owner-occupants who used to lease apartments.
That would be good news for city and affordable-housing advocates who want to save three-deckers to preserve homes that can’t be replaced under current density-limiting land-use rules.
This year Boston created a $3 million fund to preserve three-family homes out of concern that loss of buildings through neglect or foreclosure could make that city’s tight housing market even tighter.
In Providence, the focus has been on encouraging a return to the setup that made the three-decker attractive in its heyday: the owner on the first floor and tenants above. This year the city cracked down on absentee landlords claiming the homestead exemption, which gives owner-occupants a 50 percent property-tax reduction.
Considered a blight at various times over the past century for poor upkeep or their association with low-income renters, three-deckers have more recently gained currency in architectural and historic-preservation circles.
“I think of them as a very positive house form,” said C. Morgan Grefe, executive director of the Rhode Island Historical Society, who gave a lecture this fall on three-deckers at the Providence Preservation Society’s annual symposium. “Many of them were incredibly positive steps for people who lived in them over the decades. And they are very versatile,” she said. “Now you have young people and professionals moving back into them and living in them as they were originally intended.”
And if foreclosures don’t spike again, that popularity may cause apartment buildings that lost as much as half their value in the recession to gain ground in the market again.
“In the west side and Elmwood, you absolutely have owner-occupants coming in buying three-families, as long as they don’t need too much work,” said Jane Driver, broker with the Armory Revival Co. in Providence. “They are usually young couples who are renting and want to stay in the city.” Also called triple-deckers, three-deckers began appearing here in the late 19th century as urban mills grew and attracted workers from far and wide.
They sprang up not only in Boston and Providence, but New Bedford, Fall River, Woonsocket, Central Falls and Worcester.
Stacking three roughly identical units on top of one another was intended to get maximum occupancy out of a small land footprint and street frontage, while still providing a comparatively large and attractive living space.
If used the way they were around the turn of the century, three-deckers can accommodate more people in the same land area than row houses, but that’s not the case with New England’s current population.
Within New England, three-deckers come in different shapes and styles, with the boxy Italianates found in many Boston neighborhoods – flat roofs and identical porches and bay windows jutting out on each level – considered the archetype.
In some minds, a three-family with a peaked roof doesn’t qualify as a three-decker, which would disqualify many Providence properties.
Indeed, some Rhode Island three-deckers were probably given sloped roofs to conceal the fact that they had three units, either to make them more respectable or comply with building codes, said Grefe.
“There was a lot of architectural scapegoating,” Grefe said. “The reformers hated that repetition and you saw a big outcry around 1916 and 1917 pushing for laws banning them.”
Today, the classic three-decker has effectively been banned in most places through zoning rules with minimum lot sizes that make building one new, even in neighborhoods with dozens, impractical or impossible.
Modern fire codes also favor horizontal construction such as row houses or attached townhouses, which don’t have to have sprinklers.
“[Three-deckers] are very efficient housing on urban lots,” said Paul Attemann, a senior associate at Union Studio architects in Providence, which has worked with the Smith Hill Community Development Corporation to restore 20 foreclosed properties, mostly three-deckers in the Smith Hill neighborhood. “They were allowable by the standards of the time and built well. In today’s world families are shrinking, people’s houses are expanding and that layout comes with more challenges, such as the fire code.” While in its heyday the three-decker was known for housing different generations of a large family under one roof, shrinking family size has made that a less desirable attribute today.
In Providence and Boston, college students provide an easy-to-satisfy demand for investors who have snapped up three-deckers at foreclosure auctions over the last few years.
In neighborhoods further from the schools, finding people willing to invest in three-deckers has been more difficult and a greater number of them have fallen into neglect.
During the boom years, investors bought three-deckers and turned them into condominiums, but that trend is, if anything, reversing.
Like the owners of some of the large downtown high rises, Armory Revival has been “de-condoing” some three-families on the west side.
Because foreclosure auctions favor cash buyers, who almost always are investors, owner-occupants have likely lost ground to absentee landlords since the bottom of the housing crash. That’s when as much as 80 percent of multifamily sales in Rhode Island were through foreclosure or short sale, according to Rhode Island Association of Realtors figures.
But that might be turning around.
The share of multifamily sales happening through short sale or foreclosure has declined each September since 2008, and this September less than half the multifamily sales were distressed.
“I am definitely seeing the owner-occupant coming back,” said Sally Lapides, president of Residential Properties in Providence. “That first-time homebuyer is loving the idea of owning a multiunit house and, instead of feeling isolated, having a little community they are creating.”
But with rents over $1,000 per month and sale prices below $200,000, Driver said the most attractive factor right now about three-deckers is financial.
“The numbers are amazing,” Driver said. “With the rent, you can almost live for free.” •

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