How Four Rhode Islanders Are Navigating Homelessness

Illustration by Brendan Totten

Editor’s note: This article has been updated from the version that appeared in the December 2024 print issue to reflect the appointment of Deborah J. Goddard as Rhode Island Secretary of Housing effective Dec. 2.

For André Biggs, the trouble started when he was overseas.

A native of New Bedford, Biggs attended school in the city and enlisted in the U.S. Army at eighteen. He served a yearlong tour in Afghanistan, where he was injured in an accident. After he returned stateside in 2012, a doctor prescribed painkillers to help with the injury. The pills soon turned into other substances, and he found himself in a vicious cycle of using and trying to blunt the pain. Coupled with post-traumatic stress disorder he picked up during his military service, the rough lifestyle led to homelessness as he bounced between different living arrangements.

“The drugs come with the mental health because you’re trying to block it out. And then you can’t get better because you’re scared to relive it,” he says.

For the next decade, he struggled to find help. On several occasions, he joined recovery programs for individuals with substance use, but none of them stuck. Many programs, he says, offer nowhere for participants to live when they complete the program, so he ended up back on the streets or couch surfing. He also had several brushes with the law, including one incident when he was accused of stealing a van from Boston Children’s Hospital while his newborn daughter was receiving treatment. (Biggs eventually pled guilty to receiving stolen property and driving to endanger and served a year’s probation.)

As a disabled veteran, he receives disability payments that should be enough to afford an apartment. But he can’t find a landlord who will rent to him with his criminal record.

“I tried for two years to get an apartment. My girlfriend and I, we could not get one,” he says.

For most of the past two years, he and his fiancee have lived outside in a tent in the Providence area. In August, he entered a recovery program run by Amos House for homeless men with a history of substance use. For ninety days, participants attend rigorous classes, receive one-on-one counseling and live in a shelter with nineteen other men. It’s Biggs’ third time in the program after relapsing on two previous occasions. This time, though, he wants things to be different. He’s applying for a cybersecurity program at Southern New Hampshire University in the hopes of starting classes for his associate degree in January. He also hopes to move into permanent supportive housing with Amos House when he completes the program — somewhere his two daughters, ages two and nine, can visit and spend time with him.

“We need more places like this. More recovery places where we can get help to start a new life,” he says.

Biggs’ goals are as unique as his story. But he’s far from alone in his experiences with homelessness. As of last January, 2,442 Rhode Islanders were experiencing homelessness, according to the Point-in-Time Count — a comprehensive count coordinated by the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness each year. Since 2020, the number has increased 121 percent. Even larger is the increase in unsheltered individuals, or those living outside. According to the count, 534 individuals were unsheltered in January 2024, up from 108 in 2020, a 394 percent increase.

“The reality is we are watching people die. Homelessness is fatal.” —Michelle Taylor, vice president of social health services for Community Care Alliance

Providers warn the situation is becoming unmanageable, and the extra resources devoted to the issue since the pandemic have done little to stanch the flow of newly homeless people into an already overburdened system. Michelle Taylor, vice president of social health services for Community Care Alliance — a social services provider in Woonsocket — says the system is stretched to capacity.

“We are seeing homelessness at a level that has never been seen before in the state,” she says. “We have so many people in shelters, and the shelter length of stay is so long right now because there’s no place for people to go.”

And homelessness, she points out, often leads to death. Data shows that homeless individuals are 60 percent more likely to die than the general population — making the agency’s services, for some, their last hope.

“The reality is we are watching people die,” she says. “Homelessness is fatal.”

NAVIGATING THE MAZE

It’s not yet noon on a Sunday in June, and the sun is already beating down on Bouley Field in Woonsocket, where dozens gather in the parking lot for a hot meal.

Graphic icons: Getty Images/ Appleuzr and Denkcreative.

Christa Thomas-Sowers, the director of community outreach and overdose prevention for Community Care Alliance, raises the hatchback on her SUV. Inside, supplies sit in neatly stacked rows — ponchos, lip balm, needles, fentanyl test strips, tampons, Narcan. A man reaches the front of the line forming at her vehicle and asks for one of everything.

