East Providence home on former brownfield sells for $1.1 million

By Ethan Hartley
Posted 2/3/25

The home is the first to sell during the early stages of construction at East Point, overlooking the Seekonk River. The project was heralded as proof of the potential for East Providence's under-developed waterfront parcels.

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East Providence home on former brownfield sells for $1.1 million

Posted

Heralded as proof positive for the potential of developing East Providence’s long-neglected waterfront parcels, dozens of local officials gathered last Thursday morning on grounds that for decades welcomed only the traffic from heavy industry to cut a ribbon in front of a new single-family condo that had just recently sold for $1.1 million.

It was the first property to be sold at East Point, a $150 million development that looks to create 392 housing units in the form of apartments and single- and multi-family condominiums on the banks of the Seekonk River off Roger Williams Avenue in Rumford.

“As you look behind me, the East Side has nothing on East Providence anymore,” said City Council President Bob Rodericks during remarks at the event within the living room of the recently-purchased home. “We are really making a lot of our 14 miles of waterfront properties and land, which through the years mostly have been ignored. With all of you and this city council and the mayor and others, we are utilizing it.”

Development journey
Formerly the home to Washburn Wire and Ocean State Steel Company, the large parcel of waterfront property had sat vacant since the steel mill closed in 1994. Although an environmental remediation of the land was attempted throughout the aughts, a legal dispute in 2009 resulted in the property falling into receivership for roughly the next decade.

But new energy came to the table in the form of the East Providence Waterfront Commission, and Mayor Bob DaSilva, who reinvigorated efforts to take vacant industrial parcels along the city’s expansive waterfront and turn them into economic positives.

In 2019 or so, they found a partner in Richard Baccari II, President & CEO of Churchill & Banks, who agreed to develop the parcel through its subsidiary, Noble Development. Baccari was also the developer who built Kettle Point off Veterans Memorial Parkway.

“The first person I thought of, because I saw the success he had at Kettle Point, was Rich Baccari and his company,” DaSilva said at the celebratory event. “It wasn’t too long ago that we were breaking ground, and it’s quite remarkable how much progress you’ve made.”

That groundbreaking occurred in November of 2022, and the journey to last week’s event was one that brought up many emotions for Baccari.

He said the whole process began while he was still working with his late father, Richard, who passed away in April of 2024, during an early site visit to the property after DaSilva had reached out to him seeing if he was interested in potentially developing it.

“It was a sunny day, and you had to cross the railroad tracks and once you get out here, you see it’s a magnificent site with the sun glistening off the water,” he said. “So the following day, I brought my dad with me saying we had to look at this property. And it was raining. Just a miserable mid-February day in Rhode Island. And we couldn’t get over the railroad tracks, we had to kind of climb over a fence, and he’s like, ‘You’re crazy. This is way too tough of a site.’ About a week later it was sunny again, and we went back in and we could drive around and he saw the potential with the sun out.”

Navigating the complexities of getting the project relinquished from receivership, and then getting approvals from statewide agencies including CRMC, and even federal agencies due to the active railway, made the relatively streamlined approval process from East Providence’s Waterfront Commission much kinder in comparison, he said.

“These projects are like raising a family,” he said. “You start it in 2018 and just last week I sold the first house. That was seven years of work and investment and time. It’s a big deal.”

A community resource
In addition to the creation of additional housing in East Providence, the development also came with the requirement to create points of public access to the waterfront.

Baccari is accommodating that in multiple ways, including a riverside walking path that goes around the entire project, a kayak launch, a public park, and access to Omega Pond and the Urban Coastal Greenway; amounting to six acres of public access.

“There are people here in the community who will be able to, for the first time since the 1880s, come onto the property and walk along the shoreline, have access to Omega Pond and Ten Mile River,” said Bill Fazioli, Chairman of the East Providence Waterfront Commission. “And that’s a great attribute of what the Waterfront Commission does, which is take these older, underutilized sites and bring life back to it so it’s a contributing factor for the community.”

One other point of note for the project is that, in order to accommodate the 10% minimum requirement for affordable housing that was also mandated for the development, Baccari partnered up with Aldersbridge Communities of East Providence. The nonprofit that specializes in building and maintaining housing for the elderly will work with nonprofit developer One Neighborhood Builders to construct a 39-unit apartment building with units available exclusively to older members of the LGBTQI+ community.

Mayor DaSilva openly addressed a potential elephant in the room about the concept of talking about “affordable” housing while standing within a 2,200 square foot condo worth $1.1 million.

“I know people are going to say ‘How is a $1.1 million home affordable housing?’ You need a balanced stock,” he said. “And the reality is that $1.1 million home helps support the 39 affordable housing units that will be placed on site.”

Future of the project
Baccari said that the next phase of construction will include a groundbreaking for 128 apartment units coming this spring. Throughout that time, an additional 17 single-family waterfront condo units will be constructed, and then the remaining housing components will be phased in throughout the “next couple of years.”

Officials touted the project as an example of the kind of positive development opportunities that exist throughout the city’s waterfront.

“There were a lot of challenges and obstacles to overcome, but with a developer like Richard and what he’s done in the city and his dedication to the local community, we can see the end result here is a very valuable piece of property that will contribute to the city as some very attractive housing, including affordable housing, and also a lot of open space recreational access,” Fazioli said. “For communities who embrace that development, there’s a bright future for us. There are communities who, unfortunately, shun development. For communities who do embrace development, it’s going to be a much better situation for the residents who live here and the new people we will welcome into the community.”

Rodericks, during his piece, addressed residents who were critical of the amount of development occurring in East Providence.

“We’re not taking public parks. We’re not taking open space. We’re taking old, decrepit properties that were brownfields and were otherwise just derelict and abandoned. That’s where we’re developing,” he said. “To those critics who say we’re developing too much, we’re not. We are fixing up old, decrepit lands.”

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