5 new laws that will make it easier to build the homes Rhode Island needs

Three of the five laws were co-sponsored by Charlestown state Rep. Tina Spears

By Greg Miller and Monica Teixeira de Sousa, Rhode Island Current

Anyone who has tried to buy or rent a home lately in Rhode Island has seen firsthand the impacts of the state’s housing shortage, including bidding wars to access homeownership or significant yearly rent increases for tenants. The median sales price of a single-family home in Rhode Island rose to $520,000 as of June, 2025, according to the Rhode Island Association of Realtors, and rental costs in the Providence metro area climbed at one of the fastest rates in the nation, reflected in a median asking rent of $2,145.

A root problem is that Rhode Island is building fewer homes per capita than any other state in the nation. We need 24,000 homes just to meet today’s needs. With an average household size of 2.4, and a lower median household income than our neighboring states, new housing production must include smaller and more affordable options. 

A recent Stateline story in Rhode Island Current detailed the impacts of the lack of homes for sale that are affordable options for teachers, highlighting that the housing crisis does not discriminate. Workers across all sectors and all educational backgrounds are impacted. The lack of homes in Rhode Island prevents teachers, child care workers, and retail workers from living in the communities they serve. 

There is a profound irony in the fact that even builders of homes are priced out. Consider that someone earning the average income of a skilled trades worker with four-plus years of experience — $68,717 — is unable to afford most homes on the market in Rhode Island. A family of four now needs an annual income of $151,067 to purchase a home. This is dispiriting news for our state’s hardworking residents trying to secure a future for themselves and their families.  

The status quo has consequences; it pushes young people out of the communities they grew up in, as they move away in search of more affordable housing options. The lack of home choices stops older adults from downsizing into a more accessible home, putting them in a situation of maintaining a home that is too large, too expensive, or too difficult to move around in. 

Six Months Into His Presidency, Trump Has Created a Global Humanitarian Catastrophe

Deaths from disease and famine have already begun and it's more than Gaza

Olivier De Schutter for Common Dreams

Photo: Mohammad Abu Samra for the IRC

As the UN’s independent expert on poverty, I am no stranger to harrowing statistics. 

But few numbers have shaken me like those emerging in the wake of the Trump administration’s suspension of U.S. foreign aid. According to new estimates published in The Lancet, these funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths by 2030, a third of them young children.

These deaths will not be the result of droughts, earthquakes, pandemics, or war. They will be the direct consequence of a single, lethal decision made by one of the wealthiest men to ever walk this planet.

On his first day back in the White House, Donald Trump handed a death sentence to millions of people. Hours after taking office on January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14169, ordering a pause on billions of dollars of foreign aid under the guise of a “90-day review” to ensure aid was aligned with his “America First” approach.

Six months later, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dissolved, and the entirety of America’s global humanitarian aid workforce will be terminated over the summer. The findings of the “review” have not been published.

Sherlock Trump solves another mystery

Seafood Festival coming soon

Aquatic Weed Treatment Scheduled for Meadowbrook Pond

Steer clear from popular fishing spot from July 30 until DEM posts an all clear

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) announces that Meadowbrook Pond, Richmond will receive treatment to control infestations of invasive aquatic plants on Wednesday, July 30. 

Anglers and boaters should avoid using the lake during the treatment. 

Signs will be posted with information about temporary water use restrictions. 

Neighbors and other users of the pond should keep pets from drinking the water for at least three days. 

This treatment will target invasive plants in particular, variable water milfoil, and it will not harm fish or other aquatic life. 

Meadowbrook Pond is popular with anglers and boaters and is stocked with trout several times per year.

As Consumer Tax Credits Vanish, What Do You Need to Know?

We spoke to experts about what to keep in mind as incentives for solar, heat pumps and EVs are about to end.

By Dan Gearino

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Consumers are facing a Sept. 30 deadline to be eligible for tax credits for EVs, followed by a Dec. 31 deadline when credits vanish for rooftop solar, air source heat pumps and certain water heaters.

These are major purchases and customers will likely want to consider multiple options before making a selection, but there isn’t much time for research. To help, I’ve convened some experts to help you make good decisions.

First, how we got here: Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this month, which repealed tax credits that had been created or expanded under the Inflation Reduction Act.

Since the EV credits expire first, we’ll start there. Until Sept. 30, the government has a $7,500 credit for qualifying new EVs and plug-in hybrids, and a $4,000 credit for qualifying used EVs. There is also a $7,500 credit under a different part of the law that applies to leased EVs.

Disasters are for the greater glory of Trump

He cannot fail. He can only be failed.

