Tract Profit and Loss
The Tax per Acre and Tax per Capita pages look at what each neighborhood pays. This page adds the other side of the ledger. It takes every line of East Providence's FY2026 general fund, $205.1 million of revenue and $205.1 million of spending, and allocates each to the ten census tracts by the thing that drives it: property tax by where the parcels are, school costs and state school aid by public school children, streets by feet of city road, trash by the single family and two to three family homes the city collects from, and police, fire, library and city hall by residents. The point is not to rank neighborhoods or to find one whose housing mix the rest of the city should copy; none pays its own way alone. East Providence is largely built out, so the question that matters is how it grows within what is already built. The ledger shows what each kind of home contributes at today's average cost, and why infill on streets that already exist is where the margin is.
Hover a tract for its figure, click it for the full card. General fund only (water and wastewater are rate funded and excluded). Because the budget is balanced, the ten tracts' surpluses and deficits sum to zero: this is a picture of who subsidizes whom, not of whether the city is solvent. Allocation is by average cost, which is not the cost of adding one more building; see the methods.
Each neighborhood's share of the city's FY2026 revenue and spending, allocated by what drives it. Positive means a tract pays in more than its people and streets draw in services. Citywide it nets to zero; no tract's mix pays its own way alone.
These are average costs. A new home on an existing street, in a school with room, costs far less than average while paying full tax. That margin, not any neighborhood's formula, keeps a built out city solvent and attainable.
Favor infill that needs no new infrastructure: cottage courts, accessory dwellings, small buildings on existing streets. Judge proposals by their residents, students, tax and the infrastructure they need, ideally none.
The budget rises every year whether or not the city grows. New homes decide who pays for it.
The FY2026 budget rose $10.1 million (5.2 percent) over FY2025, and the property tax levy rose $4.66 million, the full 4 percent Rhode Island allows a city to raise it in a year. About $6.7 million of the increase was signed before the hearings began: the school appropriation (+$2.3 million), municipal contracts (+$1.55 million), police and fire pensions (+$1.38 million), school bond payments (+$972,000) and health care (+$472,000). Those lines rise whether or not a single new home is built. When nothing new is added to the tax base, every dollar of the increase lands on the people already here: about $212 more this year on the median $397,000 house, 22 percent more in five years, 48 percent in ten, and a bill that doubles in 18 years at that pace. New construction does not stop the increase, but it decides who carries it. The Christine alone covers about 19 percent of one year's levy increase, the Kettle Point parcel 7 percent, a cottage court about 1 percent, fifty accessory dwellings about 2 percent; roughly $1.2 million of new levy a year would cut the increase on existing bills from 4 percent to 3 percent. Opposing every new home is a position with a price, and the price is paid by the neighbors who show up to the same hearings asking why their taxes keep going up.
By census tract
Revenue is the tract's property tax plus its share of state aid and other general fund revenue; cost is its share of every general fund department. Net is revenue minus cost. Sorted by net per resident. Public school children are residents aged 5 to 17 enrolled in public school (ACS); the margins of error on that count are wide at tract scale and carry straight into the school allocation.
A resident of each type of home
Built from the citywide figures on the Tax per Capita page (people per home, levy per resident and fitted public school children per 100 residents by type of home) and the same allocation rules as the tract P&L. Streets are charged at the citywide average of 19.4 feet of city street per resident; trash collection is charged only to single family and two to three family homes, because the city collects only from buildings of one to three units; everything larger pays a private hauler (the two to five family row is charged in full, which slightly overstates its cost). Commercial, industrial and mixed use property and the state's tangible tax reimbursements add about $672 per resident citywide, which is what closes the gap for the city as a whole.
What infill adds on land that is already served
| Projectper year, citywide averages | Property tax | Residents | Public school children | Revenue | Cost at average | Net at average cost | Net with room in schools and no new street |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cottage courtten condominiums at $330,000 on one acre, existing street | $44,055 | 14.3 | 0.6 | $60,051 | $41,782 | $18,268 | $29,614 |
| Accessory dwelling unit$150,000 added to a single family lot, existing street | $2,002 | 1.4 | 0.1 | $3,569 | $4,091 | −$522 | $589 |
| Single family home$397,000, the city median assessment, on an existing street | $5,300 | 2.5 | 0.3 | $10,115 | $12,302 | −$2,187 | $2,174 |
Illustrations, not appraisals. Tax is the FY2026 residential rate ($13.35 per $1,000) on the stated assessment. Residents and children use the citywide pattern from the Tax per Capita page: 1.43 people and 4.1 public school children per 100 residents in buildings of five or more units (applied to the cottage court and the accessory dwelling, which houses 1.4 people here), 2.51 people and 10.4 children per 100 residents in single family homes. "Net at average cost" charges every service at the citywide average, including streets. "Room in schools and no new street" charges no street cost, because the lot already has one, and half the average school cost, a stand in for a district whose buildings and classrooms have room; everything else stays at average. The single family home is charged city trash collection; the others pay private haulers.