“Hello, love,” he greets her.

“What do you need?”

“Whatever you can give.”

Across the parking lot, volunteers from MAE Organization for the Homeless serve a pasta lunch. The weekly outreach program, one of six the organization offers around the state, serves close to 150 people every Sunday. Thomas-Sowers, whose job focuses primarily on harm reduction for individuals with substance use, began visiting the meal site during the pandemic to distribute supplies. Since then, the lines have only grown.

“It seems like every month it’s getting worse and there’s more and more people and not enough help,” she says, surveying the crowd streaming into the parking lot. “The work I’m supposed to be doing is harm reduction, and we’re just drowning in housing stuff.”

One of her regular visitors, a woman named Cristy, approaches in jeans and a white T-shirt. Born in Rhode Island, Cristy — whose last name, like many of those interviewed for this story, has been withheld at her request — moved around frequently as a child. She dropped out of high school and later earned her GED, giving birth to her first child at twenty-one. She’s never been into drugs or alcohol, she says, owing in part to her turbulent upbringing and the havoc it wreaked on her family.

“Addiction runs in my family, so I try to stay away from all of that,” she says.

Now forty-nine, she’s been homeless several times over the years. The latest stretch started two years ago, when she was renting a home in Connecticut near her younger son. Even with three jobs, she struggled to afford the $2,400 monthly rent. She bounced around at friends’ houses and in shelters before finding herself on the Dignity Bus, a mobile emergency shelter purchased by Woonsocket last year. The city engaged Community Care Alliance to operate the twenty-bed shelter from December 2023 until this May, when a funding shortage shut it down abruptly over Memorial Day weekend.

To the uninitiated, Rhode Island’s homeless response system can seem like an inextricable maze. In 2018, the state implemented a Coordinated Entry System mandated by federal policy to coordinate resources and prioritize households for placement in emergency shelters. Individuals call a hotline managed by the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness or get connected through a service provider, then are assessed according to their vulnerability and placed on a waitlist. As of Oct. 1, 1,055 people were on the waitlist, including 114 households with children. The average time people had been on the list was 36.3 days. To remain on the list, people must have contact with the system at least once a month. There’s no guarantee an available shelter option will be in their region, though a new policy established in 2023 allows shelters to set aside beds for local families or individuals.

Though she’s been on various affordable housing waitlists since 2017, Cristy has been unable to find long-term housing and relies on the Coordinated Entry System to secure temporary placements. When the Dignity Bus closed, she was placed at a Motel 6 operating as a shelter in Warwick. She later moved to a family shelter run by CCA in Woonsocket, where she shares a bedroom with another woman. In some ways, the location is ideal — one of her sons, who has autism, lives at a group home nearby — but the stress of communal living adds to her daily challenges as she searches for a place of her own. 

She once dreamed of a little green house by the ocean where she could open a home decor business, but lately she’s set her sights lower and is exploring the idea of returning to Connecticut or living in a van. As of October, she thought it unlikely she would find a permanent place to live in Rhode Island.

“It’s not realistic to think about being in an actual physical house,” she says.

A PREVENTABLE CRISIS

Rhode Island’s homelessness crisis is several decades in the making. Most experts date the modern era of homelessness around the country to the 1980s, when a series of policy and demographic shifts resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of homeless individuals — from about 125,000 people nationwide in 1980 to more than 400,000 a decade later, according to leading estimates.

“There really wasn’t a homelessness crisis prior to the late 1980s,” says Eric Hirsch, a professor of sociology at Providence College who also serves as interim director of the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project.

Hirsch points to the rise of income inequality under policies enacted during the Reagan administration as a major contributor to the increase in homelessness. The weakening of traditional safety net programs such as food assistance and unemployment benefits, coupled with the loss of public housing funding, meant families were more vulnerable to the effects of economic downturn.

Graphic icons: Getty Images/ Appleuzr and Denkcreative.