Noah Berlatsky

Donald Trump presents himself as strong, indomitable, and always forceful. But when disaster strikes — whether hurricane, flash flood, or pandemic — he’s oddly helpless.

To hear Trump tell it, he has infinite power to do good and no power to do bad, and anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of the country. To believe in MAGA is to believe in his simultaneous omnipotence and impotence, depending on whichever is convenient for partisan purposes.

This dynamic has been on full display following the recent disaster in central Texas.

Torrential rains and floods early July 4 accounted for 129 deaths so far, and with many people still missing, the toll is expected to continue to rise. Trump traveled to the affected area last Friday, and his response when questioned about the government response was studiously ignorant.

“Nobody has any idea how and why a thing like this could happen,” he insisted. (Trump, of course, is a climate change denier.)

When a reporter asked what his message is to families who say earlier alerts about the flooding could’ve saved lives, Trump responded that “only an evil person would ask a question like that.”

Last year, however, Trump was that evil person, insisting (nonsensically and falsely) that California Gov. Gavin Newsom had exacerbated California wildfires by preventing firefighters from accessing water.

This kind of partisan hypocrisy is the norm for Trump. In fact, it’s so typical, and so obvious, that it almost stops being hypocrisy and becomes a kind of ethos.

Trump is never responsible for anything and any disaster is always someone else’s fault, whether that someone is God or Gavin Newsom.

If Trump is never responsible for disaster, it makes sense that he shouldn’t prepare for disasters. He can’t prevent or fix anything, so trying is just a waste of money. That twisted logic has guided Trump’s policy, and there is good reason to believe that it worsened the crisis in Texas — and will lead to worse and worse disasters throughout Trump’s term.

RIP Tom Lehrer, singer, satirist, mathematician, aged 97

 

Let's do it again

As Charlestown suffers through unhealthy air, which wildfire smoke plumes are hazardous?

New satellite tech can map them in 3D for air quality alerts at neighborhood scale

Jun Wang, University of Iowa

Wildfire smoke is not just Canada's problem but ours too.
Will detection and protection efforts survive Trump
budget cuts?

Canada is facing another dangerous wildfire season, with burning forests sending smoke plumes across the provinces and into the U.S. again. 

The pace of the 2025 fires is reminiscent of the record-breaking 2023 wildfire season, which exposed millions of people in North America to hazardous smoke levels.

For most of the past decade, forecasters have been able to use satellites to track these smoke plumes, but the view was only two-dimensional: The satellites couldn’t determine how close the smoke was to Earth’s surface.

The altitude of the smoke matters.

If a plume is high in the atmosphere, it won’t affect the air people breathe – it simply floats by far overhead.

But when smoke plumes are close to the surface, people are breathing in wildfire chemicals and tiny particles. Those particles, known as PM2.5, can get deep into the lungs and exacerbate asthma and other respiratory and cardiac problems.

An animation on May 30, 2025, shows a thick smoke plume from Canada moving over Minnesota, but the air quality monitors on the ground detected minimal risk, suggesting it was a high-level smoke plume. NOAA NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research

The Environmental Protection Agency uses a network of ground-based air quality monitors to issue air quality alerts, but the monitors are few and far between, meaning forecasts have been broad estimates in much of the country.

Malnutrition and food insecurity are set to soar among vulnerable older populations due to aid cuts in Trump’s budget.

Hunger Threatens to Plague “Golden Years” of Older Americans Due to Trump’s Cuts

By Eleanor J. Bader , Truthout

It’s 100 degrees on a late Tuesday in June, but 79-year-old Elisabeth — she asked that her surname not be used to protect her privacy — is in line at St. Patrick’s Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, waiting to get a bag of groceries.

“I don’t have enough comida (food),” she tells Truthout in a mix of English and Spanish. “You know, leche (milk), pan (bread), pollo (chicken), cereal —everything es muy caro (very expensive).”

Her rent, she says, is $1,200 a month, and she pays approximately $300 per month for electricity, gas, phone, and internet service. The total, she adds, exceeds her monthly income: a $229 retirement pension from her job as an office assistant and $849 in Social Security. “My daughter has to help me, but it’s hard for her, so I come to the church every week to get what I can —a container of milk, pasta, bread, and maybe a package of meat. It helps.”

Like Elisabeth, 74-year-old Lin — she, too, asked not to disclose her surname — has trouble making ends meet, but she goes to a senior center in her New York City neighborhood almost every weekday for a meal. She’s been doing this since 2011. “We’re a family here, and if I have a problem, there’s someone to help me,” she told Truthout. “If it’s something small, there’s always someone sitting near me to make me laugh and remind me not to take my troubles too seriously. If it’s a big problem, I can go upstairs to see a worker who will help me figure out what to do.”

