RI+URBlog

End Parking Subsidies!

The Rhode Island legislature, showing its great capacity for procrastination, is scrambling like mad to pass a whole bunch of stuff before the current session ends. One bill that passed the Senate yesterday among the flurry was a new requirement for state businesses who subsidize their employees parking costs to offer RIPTA passes in lieu of paying their garage bills. Someone on Smith Hill is obviously reading the URBlog.

Sounds like a good plan to me. Will it work? I don't know, but it's worth a shot. Preferably there would be a support program to go along with it, to highlight the many benefits of bus commuting over highway traffic and to maybe convince suburban white folks that buses aren't nearly as scary as they think.

Tax Credit Moratorium?

The Historic Tax Credit program, which I linked to a while back, may be put on a one-year hiatus to examine its cost-benefit ratio. This program creates financial incentives to developers who wish to renovate or redevelop historic buildings in RI, and often provides the margin which turns an economically impossible project into reality. Debate on the moratorium, suggested by the State House Finance Committee, should take place this week.

[T]he state has given out many more tax credits than lawmakers anticipated when they established the program, said House Finance Committee Chairman Steven Costantino, D-Providence. "It grew bigger than we expected," he said.

Costantino said the moratorium would give lawmakers time to analyze whether the state is indeed achieving the golden returns on the credits that developers have predicted.

Costantino said the moratorium would last one year and would not affect the dozens of development projects that have already applied for the credits.

When former Gov. Lincoln Almond signed the credits into law in 2001, state officials predicted it would cost the state $16 million in income taxes over five years.

The state now plans to give out an estimated $134 million in credits over six years.

I imagine even with the greater-than-expected popularity of the program the economics make sense, and that's to say nothing of the non-quantifiable effects of having booming urban redevelopment. The tax credits have already made possible the conversion of the Masonic Temple to a hotel, the Rising Sun Mills project in Olneyville, the Royal Mills Project in West Warwick and the critical-mass breaking Peerless Building project Downcity.

Grow Smart RI has sent out a legislative alert asking concerned citizens to contact their legislators and the Governor (who does not support the moratorium). They cite a preliminary report that shows for each tax credit dollar spent, $5 is pumped into the local economy in the construction phase alone. They show $21 million in revenue returns to the state before factoring in long-term economic benefits (and, they point out, this $21M comes in before the credits are even eligible to be redeemed).

The Urblog can't quibble with making sure the program is economically sound, but we suggest a cap on next years tax credits rather than a moratorium (if well enough can't be left alone while studying the issue). The momentum generated by these credits should not be brought to a halt. Governor Carcieri has the right idea in saying that there's only so many qualifying projects out there, let's not be too drastic.

UPDATE: "House leaders agreed yesterday to drop a proposed moratorium on historic preservation tax credits." Excellent!

RIurblog.com?

Financial considerations were behind my decision to host the URBlog on bilherron.com. However, I think it's deserving of its own URL, so off to networksolutions.com I go to check domain name availability. www.RIurblog.com is available, but I wanted to ask if that's the best URL to get. Is it easy enough to say/spell/remember? I want to make stickers, will RIurblog.com be readable? Thoughts?

Also, if you want to see some internet magic, type www.livelyexperiment.com into your browser and see what happens.

UPDATE: bought and paid for. You can now enter www.RIurblog.com into your browser and get redirected here. Tell your friends!

PPS Historic Homes Tour

Last weekend we braved a (totally wrong) forecast of bad weather to hit the Benefit Street half of the Providence Preservation Society's Festival of Historic Homes. The turnout looked pretty good for PPS's biggest fundraiser, and the homes were a treat.

The next day there was a similar event in the Elmwood neighborhood, showcasing some of the impressive Victorian buildings on the West Side. We didn't get to go to that one.

The tour featured two houses for sale, so if anyone has $800,000 sitting around, you can a nice old place on Benefit Street. We were content to dream, for now. After we finished the walk, which included a couple urban gardens, Providence's oldest house, and a walk up one of the city's few row houses, we walked over to Whole Foods for a quick snack, then caught a talk given by William McKenzie Woodward, author of the must-have PPS/AIAri Guide to Providence Architecture. Despite his fondness for some awful modernist buildings, Mack Woodward is great to listen to. Definitely a good time.

Unbuilt Providence

I should really be posting this stuff before they go away, so I apologize for not mentioning "Unbuilt Providence", an exhibit put together at Brown showcasing 15 buildings/projects conceived but never executed downtown, sooner. Sorry.

So anyway, the exhibit closed May 31st, the day after I got back to RI. Em and I went that day, competing for parking with graduating Brown students and their families. The exhibit was empty, so we had the place to ourselves.

The pieces were arranged chronologically, from the 1850s Merchants' Exchange building to the 1999 original plan for parcel 9 in Capital Center. I won't go into each project, since the accompanying artwork would be necessary, but there were some very interesting ideas, most of which I am glad ended up on the scrap heap. Including:

The Hospital Trust Tower (the white, rectangular member of Providence's skyline trio) was originally concieved as a futuristic tower by Paul Rudolph which I found especially unsettling. Another tower proposed for the land fronting on Kennedy Plaza was Raymond Hood's New Providence Courthouse from 1916 (sorry, no pic). This structure would have been a magnificent complement to the State House, but would have changed the face of downtown dramatically in the years to come (the Industrial Bank Building went up on that site a few years later).

There were more drawings from the Plan for Downtown Providence, 1970 which I had never seen before (this cringe-inducing image being all I had seen of the project). Downtown Providence 1970 (conceived in 1960) could have almost single handedly destroyed everything that makes Providence special, so we should all thank God, Jesus, Allah, Yaweh or President Reagan that it went mostly unrealized.

An early watercolor from the River Relocation Project of the mid-1980s also captured my imagination. On the site of the Citizens Bank Building William Warner had envisioned a European-style piazza and dense, stylistically-coherent buildings surrounding it (he also managed to make the Moshassuck four times wider and boat navigable!) It's very beautiful.

Em unintentionally stole the display copy (it was the last day, I don't think anyone will miss it) of the exhibit magazine, so perhaps I'll be able to scan it in and make it available.

Anyone else get to go? I promise in the future I'll be better about posting this stuff beforehand...

College Hill Bookstore to Close

Ladies and Gentlemen, a look at Thayer St, 2020:

The College Hill Bookstore, a fixture on Providence's (formerly?) funkiest thoroughfare, will close shop in two months. The owner cites big box bookstores and internet sites for declining revenues.

I'm pretty sure I don't need to explain why this is bad news for Providence, but really, wasn't this inevitible? In Your Ear records, another Thayer Street institution closed recently. One of the newest eateries on the strip is from the Johnny Rockets chain. There's already a Starbucks. A Gap store. With two pillars of local culture (books and music) going or gone, can the Avon be far behind? Of course not, but then I would have said no way would the College Hill Bookstore would close either.

The suburbanization of Providence continues...

Back!

Hey everyone, we're back!

I know I am extremely biased, but after a trip through St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Detroit, I am more appreciative of Providence than ever. We were lucky enough to get to stay downtown in each city, and we did a lot of walking (except in Detroit, which, if you've ever been there you might know why).

But anyway, I should be settled in soon and we'll have regular postings again. I know my list of topics to post is growing! If anyone has any interesting stuff that should be posted here from the past 2 weeks, please use the contact link to the right to tell me about it. I've been really out of the loop. Thanks!