A decade earlier, in 1974, Congress had created the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as Section 8, to provide federal rental subsidies to low-income individuals. Over time, the program effectively shifted the burden of creating and managing low-income housing from the federal government to private landlords and developers. The system offered little incentive for landlords to participate during a housing shortage. According to the 2023 rent survey conducted by RIHousing — a quasi-public agency that administers affordable housing programs for the state — Rhode Island’s rental vacancy rate stood at 2.7 percent in 2023. The number is a slight increase over the previous two years, but far below the 6 to 7 percent considered healthy in a competitive rental market.

“There were landlords who were willing to accept those [vouchers] in Rhode Island until the rental market got as hot as it did. And now, why should they do it?” Hirsch says. “Our whole system is based on a model where the key resource is missing.”

Like income inequality, Rhode Island’s housing shortage has a lengthy history. Brenda Clement, director of HousingWorks RI at Roger Williams University, points to a lack of production dating back to the 1990s as the source of the problem. During the housing boom of the ’80s, Rhode Island issued more than 7,000 building permits per year. Since the ’90s, however, that number has hovered far lower, with fewer than 1,200 building permits issued in 2023. And it does not appear to be improving: A 2023 report by industry website Construction Coverage found Rhode Island had the fewest new home builds per capita of any state in the country.

The result is a state where more than a third of residents are cost-burdened, or spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. The average monthly cost of a two-bedroom apartment in Rhode Island was $1,887 in 2023, according to RIHousing data. That means someone with an income of $45,560 can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment in just one municipality, Burrillville, according to data from Housing Works RI. Meanwhile, a household earning the state’s median income of $81,370 cannot afford to buy a median-priced house anywhere in the state.

“We’ve always had the need,” Clement says. “The need is not new. But the political awareness of it, the fact that it’s creeped up to a much higher-income individual, and more of a middle-income individual also struggling with housing costs and housing burden numbers, is making it more of an issue that people are paying attention to.”

Melina Lodge, executive director of the housing advocacy group Housing Network of Rhode Island, compares the situation to a game of musical chairs.

“Numerically, we just lack the number of housing units in this state that we need to house people,” she says.

The state has set aside $244.7 million to construct new affordable housing since 2021, according to a report released by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council in October. Those funds supported the construction of 1,515 new housing units, most of them for low- or very low-income households. Combined with the number of new units expected from this year’s state housing bond, those units would deliver only 8 percent of the estimated 26,351 new units needed to close the affordable housing gap in the state. The report further recommends investing in more middle-income housing to maximize the use of state funds.

“We’re not talking about a few people,” Lodge says. “We’re talking about most people.”

ENCAMPMENT ESCALATION

The bike path is quiet on a Tuesday morning in August, and passersby could almost miss the green tent pitched on the embankment if they didn’t know where to look.

Tripp McCreery, homeless outreach team lead for Warwick-based Thrive Behavioral Health, knows where to look. He parks his red Toyota Corolla across the street from a West Warwick access point to the Washington Secondary Bike Path and opens the hatchback. Like Thomas-Sowers, his trunk is filled with supplies, and he loads a bag with food, water, Narcan and trash bags before setting off down the path.

“Five to six years ago, West Warwick became this enormous hub for homelessness,” he explains as he walks.

McCreery and his team regularly check on close to 100 people living outside, trying to connect them with housing and other services. First on his list this morning are Linda and James, a mother-and-son duo who have been working with the agency since late last winter. The pair is awake when we arrive — James smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee from a disposable cup, Linda sitting patiently on her sleeping bag wearing a crucifix and a gray-and-white-striped shirt. McCreery hopes to find them an apartment, he explains, and is following leads in Pawtucket, Providence and Central Falls.

“I don’t care where we go,” James says.

“Just get [us] out of here,” Linda adds.

Linda, in her seventies, says they’ve been living outside since the winter. Both receive SNAP benefits, but two weeks into August, the funds have already run out. It’s difficult to cook at the campsite, she explains, and they prefer not to visit nearby meal sites.

“There’s too many wrong people doing drugs in there,” she says. “You’ve got to watch your stuff. They’ll steal from you.”

Graphic icons: Getty Images/ Appleuzr and Denkcreative.

