Providence · Rhode Island
Restoring the river finally pays.
Rhode Island already puts a price on phosphorus runoff, the pollutant that turns our ponds green each summer. We turned that price into a market aimed at restoring wetlands and green space.
Unused land becomes valuable wetland. Nobody pays more than the law already requires, and the whole watershed becomes more resilient.
Scroll to follow the water ↓
Why it works
The land remembers how to hold water.
Providence was built on wetlands and streams that absorbed storms and cleaned water by design. We filled them, buried them, paved them, and today's flooding is a direct result.
Drag the handle: the georeferenced 1889 USGS survey on the left, the city we built on the right. Step forward through 1894 and 1921 to watch the water disappear. The colored shapes are BCI's digitized 1889 water system: the streams didn't vanish, they were buried.
Nature already did the engineering
Today's worst flood zones are where the water used to be.
Today's highest-priority flood areas (red) sit squarely on the wetlands and ponds of 1889 (blue).
The cheapest place to manage water is where water used to live.
Find yourself in this story
Five ways in.
For businesses with a requirement
Your requirement is your restoration budget.
Under the Clean Water Act's Residual Designation Authority, active in watersheds across four states, large paved properties must reduce their stormwater phosphorus.
During heavy rain events, the graywater system in Providence overflows sewer water into the river. In this case, there are ways to comply: a costly water storage system under your own parking lot, or funding verified wetland restoration in the watershed for less. Rhode Island's own permit recognizes both, and restored land is proven to better absorb shock from drought or flood.
Your options
Three ways to settle it. Only one of them earns.
A requirement is not a bill with a single payment method. Take two adjacent properties on Diamond Hill Road in Woonsocket — forty-seven acres, ninety-one per cent of it paved. Together they owe about fifty-two pounds of phosphorus a year, and there are three honest ways to get there.
That third row is the whole idea behind this exchange. Everything below is about who is in a position to take it, and what it takes to get there.
Next — who owns land like that ↓For property owners
That unused lot can store water.
Remaining wetlands in the Woonasquatucket watershed are strongest upstream, and are nearly erased in highly populated areas. An idle, low-lying lot on the right soil can rejoin the hydrologic system, all while generating credits to be sold.
The marketplace connects buyers who owe on phosphorus runoff with sellers who restore their land. The restoration project pays owners back over time, all while serving as flood-absorbing, biodiverse green spaces.
A two-part credit structure provides a one-time establishment credit payment, issued once a BMP is built and certified. This covers construction costs and pays the landowner promptly through credits sold to a buyer.
A performance credit stream then continues to generate recurring credits for the landowner as the land keeps working and pollutants removal is verified. Credits may be sold annually or in forward-purchased 5, 10 or 20-year tranches.
For third-party aggregators
One parcel is too small to matter. A portfolio isn't.
Many individually owned lots may be too small, or oddly shaped, for a single landowner to justify constructing a wetland or bioswale. Pull together a half dozen or more and the math changes.
The Exchange offers tools to sign members up, build a critical land mass, and keep the revenue flowing back to them.
For anchor institutions
The parking lot becomes the front porch.
Your institution already anchors this neighborhood, but an underused lot costs money to maintain and gives little back to the block around it.
Partner with a developer, and that same asset starts paying you back — in revenue, and in new benefits that support your community.
A real site, on this map
2 Columbus Avenue, Pawtucket — owned by the City
- Area
- 23.4 ac
- Paved
- 59%
- Owes
- 17.5 lb/yr
- Worth to settle
- $786,099
- Incentives
- NMTC + OZ
For land developers
The credit stream can be part of the plan from day one.
Every new project already has to solve for stormwater. Depending on where you're starting from, that requirement can become part of your own capital stack — either on your own site, or in partnership with an institution that already owns the land.
For compliance developers
The safest bet for your own bottom line is also the best deal for your future neighbors.
Every new project has to solve for stormwater. Model what you can capture on-site against what's cheaper to buy, and close the requirement before breaking ground.
Either way, it's an asset instead of an isolated cost center.
