Being the mayor of Rhode Island’s largest city is a demanding job.
Providence has a lot going for it, but the city remains bedeviled by a lackluster tax base. Other long-standing challenges include underperforming schools and an underfunded pension system.
The man responsible for tackling these issues is Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, a veteran of state and city government.
After first winning the election in 2022, he’s gearing up to run again in 2026. Smiley remains the favorite, though he faces a challenge from state Rep. David Morales, a young progressive hoping to channel the insurgent energy of Zohran Mamdani in New York City.
Does Smiley have bold ideas to meet the moment? What does he consider the way forward for Democrats during the Trump era? And how much progress can his back-to-basics approach deliver on Providence’s most nettlesome issues? Ian Donnis sat down with Mayor Smiley to ask him these questions and more in this in-depth conversation.
Interview Highlights:
On the impending cuts to SNAP benefits
Brett Smiley: We need to do everything we can to make sure that the most vulnerable members of our community have the most basic need: food. And so, at the national level, we really need to encourage and advocate for and demand that the President, Republicans and Congress and the Senate get back to business and pass a funding bill.
Second of all, locally here, we’re never going to be able to backstop at the city level, the amount of money that the federal government spends on SNAP. But what we can do is triage the emergency. And so, that means surging food assistance through our food banks. And my Department of Emergency Management in the city of Providence has an emergency food plan. We have activated it. It involves working with our local food banks to make sure that they’ve got excess food stores so that they’re ready for the demand that’s going to come in just a couple of days here. Certainly, members of the community are encouraged to step up and help as well. But this isn’t just about a fundraising call. The city needs to step into the breach, and we’re going to, by surging dollars to food banks so that they can help meet the need.
I’m under no illusion that that is the same as people having their EBT cards filled. Families deserve the dignity and the choice and the right to shop for what they want to eat and the meals that their kids want to have prepared. Just telling people to go to the food bank is a poor substitute for that, but that’s where we are right now in the midst of this shutdown, and we want to make sure that people’s basic needs are met.
On the relationship between the Providence police and federal immigration officers
Smiley: Well, it certainly is a tense moment and, I know there’s widespread fear in our community. I’ve heard personal stories about businesses that are struggling because customers don’t feel safe leaving their house. I know that there’s kids who aren’t going to school because their parents are worried about sending their kids to school in this environment.
This is a major problem that affects families, affects businesses, affects our entire community. And so, my executive order sought to restore a little bit of confidence in all of the steps that we’re taking as a community, including the police. But beyond the police, we want to make sure that schools and courthouses and hospitals know what to do, that everyone feels well acquainted with the process for how to make sure that the immigration officers are presenting a valid warrant, that they know who to call. I’ve funded through Dorcas (International), which is our primary funder for immigration services, a 24/7 legal hotline to make sure that residents know that they have a resource that they can call for whatever their unique circumstance might be. And Providence police have the trust of the community. We want to make sure we maintain that trust.
Providence police are not, will not be immigration agents. And we want to make sure that every resident in Providence, whether they’re documented or not, feels comfortable calling the police because we don’t want them to be victims of crime. We want them to help report a crime in the neighborhood if they see it, so that we can bring justice to someone else who may have been harmed. And I feel good about the policies and practices of the Providence Police Department in the midst of a really complicated and really hard time. We have, I think, struck the right balance to ensure safety in our community, protection for our residents, while still not violating any federal laws.
On the mayor’s public-private approach to building new housing
Smiley: So first of all, Providence is going further and faster than any other community in Rhode Island. Not just because we’re the biggest, (but) also on a per capita basis, so we are certainly leading the way. And I hope that we continue to lead, but that it also inspires some other communities to do the same, because this cannot be a Providence-only solution. It’s not a Providence-only problem.
So our three-pronged approach is production. Produce more housing. That’s the most important prong. Then preservation to make sure that the housing we do have is maintained, particularly the affordable housing, because we don’t want to take one step forward and then two steps backward. And then protection, which is, we know in a rental market like this that landlords can behave badly. And so we want to make sure that tenants are protected through things like eviction defense, temporary or emergency rental assistance and other strategies to protect tenants. That’s the right mix. I’m confident that the only realistic, sustainable solution to the housing crisis is those three prongs, with production being the most important. So you talk about that new project, we highlighted it because it’s a new tool in the toolbox that we haven’t used before, where the city actually bought the land to ensure that we didn’t lose an opportunity to build more housing for what is currently a surface parking lot, which is not a use we’re trying to incentivize. We’re actually trying to decentivize, but it is only one of many developments happening in the city.
In our housing report, which we released earlier this week, we noted that there were almost 900 new units last fiscal year. And so we are really making great gains. Seventy-six may not sound like a lot, but in aggregate, there were almost a thousand new units last year, and we’re still going full speed ahead. And so there’s development happening across the city in every neighborhood, in many cases, in sort of low-scale, three-family, four-family, small-scale buildings. And that’s how we’re going to meet the moment. It’s not going to be, you know, one big high-rise. It’s going to be a bunch of infill development opportunities across the city. By the way, of those nearly a thousand new units, 22% of them were permanently subsidized affordable housing units. More than double what the state target is. And so Providence is gonna continue to lead the way on meeting the housing crisis.