Linda grew up partly in Germany, where her father was stationed as a cook in the United States Army. Later, the family moved to Rhode Island, and she attended Lineham School in West Greenwich and East Greenwich High School. Today, she and James both receive income in the form of disability payments, allowing Thrive staff to search for a market-rate apartment outside the backlogged voucher system. Thrive, like many agencies, follows a Housing First model that prioritizes housing without requiring clients to meet strict expectations. The model emerged in the ’90s alongside evidence that homeless individuals were more likely to succeed in resolving substance use or mental health challenges if they were first placed in housing, as opposed to the other way around.

“It’s unreasonable to ask somebody in these circumstances to manage it for themselves,” McCreery says.

Later, he visits an encampment by the Pawtuxet River, where at least a dozen tents are strung out along a wooded path. Unlike in some communities where encampments have been subject to raids, McCreery says the agency has had a generally positive relationship with West Warwick officials. Earlier this year, he says, public safety officials gave ample notice when several people needed to relocate from a site that had become a safety concern due to flooding. Elsewhere, the relationship is more contentious. In May, Providence officials faced criticism from advocates and service providers when they ordered residents to clear out of two homeless encampments. Emily Mendes, director of outreach for House of Hope CDC, told Rhode Island Monthly in September the agency had still not reestablished contact with all of its clients who were living at the sites.

“You’re disrupting and disconnecting a community that was taking care of each other,” she says.

In addition to a general lack of shelter beds, Mendes shares that many clients prefer sleeping outside over large, congregate shelters, with some likening traditional shelters to jail. In some cases, couples are forced to split up in individual men’s and women’s shelters. In others, individuals have pets, are unable to comply with policies requiring them to be sober or have past traumatic experiences in shared living environments.

Last January, the state announced a possible solution in the form of forty-five rapidly deployable shelters manufactured by Pallet to be assembled on state land near Route 146 in Providence. ECHO Village, which is managed by House of Hope, consists of
climate-controlled, seventy-square-foot sleeping units with a bathroom, showers, laundry and community space nearby. Since its deployment in the spring, however, the village has been mired in regulatory red tape. State officials ordered the shelters to be equipped with additional fire safety features, delaying the project’s opening date. As of October, the shelters had still not been occupied, though House of Hope Executive Director Laura Jaworski said she was hopeful they would be up and running by the end of the year.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley’s office responded to a request for an interview for this story with a series of written responses. Upon learning of an encampment, the city’s Housing Resources Coordinator communicates with outreach teams to explore alternative housing options as well as provide harm reduction and recovery services as needed, according to Josh Estrella, the mayor’s director of communications.

“We work closely with the emergency medical service teams to ensure comprehensive support for individuals in need at all hours of the day. This response was developed in order to ensure that individuals were provided all available resources the city has, prior to any relocation,” Estrella says.

Estrella also notes the city’s ongoing efforts to address the issue, including establishing a Housing and Human Services Department this past February. The city has devoted more than $55 million to develop and preserve affordable housing through its Housing Trust Fund, he says, along with an additional $6 million to expand shelter beds, including the forty-five Pallet shelters managed by House of Hope.

“We became one of the first municipalities in the state to adopt new zoning regulations that allow more housing development in every Providence neighborhood, including on smaller lots,” he says. 

In June, the United States Supreme Court ruled municipalities can enforce bans on sleeping in public spaces even when shelter space is not available, raising concerns among advocates about a crackdown on encampments. In August, Cranston Mayor Ken Hopkins issued an executive order allowing police to break up encampments on city property. Though House of Hope says the order did not lead to any immediate action against their clients, the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island questioned the legality of the order and its impact on residents.

“The key thing is that simply razing these encampments does nothing to solve the problem,” says ACLU Executive Director Steven Brown. “It may require the people who’ve been living there to move somewhere else, but it doesn’t address the underlying issue at all.”

