Real estate expert: ‘We need to build up’
Roger Williams educator says R.I. could build smarter to balance its environmental and housing needs
The real estate industry is facing powerful forces: rising interest rates, near-empty commercial spaces that once held offices, inflation in material and labor costs, and shortages of housing for every income level.
For Richard Godfrey, the executive director of the Roger Williams University Cummings Institute for Real Estate, these challenges present an opportunity to abandon the “businessas-usual” philosophy, and reimagine what development, investment, and reuses might look like in the future.
Q: What is the Cummings Institute for Real Estate, and how is it thinking about “real estate” programs differently?
Godfrey: The Institute is a curriculum program that combines architecture, preservation, construction management, engineering, business, law, public administration and leadership, humanities, and science. Real estate often is a focus of just buying and selling real estate or the financing of development. We’re taking a much more holistic approach and saying real estate is the intersection of the building in the natural environment, and we need to manage that intersection in a way that promotes a better future.
So this isn’t where students go to obtain a real estate license.
Real estate licenses just touch on the buying and selling [of ] homes. Real estate is broad, and makes up 17 percent of the overall economy and about 40 percent of the factors in the consumer price index. Real estate is everywhere we live, work, and play. People don’t think about it that way, and a lot of things are taken for granted.
But why was an entire institute in academia needed, and particularly in Rhode Island?
Rhode Island is one of the most densely populated states, and we have one of the highest percentages of coastlines. We don’t have that much room to grow, and there are many competing needs that we need to balance. Taking a traditional development approach — where a builder buys a big piece of property, proposes a project, and fights their way through the zoning to come up with a compromise — that may not be in the best interest of anyone.
We need to have education center around balancing the needs of open space, the needs of climate change and sea level rise, the needs of lower-income families versus higher-income families, the corporations who are buying up property. If everyone makes those decisions on their own in a silo, we come up to probably the least helpful solution.
The Institute is hosting its second annual Real Estate Symposium on April 25 in Providence. What can people expect if they attend?
We’re presenting a global view of the industry. Phil Mobley from CoStar is going to provide an overall market analysis of what’s happening in real estate right now. And we’ll be focused on three critical sectors: changing office markets, retail sector, and the affordable housing and residential sector.
What challenges do you think real estate and development in Rhode Island and New England face in particular — outside of the issues seen on a national level?
The lack of available land and the fact that we are already highly developed. In other areas of the country, they are able to build further and further out. In New England, Boston has sprawled into Providence and Worcester. In Maine, some of the fastest growing communities are Lewiston and Auburn, which used to be these abandoned industrial towns.
Across the US, there’s a lack of affordable housing. Even developers who are purely profit driven cannot ignore the social and land use issues that we’re facing today.
Where do you see opportunities to build smarter?
I definitely think we need to build up more. Providence, I believe, has far better assets than some other, smaller cities around New England. But we could reuse our commercial districts better. There’s so many places where we could go up three or four stories right now, but we’re busy just wasting time with one-story buildings.
The R.I. Department of Housing is currently contracting the New York University Furman Institute to help with some consulting work. Have you offered the agency assistance so they can keep work in-state?
The Furman Institute has been around for a long time and is one of the nation’s leaders. But we have a lot of expertise at Roger Williams, including HousingWorks R.I. There are limited roles that we have right now, but we’re looking to expand those all the time.