The center, she says, asks for a voluntary contribution of $2 per meal. “It’s a good, square, balanced lunch,” Lin says.

Lin says that the combination of camaraderie and affordability will keep her coming back to the center for as long as she’s physically able. “My income — a $1,400 Social Security check and a pension of slightly more than $300 a month — doesn’t leave much left over. My rent is $1,000 and I have to pay for utilities and a phone,” she says. “So many of us seniors live doubled-up or in substandard housing. We deserve better, but the government, and Donald Trump in particular, treat us like garbage.”

Low-income seniors and their advocates agree and say that pending cuts to food and nutrition programs — including funding for meals at senior centers, and cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Meals on Wheels —will increase hunger and malnutrition.

Both are already big problems.

According to Feeding America, a national network of food banks and pantries, food insecurity is nothing new, and even before Trump’s Big Bad Bill championed slashing social welfare spending, 6.9 million people over the age of 65 faced hunger in the U.S. The group estimates that in 2022, one in 11 people aged 60 and older, and one in eight between the ages of 50 and 59, lacked adequate food.

Part of the reason is poverty, but isolation, the inability to shop or cook, trouble chewing and swallowing, cognitive decline, depression, a diminished sense of smell and/or taste, and the side effects of medication can also contribute to malnutrition in American seniors. These factors, in concert with economic precarity, make it difficult for many elders to remain healthy and well-nourished.

But money, unsurprisingly, is crucial to eating well, and many seniors like Elisabeth and Lin have too little of it.

According to the Social Security Administration, as of May 2025, the average monthly Social Security payment was $2,002. Millions, however, are ineligible for retirement benefits and instead rely on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a benefit provided to disabled people who did not work for the required 40 quarters needed to collect Social Security. Their monthly benefits amount to $967 for individuals and $1,450 for couples. More than 2 million adults over 65 receive SSI, with 39 percent living below the poverty line.

“Cuts to Medicaid and SNAP don’t just harm individuals. They impact whole communities.”

Trump orders homelessness to be treated as a crime

Calls for involuntary committal, imprisonment even though federal funding has been cut

Jessica Corbett for Common Dreams

Advocates for mental health and unhoused people blasted Donald Trump over his executive order titled "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets."

Trump's order directs U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to end policies that restrict the government from institutionalizing "individuals on the streets who are a risk to themselves or others." 

She must also work with other Cabinet members "to prioritize grants for states and municipalities that enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting, and track the location of sex offenders."

As a White House "fact sheet" highlights, the order also "redirects funding to ensure that individuals camping on streets and causing public disorder and that are suffering from serious mental illness or addiction are moved into treatment centers, assisted outpatient treatment, or other facilities." Further, it ensures grant money does not "fund drug injection sites or illicit drug use."

In a statement to USA Today, which first reported on the executive action, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that "by removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need."

Meanwhile, National Coalition for the Homeless executive director Donald Whitehead Jr. declared that "everyone deserves a safe place to live."

Trump's policies, he said, "ignore decades of evidence-based housing and support services in practice. They represent a punitive approach that has consistently failed to resolve homelessness and instead exacerbates the challenges faced by vulnerable individuals."

The $50 Million Venetian Wedding of Robber Baron Jeff Bezos

Today's robber barons revel in a new Gilded Age

Elliott Negin for Common Dreams

With all the fawning coverage of Jeff Bezos’ storybook $50 million Venetian wedding, the news media lost sight of fact that Bezos—the third-richest person in the world—is hardly worthy of veneration. He’s been exploiting Amazon workers for years.

Historians have drawn parallels between the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and what we are experiencing today. Like the first Gilded Age, Gilded Age 2.0 is marked by increasing economic inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a rise in populism and social unrest.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Jeff Bezos fits the profile of a latter-day robber baron to a T. Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.

Amazon terrorizes its workers

With their manifestly unsafe working conditions, Amazon warehouses are a 21st-century version of a Gilded Age sweatshop. Despite the company’s claims that it protects its workforce, an 18-month investigation released last December by a Senate committee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer risks its workers’ health and safety by prioritizing speed and profit, and it is doing quite well on that score. Last year, the company outpaced Walmart, the largest private-sector employer, by netting $59.2 billion—a 95 percent increase from 2023.

He speaks! Actually, he won't shut up.

Providence City Council offers good advice on your rights whether you are a citizen or not