Repaving is bought from the capital budget, outside the general fund above. The city's 2018, 2023 and 2025 paving programs price it at about $78 per centerline foot, so repaving all 917,031 feet of city street once would cost about $71.5 million. At the $2.4 million a year the city has been spending, a street waits about 30 years for its next surface, roughly twice the life of a mill and overlay; a 15 year cycle would cost about $4.8 million a year, or $101 per resident. It is a real liability and another reason to grow on streets that are already paved, but it is not what decides the ledger.
Where the money comes from and where it goes
FY2026 adopted general fund, from the budget book's summary tables (pages 7 to 12). The driver column is how each line was spread across tracts.
How much the assumptions matter
Net per resident under alternative allocation rules. The ranking is stable: the same four tracts run surpluses under every rule, and the spread between the strongest and weakest tract is at least $2,400 per resident under every rule.
Methods and sources
Budget. FY2026 adopted general fund, $205,100,061 of revenue and expenditure, from the City of East Providence FY2026 budget book (fiscal year November 1, 2025 to October 31, 2026), department summary on page 7 and revenue by source on pages 11 and 12; total confirmed by the mayor's October 2025 signing release, which is also the source for the FY2025 comparison, the 4 percent levy increase and the drivers of the increase quoted in the "If nothing new gets built" panel. The 4 percent limit is Rhode Island's annual levy cap (R.I. Gen. Laws 44-5-2). Water ($13.3M) and wastewater ($15.2M) are rate funded enterprise funds and are excluded. Capital spending, including repaving, sits outside the general fund and is noted in the paving aside.
Property tax. Estimated FY2026 tax (assessment times the FY2026 rate, $13.35 residential or $21.06 commercial per $1,000, before exemptions) on all 15,222 taxable parcels from the assessor extract behind the Tax per Acre page, $116.8 million. Each parcel was assigned to a tract by the centroid of its outline in the RIGIS/RIDEM statewide parcel layer (December 2021 vintage); 57 parcels split since then have no outline and their $1.0 million was spread in proportion to each tract's matched levy. The $121.0 million "taxes" line in the budget exceeds the real estate estimate by $4.2 million, which was treated as the tangible (business equipment) tax and allocated by each tract's share of commercial, industrial and mixed use levy.
Allocation rules. The method is the per capita multiplier approach standard in municipal fiscal impact analysis (Burchell and Listokin, The Fiscal Impact Handbook): each budget line is spread by the driver most responsible for it. School Department ($103.5M) and debt service ($17.8M, mostly school construction bonds) by public school children; state school aid, school housing aid, Medicaid and other school revenue ($51.4M) likewise; Highway, streetlights, engineering, central garage and the DPW director ($8.5M) by feet of city maintained street; refuse collection ($3.8M) by homes in buildings of one to three units, the only ones the city collects from (the ACS groups three and four unit buildings together, so three quarters of that group is counted); the state's motor vehicle excise reimbursement, general revenue sharing, traffic camera fines, rescue billing, police detail reimbursement, interest and rents by residents; meals and hotel tax and the tangible phase out reimbursement by commercial levy share; and fire, dispatch, police, library, recreation, senior services and all general government by residents. The sensitivity table shows the main alternatives.
Population and children. American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 five year estimates by tract: population (B01003), public school enrollment ages 5 to 17 (B14003), housing units and units in structure (B25024). Tract geography is the 2020 census tracts as published by the Census Bureau's TIGERweb service.
Streets. RIDOT Road Centerlines (RIGIS), East Providence segments with local jurisdiction, excluding proposed roads, clipped to tracts in 5 meter pieces: 917,031 feet in all. State highways, I-195 and ramps are excluded as state costs. The city's budget narrative puts its own figure at 160 miles, so the RIDOT total likely includes some private ways; tract shares are the useful quantity. Repaving cost per foot is the average of three city programs: the December 2018 three year contract ($9.5 million for about 25 miles), the October 2023 program ($2.4 million for 35 streets measured at 31,577 feet) and the 2025 preliminary roadwork table ($2,385,016 for 29,450 feet, with unit costs of $19.00 per square yard for mill and overlay and $34.00 for cold in place recycling).
What this does and does not show. Average cost allocation describes how the existing budget is shared, not what one more building would cost: an apartment building on an existing street with existing pipes adds almost nothing to street or school building costs, so average allocation understates the fiscal benefit of infill and overstates its cost; the infill table above shows one simple way to adjust for that. Tracts are not service areas; residents of one tract use the parks, roads and fire response of another. Ten tracts cannot establish statistical significance, and the ACS child counts carry margins of error of 25 to 70 percent at tract scale. The school enrollment by address held by the school department would replace the weakest input here.