Over the last twenty years, rapid redevelopment in the Elmhurst, Smith Hill and Wanskuck neighborhoods abutting Providence College has turned the 02908 zip code between Smith and Admiral Streets into a hotbed of investor-owned housing that caters to students. A 2025 map created by PPS reveals the scale of institutional ownership in these neighborhoods, showing that 258 parcels in the immediate vicinity of the campus are now owned by a handful of landlords and developers.
In the fall of 2024, Providence College (PC) had a student body of 4,494 undergraduate students, but on-campus dorms to house a little over 3,200 students, leaving close to a thousand students to find housing in the surrounding area. Between 2012 and 2024, PC built ten new academic and recreational buildings and only one dormitory (however, they also demolished a dorm during this period). Their most recent Master Plan envisions one new residence hall. Anecdotal reports also suggest that not all of the students living in this area are PC students, rather some attend other colleges in the city.
For Wanskuck resident Abby Brennan, the issue is personal. She says “I was a college student who benefited from off-campus housing, which allowed me to fall in love with Providence and eventually choose to make my permanent home here. So this isn’t a simple issue for me. But what is simple is that I can see, in real time, the way these corporations are buying up large amounts of single-family properties, jacking up rents, and zapping [the] character from North End neighborhoods. Losing affordable single-family properties is detrimental to our community.”
Block-long stretches of some streets — including Eaton Street, Pinehurst Avenue, Pembroke Avenue, Liege Street, and Oakland Avenue — are entirely or almost entirely owned by investors. On a cluster of two streets in Wanskuck – Liege Street and Venice Street, located on the eastern border of PC’s campus – four permits for the demolition of single-family homes within steps of each other were approved in 2023 and 2024, three of which were submitted by the same company.
The nine real estate companies that own the 258 parcels that were mapped include The 02908 Club and Amicus Properties (132), Strive (69), Green Light Investment LLC (11), D&D Realty Management LLC (13), Big Dreamz LLC (9), Veritas Holding LLC (3), Sheldon E. Schwartz (10), SHA Investments LLC (5), and Federal Hill Capital LLC (6).
All of the streets impacted by the wave of redevelopment and targeted demolition are in Rhode Island Health Equity Zones, and most of them are in a Justice40 tract, which identifies them by the federal government as an under-resourced neighborhood. About thirty of the homes are part of the Oakland Avenue National Historic District, designated in 1984, with two- and three-family homes dating between 1890 and 1930.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Providence’s population was booming, these neighborhoods provided affordable housing options in two- and three-family homes, many of them triple-deckers. While in most cases, the original structures remain, the generational communities that made lives here are being displaced rapidly. Some states are considering measures to limit investor ownership of housing to address the housing affordability crisis in contexts like this, of hyper-local real estate monopolies.
PPS Action Items in 2025:
- Continue to report on and map the rapid redevelopment and encroachment of investor ownership of the neighborhoods surrounding PC, as well as PC’s action or inaction, to inform the public and concerned community members of the extent of student-driven housing pressure in 02908 and its impacts on long-time residents.
- Add new research about the neighborhoods impacted by this targeted redevelopment to PPS’s online Guide to Providence Architecture to better inform the public and community members about the history and cultural vitality of these 19th- and early 20th-century neighborhoods.
- Advocate for policies that target this scale of investor ownership of Providence’s housing stock in order to curb the rise in rents in these areas, support first-time home buyers, and limit hyper-local real estate monopolies.
Editorial Note: This article was initially published on Providence Preservation Society’s website as part of its annual list of Most Endangered Places (MEP). For the full list, visit here. For further reporting on “The Studentification of Wanskuck,” read here.
Additional reporting by The Providence Eye.
Marisa Angell Brown is the Executive Director of the Providence Preservation Society and Katy Pickens is the Providence Preservation Society Planning & Development Writer