“I started doing this work thirty years ago when we had a ten-year plan to end homelessness. And here we are thirty years later, and I see more people than I’ve ever seen.” —Russ Partridge, executive director of the WARM Center

A STATEWIDE EMERGENCY

While battles over homelessness policy have played out more quietly in other parts of the state, the issue is no less present. In Newport, Leah Voccio, housing director for Newport Mental Health, says she’s seeing large numbers of new people enter Aquidneck Island’s homeless population, including families and elderly people. While the island has always faced housing challenges due to its reliance on tourism, the population is transient, she says, and some individuals have traveled from other parts of the state.

“Statewide, there’s not enough shelter beds,” she says. “We have one [adult] shelter for the whole island, and we have people coming down from Providence and Woonsocket and Pawtucket.”

Voccio, who commutes from New Bedford, Massachusetts, and says she cannot afford to live on the island, points to the sparse availability of supportive housing with wraparound services for individuals struggling with mental health challenges or substance use. Many of her clients, she says, would qualify for these types of housing, but a backlog in the system keeps current residents from moving on.

Staff at Westerly’s WARM Center also report a recent uptick in homelessness among elderly people and individuals on a fixed income. As of August, the center housed 156 people in its shelters and apartments, compared with about eighty prior to the pandemic. This includes a family shelter that opened last February as a seasonal shelter but remained open through the summer due to demand. Like Newport, the area faces unique challenges related to tourism and a scarcity of public transportation connecting it to the rest of the state.

“I started doing this work thirty years ago when we had a ten-year plan to end homelessness,” says Executive Director Russ Partridge. “And here we are thirty years later, and I see more people than I’ve ever seen.”

FINDING SOLUTIONS

This past August, as the thunder of footsteps races down the hall toward the scent of pizza, it’s hard to believe the Charlesgate building on Randall Street in Providence was ever a nursing home.

Kids dive in eagerly to the cheesy treat and accompanying sundaes, while in the next room over, those with more patience sit quietly for a team of volunteer barbers delivering sleek cuts and glittery hair extensions. A gaggle of princesses holds court at the play area in the corner, and kids browse the selection of backpacks, looking for just the right accessory for the new school year.

“It’s organized chaos on any given day here,” observes Jessica Salter, chief philanthropy and communications officer for Amos House.

The facility has served as an emergency family shelter since June 2023, when Amos House began managing several floors of the former nursing home. The shelter had capacity for fifty-seven families as of August, and rarely has vacancies, according to Salter and shelter manager Tiondra Rollins.

“I get calls at least twice a day of families looking for shelter,” Rollins says.

On Aug. 26, the shelter hosted a back-to-school party for current and former residents. Among those joining in the festivities was Veronica, who until recently lived at the facility with her three children. In August, the family moved into a duplex managed by Crossroads Rhode Island as part of its permanent supportive housing. They spent nine months living at Charlesgate.

“We felt really welcomed,” Veronica says. “We had a roof over our heads and food in our belly, so we had all the necessities.”

The family’s journey to Rhode Island started in Florida, where Veronica was a victim of domestic violence. Worried she would face further abuse when her children’s father completed his prison sentence, she packed up the family last year and headed north, where she had an older son living in Massachusetts. The family lived at motels in North Smithfield and Woonsocket before moving into the shelter last fall.

“I always went back to him because he’s the dad, but I had to do this for me so I could be a good mom to these kids,” she says.

Graphic icons: Getty Images/ Appleuzr and Denkcreative.

All three of her children attend counseling, she explains, and one of them sees a pediatric psychiatrist for ADHD. While staying at the shelter, the family of four shared one bedroom and split a bathroom with another family. In contrast, their new apartment — where she’s expected to pay 30 percent of her income toward rent — has three bedrooms and a finished basement, and even an outdoor space for the kids. Her favorite room is the kitchen, where she looks forward to teaching her children how to cook.

“We can finally get settled,” she says.

In October, the Rhode Island Department of Housing purchased Charlesgate, ensuring that Amos House can continue to manage its family shelter on the property. The $6.85 million investment was a significant step forward for the department, whose mission has been overshadowed by delays and personnel changes since its creation two years ago. After the General Assembly passed legislation formally establishing the Housing Department in 2022, Governor Dan McKee appointed Josh Saal — who had previously served as deputy secretary of commerce for housing — as the state’s inaugural housing secretary. Saal lasted just five months in the position before a series of missteps — including an incomplete housing report submitted to the General Assembly — forced him to resign.

