Tenants and affordable housing activists plan to rally at the State House Tuesday to protest a change in rent subsidies that will make their apartments harder to afford.
About 234 households who receive rent subsidies in apartments in Providence, Central Falls and Woonsocket will be affected by the change.
The households received rental support through a little-known state Rental Assistance Program (RAP) that created by the General Assembly in 1988, and was supposed to be financed through lottery sales.
But the state only appropriated funds for the program once, in fiscal 1995. Rhode Island Housing voluntarily stepped in and paid the subsidies for years.
But Rhode Island Housing says it no longer has the resources to foot the entire bill for the RAP program. Rhode Island Housing says it has invested almost $80 million in RAP subsidies over the years.
As the program was designed, RAP tenants were supposed to pay only 30 percent of their incomes for rent, no matter how low those incomes might be.
But now, a minimum RAP rent has been established, and many RAP tenants are facing a series of steep rent increases.
A $50 minimum RAP rent was instituted in November 2011. Last July, it doubled, to $100. It went to $225 on Jan. 1, and it is scheduled to increase to $300 next July 1 and to $385 on Jan. 1, 2014.