A Home For The Liberal Ideal
A taste of Nathaniel Pettit ‘20’s enlightening thesis exploring a principal cause of Providence’s housing crisis: Brown University.
“On a brisk, Providence, Rhode Island winter night, I sat with Larry on a covered bench in Kennedy Plaza, the city’s main public transportation hub. As Larry and I talked, I became more and more aware of the night’s bitter cold: my toes started to tingle, and my hands, pressed against the metallic bench, started to go numb. From my vantage point in Kennedy Plaza, I could see in
the near distance the warm lights of Providence’s East Side — the home to my university, Brown University. With a quick, ten-minute walk east, over the Providence River and up College Hill, I could be back on campus and in my dormitory. As Larry spoke again, I refocused my attention. Allowing my mind to wander to thoughts of my warm bed was inappropriate, I reminded myself,
for like thousands of Rhode Islanders that night, Larry would not be returning home to a warm bed of his own. Instead, he would sleep outside, seeking refuge from the elements in a sleeping bag, under a pavilion near the river.
That night, I sat with Larry in my capacity as a nighttime outreach worker with Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, or HOPE, the student-run homelessness direct service and advocacy organization at Brown. For more than fifteen years, HOPE undergraduates have fought to end homelessness in Rhode Island through partnership with many of the state’s homelessness service providers, political activists, and individuals with lived experience. Through HOPE’s political advocacy work, students strive to elevate the issues of housing and homelessness in Rhode Island while supporting the passage of legislation to expand the state’s affordable housing opportunities. Through the organization’s direct service work, students seek to make life on the
streets ever-so-slightly more bearable for people experiencing homelessness — distributing things like hats and gloves, granola bars, and bus tickets. However, our true goal is something bigger, something infinitely more challenging to achieve: to walk alongside our unhoused neighbors in solidarity as they seek stable, affordable homes.
In HOPE, we often talk about what it means to have a home. Homes are places where we nourish our bodies, our minds, and our souls; they are places we share with those we love most in this world; they are places where we are free to be our truest self. Our homes are the foundations upon which we build the rest of our lives. In Kennedy Plaza that night, Larry shared with me the many places he had called home, but the East Side was his first. He was born there,
he said, pointing up College Hill, in the direction of my campus. Larry had lived amongst members of the Brown community, he said,
“until they expanded and pushed us out.”
HOPE’s mission, Larry continued, was well and good. But how, he wondered aloud, did HOPE, as a collection of Brown undergraduates, reckon with the tremendous burden that students like us put on the Providence housing market? What did we think of the significant role that our university played in displacing the working-class communities that had once existed at the edges of Brown’s campus? How, Larry asked, could we as Brown community members ever truly be a part of the solution to Providence’s housing crisis when we were also a part of the problem?
Upon my arrival to Providence as a Brown first-year in 2016, I assumed — like the great majority of my peers — that the East Side had always been an enclave of wealth and whiteness in an otherwise predominantly low-income, non-white city. The East Side is adorned with streets that project power and privilege — streets like Benefit Street, home to the city’s impressive collection of colonial-era mansions, and Wickenden Street, a hip retail strip brimming with trendy coffee shops and boutiques. Indeed, contemporary demographic and housing data seemed to support my presumption. In 2018, the East Side’s median household income, $64,447, was more than double that of the rest of the city. Meanwhile, the East Side’s median single-family home price, at $570,000, was more than triple that of the rest of the city. I struggled to imagine how Brown’s campus — with its stately mélange of Georgian and Federalist buildings, many dating back to the nation’s founding — could have ever been surrounded by anything but communities of power and privilege. And yet, Larry said otherwise, and as this thesis will demonstrate, he was correct.
A few short decades ago, working-class communities, immigrant communities, and communities of color abutted Brown’s East Side campus. These communities offered some of Providence’s most affordable housing opportunities, opportunities that served people of modest means like Larry’s family. Within East Side neighborhoods to Brown’s north and south, these communities laid down their roots, providing inclusive safety nets and springboards for newly-arrived émigrés, racial and ethnic minorities, and low-income Rhode Islanders. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, a complex array of forces — including historic preservation
and urban renewal — collided to uproot and displace many of those communities from the East Side. But, as Larry suggested on that brisk night of outreach, there was a third force: Brown University expansion. This thesis is the story of that force.”
Read the full thesis here.
