Wickenden Street, a commercial area with the kind of cute coffee shops, restaurants and shops you’d expect of a college town, could soon get a big new building. The City Plan Commission is expected to vote Tuesday, Aug. 15, on whether to give crucial, first round approvals to a proposed five-story mixed-use building at the corner of Brook and Wickenden Streets. 

The project is unpopular with local residents. During a walk through the neighborhood on Aug. 9, 17 of the 19 people The Public’s Radio spoke to were opposed to the building. Outside Coffee Exchange sat a group of five or six men. Some of them have been coming to the area from other cities for nearly four decades to meet up and chew the fat. 

“We talk sports,” Chuck Cudworth says. “Broads, weather, music,” another man adds. 

In part, it’s the vibe of the neighborhood that keeps them coming. 

“What we’ve liked about the neighborhood is it’s been kind of homegrown. It’s individual businesses. It’s not like large corporate businesses,” Cudworth said. 

Janet is also part of the group and is one of many people who are concerned the proposed building would bring a different kind of commercialism to the area.

“We wouldn’t want the street to become like Thayer Street, where they took away all the little organically grown businesses and just put these chain-y kinds of things up there,” she said. 

What’s there right now are two two-story buildings. One is a long, dark blue building home to a few shops. The other is a brick house structure that contains some offices. The developer plans to knock them down and build a five-story mixed-use residential building with 62 apartments and three commercial retail spaces. It would offer much-needed housing in an expensive neighborhood. So why are people so opposed? 

“It’s going to look really ugly!” said Zainab Zulfiqar, a 26-year-old painter from Pakistan who moved here a year ago to study at RISD. She was also concerned that the building isn’t required to provide affordable housing. Complaints like these come both from people who are in favor of building new housing in the neighborhood, and people who are opposed to any sort of new development.

Another big reason behind the opposition comes from Vincent Scorziello, one of the co-owners of Campus Fine Wines on Brook Street.

“The proposal is definitely out of scale for the street,” he said. “It’s a six-story proposal. They claim it’s five, but if you look at the renderings and count the floors, there’s a slope, and the highest point on the corner is six stories,” he said. 

Scorziello says he is all for development – just not at this level.

“I think that if they made it a four-story building and kept it within scale, that would be fine. And less people would be as opposed to it,” he said. 

Most of the buildings on Wickenden Street are two stories. The area is zoned for four stories, but there are exceptions to that rule. That’s according to the Deputy Director for the Department of Planning and Development, Robert Azar. 

“The city says: we find development and commercial areas to be desirable if it has ground-floor commercial and residential above. And we like it so much that we’re going to offer you additional height if you do this,” Azar said. 

As long as the building fits with the city’s zoning rules and comprehensive plan, he says, it should be good to go. 

“The commissioners cannot vote to deny a project simply because they don’t like it,” he added. 

A new comprehensive plan, and along with it, new zoning rules, are up for debate this year. 

As it stands, the City Plan Commission has three options before them with this building. Either they approve the plan as it is written, deny it, or approve it with conditions like one less story. That last option would likely appeal to some of the detractors. 

There’s another thorn in the side of people who are opposed to the building – one that would not go away with fewer stories. Dustin Dezube, building’s developer and landlord, already has a somewhat contentious relationship with tenants in the city. After the Providence Journal printed two articles about poor conditions in buildings owned and co-owned by Dezube, some of his renters formed a tenants’ union. 

Dezube didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, either by phone, email, text or when The Public’s Radio visited his office.

Dezube’s building is going to be nearly six stories, and some of the units are under 300 square feet. To put that into perspective, that’s an apartment that’s just a little bigger than a one-car garage. 

But despite the apprehension about this building, Providence is in desperate need of housing, and Fox Point is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city for renters. It’s not clear how the proposed building might affect rent prices, especially without affordable housing requirements. But so far, locals aren’t convinced it’ll benefit the community. The Public’s Radio didn’t find any strong supporters among the 25 people it talked to for this story. Of the 31 public comments submitted to the City Plan Commission so far, only 4 are in favor of it. 

The Providence City Plan Commission meets Tuesday, Aug. 15 at 4:45 p.m. at 444 Westminster Street.