People my age that I went to school with who are trying to stay in town can’t even find a place to stay. And there’s so much housing in town. It’s not really about building housing. It’s about how we use the infrastructure we already have.”

Myles Arkins

A new face was introduced at the most recent Little compton Housing Trust meeting early last month. Myles Arkins fills a vacant spot on the board after he was named to the post over the another candidate, Lucy Duhamel.

At 26, Arkins is the youngest member by far on the seven-member board. Growing up in Little Compton, Arkins said he has gotten involved after long seeing first-hand the negative growth in town population and in the number of kids attending schools here.

“My generation had 30 kids per grade. The generation before me had over twice that and was half the size of the school,” he said of Wilbur McMahon’s waning student body. “Growing up there was so much more going on. And this was only going back 15 years or so.”

Arkins’ parents, Tom and Josie Arkins, have long been involved in matters of affordable housing — as the owners of a construction company, they were the first to develop affordable housing in Little Compton after the state’s Comprehensive Housing Production and Rehabilitation Act required the town to meet the state established goal of 10 percent low or moderate income housing in 2004.

Being surrounded by that process impassioned Arkins to get involved. But being a born and bred Little Comptonite doesn’t necessarily a member make — Arkins is invested in the housing crisis on both a professional and scholastic level. After working in construction alongside his father since his days at Wilbur, Arkins went on to study architectural design at Parsons School of Design in New York, completing a year of his master’s degree before the pandemic sent him packing for home. Since then, he has worked as one of the principle designers for Arkins Construction Company, spending copious hours poring over different town’s zoning and building regulations, something that he feels makes him uniquely qualified to serve on the trust.

With a couple years post-grad under his belt, Arkins feels very sure of his decision to live in Little Compton and advocate for people’s right to fairly occupy it.

With gaining more affordable housing, he said, "I think the goal is to bring in new people. But the community concern right now is how we can prioritize creating attainable housing for our community first.”

“People my age that I went to school with who are trying to stay in town can’t even find a place to stay,” he said, pointing to the correlation between house sales and affordability in town over the past three years. “And there’s so much housing in town. It’s not really about building housing. It’s about how we use the infrastructure we already have.”

Arkins believes that a good place to start is to realize the underestimated power of subcommittees, indicating other associations like the Agricultural Conservancy Trust as a good example. By forming subcommittees and bringing in people from the community that specialize in different areas, he hopes that the housing trust can really begin diving into specific issues and get more information out into the community.

“There’s a million ways to look at affordable and attainable housing. Subcommittees are where you can start to navigate that a bit more and get a lot of top voices involved.”

Arkins echoes the sentiment of other townspeople, including his father, who was among a handful of stakeholders polled in the Evaluation of Housing Needs completed late last year by HousingWorks RI. The evaluation, which was commissioned by the housing trust, included interviews with various involved individuals and discovered prominent themes that emerged — namely the importance of delineating affordable and attainable housing, the latter of which may apply more aptly to locals of Little Compton.

"There was a general agreement that the state’s laws and both state and federal sources of funding do not work for rural places generally,” found Annette Bourne, HousingWorks RI’s Director of Research and Policy, during the evaluation. “And for Little Compton particularly.”

On this, Arkins agrees.

“Most of our community doesn’t fit into the parameters of affordable housing,” he said. “There’s such a narrow gap to be included in affordable housing. And the Housing Trust’s focus isn't just affordable housing, it's attainable housing.”

According to the 2021 survey by HousingWorks, 28 percent of Little Compton’s homeowners are cost burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. Of the 1,607 year-round homes within the town, only nine, or about one half of one percent, were deemed long-term affordable homes. An additional 142 affordable units are required to meet the state’s 10 percent requirement.

Moving ahead, Arkins believes that collaboration among the housing trust, agricultural conservancy trust and the preservation association could create some unique solutions for the town’s affordable housing problems.

“What’s cool is that I’m coming in at a really good time,” he said, acknowledging the trust's aim to soon close on its first affordable housing project on Colebrook Road.

“My dream projects in town would be some sort of agricultural, attainable housing project that doesn't go over the top — no big developments or anything — but instead preserves agricultural use and the beautiful farmland in town to create something more sustainable for future generations.”