A real site, on this map
1666 & 1750 Diamond Hill Road, Woonsocket
- Combined area
- 46.8 ac
- Paved
- 91%
- Owes
- 52.3 lb/yr
- Buy
- $2,353,926
- Build
- $4,388,670
- Incentives
- NMTC
Paying for it
The tax credits build the building. The credit stream unlocks the land.
Restoring land costs money before it earns any. Two federal programmes exist to put that money into exactly the neighbourhoods this watershed runs through, and they work in opposite ways.
Be careful what you claim here. On a fifty-five-million-pound project the phosphorus credit is worth a fraction of one per cent. It is not what makes a scheme viable. What it does is bring the landowner to the table, by turning a bill they cannot pay into an asset they can contribute.
Next — how both fit on one site ↓How both fit on one site
One building, two programmes, split by a condominium line.
New Markets money cannot go to a business that is mainly a landlord of flats. The line in the statute is eighty per cent of rental income. So a scheme with homes above and community space below looks, at first, like it has to choose.
It does not. The building is divided into two ownerships on paper, and each half takes the programme it qualifies for.
For community-partnership developers
Three winners on one parcel — housing, habitat, and the institution that made room for both.
An anchor institution has the land and the trust of the block. You can build the capital stack and delivery capacity.
Together, one parcel can deliver housing, green space and revenue at once. The tax credits are what make the building pencil out; the credit stream is what makes the landowner able to say yes.
A real site, on this map
560 Prospect Street, Pawtucket — already affordable housing
- Area
- 21.4 ac
- Paved
- 59%
- Owes
- 15.8 lb/yr
- Worth to settle
- $711,356
- Incentives
- NMTC + OZ
One more thing that money can do
An aggregator is what an Opportunity Fund is built to finance.
Everything above puts a building on the land. But the same money will finance land with no building on it at all — and that is the harder problem to fund, because restoration returns slowly and there is no rent roll to point at.
Which is exactly the shape of money an Opportunity Fund is looking for: a long hold, rewarded by what the asset becomes rather than what it pays out each year.
Silver Lake, in Providence, is a real example: a hundred and seventy lots of an acre or less, mostly two- and three-family houses on a tenth of an acre, three-quarters paved, all inside an NMTC tract and an Opportunity Zone, and all but eleven owing nothing at all — so every pound they could save is a pound they could sell. Together, $1,316,526.
The idea
Everybody wins.
One side, a business saves money and helps fix what a century of paving broke. On the other side, a landowner turns idle ground into cash and green space.
The buyer
Saves on compliance. No construction on their own site. A genuine part of a watershed recovery.
The owner
Annual payouts and a beautiful, biodiverse backyard.
The bill comes due
When the storm arrives.
Faster runoff, buried streams, and rising seas converge downstream. FEMA's flood zones and hurricane-surge extents put downtown Providence, with its hospitals, highways, and most vulnerable neighborhoods, in the water's path.
This is not a future problem. It's happening today. Every restored wetland upstream shrinks it.
Where a dollar works hardest
Not all land heals equally.
Blue Cities' analysis overlays flood risk with ease of action, scoring every corner of the watershed to create a map of where restoration buys the most protection.
This layer is live from our database as a part of the engine that prices credits on the exchange.
The proof
Every credit has an address.
Projects live on the public tracker. Markers show a project's maintenance history and how it performed in the last storm. If a wetland is funded, it is maintained, monitored, open to the neighborhood.
The horizon
The forefront of climate resilience.
Rhode Island already took the first step to revolutionizing our response to climate instability in Providence.
The companies and landowners here first will be the ones who made the better way — ecological restoration over concrete construction — normal.
What the exchange is for
None of this is visible from a deed. All of it is visible from the map.
The programmes already exist. The requirement already exists. What has been missing is any way for one owner, looking at one property, to find out whether they are in the picture at all.
Put those three on one page and a church board, a mall owner and a land trust can each see their own position in about ten seconds. That is the whole product.
Find your own parcel ↓