On a frigid early Sunday morning, a fire blazed through three blighted Olneyville homes, displacing 23 people and claiming the life of one resident. Located in one of Providence’s poorest neighborhoods, the leveled lot remained vacant for three years—a scar of neglect in a city desperate for housing. Yet, where traditional development stalled, One Neighborhood Builders saw an opportunity. Reclaiming the site for affordable housing, the nonprofit embraced modular construction to bypass the industry’s notorious delays. Eight apartments were assembled in just three months at 20 percent below the standard construction costs. Low-income and unhoused families moved into the affordable homes in a fraction of the time that traditional construction would have taken.
Unfortunately, the successful redevelopment of neglected property is a rare story in the Ocean State. Rhode Island has produced the least amount of housing in the nation, permitting only 4,562 new homes between 2020 and 2024 despite suffering from a crippling 24,000-rental unit shortage for extremely low-income households. This scarcity has imposed heavy burdens on low- and middle-income families who are increasingly cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing and rent. The outlook remains grim, with only 922 new units constructed between May 2023 and May 2025, amounting to a meager 0.2 percent increase in the state’s housing stock.
The cost of developing affordable housing and the navigation of restrictive zoning are slowing the construction of new homes. Across the board, housing costs have risen by an unprecedented 60 percent since 2018, disincentivizing developers from taking on small housing projects and affordable developments. The bulk of the heightened cost is derived from the acquisition of land that eats away 45 percent of the total house price compared to the lower national average of 34 percent. Beyond the sticker shock, developers face bureaucratic red tape nightmares from continuous delays in obtaining a permit, taking an average of two to three years before ground is even broken. Developers are constrained by zoning laws that disproportionately favor single-family homes through by-right legislation in 87 percent of residentially zoned areas.
Traditional on-site construction has proven incapable of meeting the urgency of Rhode Island’s affordable housing crisis. By mitigating weather-related delays and labor and transportation inefficiencies, modular housing construction spends 90 percent of the time building off-site housing modules in a controlled factory setting before transporting the developed components to the construction site. The compartmentalized construction method cuts project time in half, reduces waste, and improves work safety with a 65 percent smaller carbon footprint compared to traditional construction methods. By employing sustainable materials and precision engineering, modular construction overcomes the industry’s primary barrier—cost—delivering high-quality housing in a fraction of the time.
While panelized assembly offers a technological lifeline to affordable housing construction, single-family zoning laws create restrictive, bureaucratic schemes that disincentivize the necessary construction of multi-family homes. Duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes introduce varied housing structures at affordable price ranges for young professionals, families, and seniors who have different needs and desires. Multi-family homes allow for lower per-unit maintenance costs, easier financing options, and more affordable property management. Unlike archaic single-family zoning regimes, multi-family by-right zoning would allow modular developers to maximize their efficiency, using expedited permitting to deliver duplexes and fourplexes across the state to tackle the cost-burden facing a third of the state’s residents.
Modular multi-family housing construction is not the fantasy of policy briefs, but a realistic future that Rhode Island policymakers can turn into a new, budding industry. One Neighborhood Builders is leading by example with the multi-family apartments constructed over the burned, dilapidated houses in Olneyville, as well as a new project in Sheridan Village to deliver 20 affordable condominium apartments across six buildings. The momentum drummed up by One Neighborhood Builders would advance to rapid scaling of affordable housing through the development of an in-house modular factory in Rhode Island, reducing the prohibitive transportation costs from out-of-state providers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania.
Across the pond in Sweden, IKEA, the Swedish furniture manufacturer, and Skanska, a multinational construction and development company based in Sweden, developed BoKlok as a joint venture, putting proof into practice for modular housing. BoKlok has created a fleet of pre-designed modular homes that individuals can order, cutting construction time and construction carbon footprint in half compared to traditionally built homes. The variety of multi-family housing options from BoKlok are completed 90 percent in the factory, reducing the number of site deliveries by 75 percent and overall transport movements by 50 percent. The model has proven successful in private and public-private financing partnerships, delivering over 15,000 housing units across Sweden and the United Kingdom. Rhode Island lawmakers can take a page out of BoKlok’s playbook to fund a Rhode Island factory to deliver modular housing designs that take advantage of adjustments favorable for multi-family housing development.
While the current housing landscape appears as bleak as the New England winter, modular housing construction presents a blinding beam of sunshine to spur development into high gear to cover the affordable housing gap plaguing the state. The Rhode Island General Assembly should create a Rhode Island Modular Housing Commission composed of relevant state agencies, academics, and developers to establish a standardized building code for modular housing construction and recommend feasible steps towards financing a public-private factory venture. The newly formed modular housing factory will be able to take advantage of new legislation that establishes multi-family housing by-right zoning in all areas currently zoned for single-family residences. Existing grant programs through RIHousing should also incentivize the use of the new factory to build panelized housing units across the state, improving the cost-effectiveness of state expenditures while delivering more units for Rhode Islanders to live in. The combined benefits of reduced construction costs and quick completion timelines will produce a steady demand for modular housing units to keep the factory in business while outputting affordable housing units across the state to tackle the affordability crisis.
With the challenges of rising mortgage payments and monthly rent checks, the ashes of traditional housing construction can rise into the phoenix of modular construction design that delivers fast, affordable units for Rhode Island’s low-income and homeless population. The residents of One Neighborhood Builders’ Olneyville modular multi-family home know this story to be true, delivering the needed respite from the mounting pressures of modern life. Rhode Island legislators need to rise up from the scorched housing permitting and construction process to build a new future forward through modular housing that incentivizes rapid development of affordable multi-family homes for the Ocean State.