House of Hope Executive Director Laura Jaworski speaks at the opening ceremony for ECHO Village on Feb. 11, 2025. Seated left to right are Gov. Dan McKee, House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, and Acting Housing Secretary Deborah Goddard. (Photo by Christopher Shea/Rhode Island Current)
The long-awaited opening of Rhode Island’s first community of temporary homeless shelters was heralded with the brass and drums of a marching band Tuesday as a crowd of 200 homeless service advocates and politicians gathered at ECHO Village.
Extraordinary Rendition Band, a protest marching band based in Providence, ushered in the celebration a day before the first group of residents was expected to move into the cabins arranged on a 4-acre site on Victor Street near Route 146. There are 45 cabins in all, each measuring 70 square feet.
“Today we are officially adding this to the portfolio of options for Rhode Island’s homeless community,” Gov. Dan McKee told the crowd.
When the project was officially announced in January 2024, the opening date was supposed to open by the end of the first quarter. Its original price tag was $3.3 million, with funding coming from State Fiscal Recovery Funds and Community Development Block Grants, as well the city of Providence. But addressing regulatory gaps in the state fire code delayed the work for a year and ultimately pushed the project over budget by $1.3 million.
Laura Jaworski, executive director of House of Hope, called ECHO Village’s long-awaited opening a bittersweet moment.
“It’s really a strange place to be to want to mark the opening of a shelter,” Jaworski said. “We felt it was really important because there was a lot of hard work that has gone into this project to get us to where we are today — I quite honestly believed we would never make it.”
House of Hope is a Warwick-based community nonprofit that will manage the village and connect residents with supportive services including housing and benefits application assistance, job training, substance use recovery and mental health services.
Each cabin has enough space to accommodate a twin bed, night stand, and shelves. They are also equipped with climate control, fire and carbon monoxide detectors, extinguishers, a locking door, and two windows.
The pallet shelter village also has a community room, along with ADA-approved combination bathroom/shower facilities and a laundry room. House of Hope staff will work out of four office structures.
Residents can begin to move in starting Wednesday, Jaworksi told reporters after the ceremony. Move-ins will be in waves, with groups of 10-15 people moving over the next three weeks.
Individuals and couples will be selected to live at the site through the state’s Coordinated Entry System — a calling system designed to ensure people experiencing housing insecurity have “fair and equal access” to shelter. Jawroski told Rhode Island Current that priority will be given to people who have been living on the streets for the longest time.
The expected length of the stay for residents is expected to last around nine months, but could vary depending on each individual’s health and other circumstances and whether there is a more permanent place for them to stay, Jaworski said. Four case workers will be on site from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“It’s gonna be an individualized process because of the state of the housing crisis here in Rhode Island,” she said.
House of Hope first began pushing for using pallet shelters during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pallet shelters are easily set up to provide emergency shelter for homeless people. Forty-five cabins manufactured by Pallet, a public benefit corporation based in Everett, Washington, were shipped and assembled last February. They sat empty as officials struggled to figure out how the cabins fit into the state’s fire and building codes, which had no category for pallet shelters. Officials also couldn’t treat them like campsites or dormitories.
The gaps in state regulations prompted House Speaker K. Joseph Shekarchi to introduce legislation in January that creates a new type of emergency shelter under the state’s building code called Supportive and Versatile Emergency (SAVE) units.
Shekarchi’s bill, which had its first committee hearing Feb. 4, would allow municipalities to be exempt from the normal fire and building codes for 180 days, so long as a city or town declares an emergency.
McKee said he would sign the bill should it clear the General Assembly, though he told Rhode Island Current that as of Tuesday morning he had yet to read the legislation
“I know the speaker pretty well, he’s not going to be asking for something that’s unsafe,” McKeesaid.
Speaking to reporters, the governor said his administration plans to regroup and fully assess what caused ECHO Village’s delays to ensure similar projects aren’t held up in the future.
“We’re a few months behind where we wanted to be, but looking forward you have multiple years of helping people,” McKee said.
Help alleviating homelessness, especially during winter months, can’t come soon enough, Shekarchi said. He cited the case of Rico Timez Ramy, 48, an unhoused person who, according to the editor of the website Street Sights, regularly slept outside in the Smith Hill neighborhood and reportedly froze to death in January.
“And there are probably others we don’t know about,” Shekarchi said. “We need to do more and we need to do it better.”
The Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness conducted its annual Point-In-Time count for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on Jan. 28, but results aren’t expected to be released until some time in the summer. At least 2,442 unhoused people across Rhode Island were counted when volunteers conducted an annual survey in late January 2024 — up 35% over the 2023 count.
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