PROVIDENCE — Most Rhode Island voters say there isn’t enough affordable housing in their community, and they would support some land-use policies to change that, according to a new poll from Neighbors Welcome! Rhode Island.

Neighbors Welcome! is a relatively new housing advocacy group, whose mission, according to its website, “is to build more homes in Rhode Island so that our friends, family, and neighbors can afford to live in the Ocean State.”

The poll, which was conducted in partnership with YouGov earlier this year and included surveying more than 600 registered Rhode Island voters, also found that about six in 10 considered housing the state’s top problem.

“We probably didn’t need a public opinion poll to tell us that housing costs and scarcity are major issues,” Neighbors Welcome! president Claudia Wack joked at a press conference releasing the poll’s findings. “Still, we wanted to learn about and quantify what voters think about the housing shortage, so that we can provide reliable data to inform the decisions of lawmakers, donors, and community stakeholders.”

Sharing the poll results, Wack noted that both urban and suburban respondents rated the state’s housing issues similarly.

Giving an example, she said 71% of Providence respondents and 72% of those living elsewhere agreed that housing “was a major problem of Rhode Island.”

In addition to gauging the public’s level of concern regarding housing, the poll also assessed how respondents felt about various solutions, including initiatives proposed in the General Assembly, to address the state’s housing problem.

Building in some commercial districts and on smaller lot sizes, practices that are typically used to help prevent urban sprawl, showed some of the highest support in the survey with 87% and 81% of respondents, respectively, agreeing that those policies should be implemented.

Some communities, including towns such as Burrillville, have created some policies in their zoning ordinances to encourage development in former mill village areas, which might be seen as a downtown or Main Street district in other communities. This has helped preserve open space in the town while keeping the housing market less stressed, according to some community members who live there.

(For many years, Burrillville was one of the only communities in Rhode Island that met the state’s 10% affordable housing minimum; according to HousingWorks RI, the town fell just below that minimum in 2023.)

Building on smaller lot sizes could be a challenge in communities that have strict lot size minimums, like Little Compton, in which the minimum housing lot size is 2 acres, something residents there say has posed challenges. (A little more than half a percent of the seaside community’s housing is considered affordable, a stat the town has been stuck at for years.)

Rhode Island House Speaker Joseph Shekarchi, D-Warwick, said he appreciated the polling results and Neighbors Welcome! coming into the state’s housing advocacy scene.

“I know this isn’t easy, because, quite frankly, if it was easy, it could have been done a long time ago,” Shekarchi said at the press conference.

The speaker, who is pushing a package of bills in the General Assembly to tackle the affordable housing issue, admitted he’s received some pushback from community members and other legislators, but he noted, “The status quo is not acceptable. It hasn’t been and that’s what got us in the position.”

“If anybody has a better idea,” he added, “bring it to us, because I’m all ears and I’m willing to work collaboratively with anybody.”