In January 2023, McKee appointed former commerce secretary Stefan Pryor to serve as housing secretary. Pryor lasted eighteen months in the position before he, too, resigned, stepping aside this past July to pursue an opportunity in the private sector. On Nov. 21, McKee announced the appointment of the state’s third official housing secretary, Deborah J. Goddard. Goddard is a housing industry veteran who previously served as a consultant for the department, in addition to holding roles with the New York City Housing Authority, MassHousing and the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.

“I am very aware of the persistent headwinds that we face in this arena, but they are not unique to Rhode Island nor are they new,” Goddard said in a statement upon her appointment. “I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Department of Housing and sister agencies, with elected officials and partners throughout the public and private sectors, to achieve success despite the challenges.”

In October, a Housing Department spokesperson declined to set up an interview with the interim secretary for this story, instead answering questions about the department’s progress via email. The department has faced questions for its lack of staff, with sixteen of its thirty-eight full-time positions vacant as of October, according to chief of information and public relations Emily Marshall. Progress has also been slow on a state housing plan that will guide the department’s policy and budgetary goals over the next six years. In fall 2023, the state engaged Abt Associates (now Abt Global) to develop the plan, and has since launched an advisory group that will meet into early 2025. The process has included a survey and meetings with all thirty-nine municipalities, according to Marshall. The results will be developed into a Consolidated Plan with RIHousing and submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

With cold weather approaching, Marshall says the department’s priorities over the winter season include preventing homelessness using Housing Problem Solving — a strategy that bypasses traditional housing eligibility assessments — as well as maintaining existing shelter space and collaborating with other agencies. A RIEMA staff member, she says, will embed with the department through the winter to oversee the Municipal Homelessness Support Initiative, which uses State Fiscal Recovery Funds to support shelter space and emergency hubs hosted by municipalities. The department also plans to reconvene the Interagency Council on Homelessness — a committee that, according to the state’s public meetings dashboard, hasn’t met since 2017.

Ultimately, advocates say the only long-term solution to homelessness is to build more housing, including low-income housing and supportive housing for those with complex needs. In October, the state released a report commissioned from the NYU Furman Center exploring the idea of a public developer, a model used in other locations around the country. Funding for that model, if the state chooses to pursue it, could come from a recently approved $120 million housing bond, which includes $80 million earmarked for development and preservation of low- and moderate-income housing. The General Assembly has also taken action to spur private housing production by legalizing accessory dwelling units by right, among other reforms. The issue has been a signature priority for House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, who last year championed a package aimed at streamlining permitting and reducing zoning roadblocks to development.

“Rhode Island does not have enough housing supply to keep up with demand,” he said in a statement earlier this year. “Too many years of being dead last in the country for new housing permits have caught up with us.”

A PATH FORWARD

As falling leaves give way to falling temperatures, the conversation around homelessness in Rhode Island has taken on a sense of urgency, as it does every winter.

For several years, Hirsch and other advocates have called on McKee to declare a state of emergency around homelessness, potentially opening up further resources and pathways to establish shelters and permanent supportive housing. Under the current system, the Housing Department awards seasonal shelter contracts to address the greater need for shelter between November and April. Seasonal shelters last as long as the funding, and many residents find themselves back on the same streets come spring.

Within a seemingly inescapable system, there are glimmers of hope: In early October, Thrive Behavioral Health found a private landlord willing to rent an apartment to Linda and James, ending the mother and son’s nine-month sojourn on the bike path. Veronica and her three children prepared to decorate their duplex apartment for Christmas — the family’s first in many years in a safe home. Reflecting on her journey, she reiterates how glad she is she never gave up.

“Now we can settle and breathe and feel safe,” she says.

For thousands of Rhode Islanders trapped in a system designed for another era, it’s a feeling that remains just out of reach. For now, the goal is just to survive — and maybe, someday, come out on the other side.