Providence resident Rob Farago was profiled in Sunday’s Washington Post:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Heading toward a Starbucks on the pricey side of town, Rob Farago is packing. The Glock 30SF lives on his right hip, holstered under his jacket, with 10 rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. Backup ammo is in another pocket.

Farago didn’t used to be a gun guy. He was a car guy. He had a popular blog called the Truth About Cars. He sold it in 2009 and searched for a new consumer topic, landing on guns.

He bought his first gun a week before the debut of TheTruthAboutGuns.com. He took a firearms class. He filled out the paperwork and went through the background check to get a permit to carry a gun. He now owns 18 guns.

“Once you put a gun on, you gain situational awareness,” he says. After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”

Last summer, Farago secured a pistol permit [pdf] from Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s office and did a multiday open-carry experiment, which he described as his “personal journey into RI gun rights.” You can read it here: day one, day two, day four, day five.

“I’m not a weirdo with a gun,” Farago wrote at one point. “I’m a non-violent, law-abiding American who believes deeply and completely that U.S. citizens have a Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. I am a single father protecting his daughter. Both her life and her right to defend herself with a firearm when she assumes that responsibility for herself.”

Chafee's house at 54 Barnes St.

Bill McBride, who writes the must-read economics blog Calculated Risk, has been keeping an eye on Governor Chafee’s (thus far unsuccessful) efforts to unload the Providence house he and has wife bought in 2006.

As I reported yesterday, the Chafees have reduced the price twice since putting the home on the market in mid-February – it’s now listed for $799,000. McBride, who knows the housing market better than just about anybody, thinks they’re getting closer to what the market will bear:

When this house was first listed, I argued we’d see a price reduction. Although Case-Shiller doesn’t track Providence, house prices have fallen about 15% in Boston and 23% in New York – and that would suggest a selling price in the $700s for the Chafees’ home. So many homeowners are unwilling to price their homes realistically – at least the Chafees have been willing to reduce the price.

One of McBride’s commenters noted that the house has an appraised value of $801,200, so the Chafees are only now asking for what the city says it’s worth. Meanwhile, another commenter questions whether the local property market should be compared with those in Boston and New York:

I don’t know much about Boston’s real estate market. But why would you compare the real estate markets in Providence and New York? The economic base, job scene, inventory, relocation market, etc. is totally different. Providence once was one of America’s great manufacturing towns. Now, all it has left is government and education.

Providence has more in common with Detroit or Cleveland.

Detroit?!

Chafee's house at 54 Barnes St.

Doesn’t anybody want to buy Lincoln Chafee’s house?

After two and a half months on the market, this week the governor and his wife reduced the asking price for their 3,900-square-foot home on Providence’s East Side by another $30,000.

The Chafees are now seeking $799,000 for the seven-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom property at 54 Barnes St.

That’s down 10% from the initial listing price of $889,000 they sought in mid-February. The Chafees had already reduced the price to $829,000 last month.

The Chafees bought the house for $939,000 in 2006, so selling at the current price would mean a $140,000 loss for the wealthy couple (before closing costs). They already tried to get rid the property in 2009 but didn’t wind up selling.

Home prices in the Providence-New Bedford area dropped 33% from the peak of the housing bubble in June 2006 through last December, according to a home-price index maintained by FNC Inc., a mortgage-technology firm. Prices on the relatively desirable East Side likely haven’t fallen by that much, however.

(photo: Residential Properties)

A WPA sidewalk plaque in Prospect Terrace Park. (Wikipedia)

One of my favorite places in Providence is Blackstone Boulevard, the tree-lined, two-mile stretch of road on the East Side that is a popular destination for joggers, walkers, readers and painters.

At both ends of the boulevard, there are tiny plaques in the sidewalk that credit its construction to employees of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal jobs program that funded everything from highways to playwrights. Similar plaques are also in the nearby sidewalks of Pawtucket’s Oak Hill neighborhood.

As a lover of history, those signs had made me wonder how many places in Rhode Island were impacted by the WPA, which operated from 1935 to 1943.

Monday’s announcement that URI has uncovered six WPA murals renewed my curiosity about the agency, which has been in the news again during the Great Recession as some commentators discussed the merits of a federal jobs program to deal with today’s high unemployment.

So I did a little research – and here’s what I found. (Most of this information came from the “Final Report on the WPA Program, 1935-43.”)

Highways, sewers, clothing

The WPA spent $60 million on projects in Rhode Island over its eight years – about $737 million in 2009 dollars. (For comparison purposes, the big federal stimulus enacted last year is expected to send $1.1 billion into Rhode Island, half of it for Social Security and Medicare Medicaid.)

How did all that money get used? All sorts of ways. But here are a few statistics.

Transportation was a big category. WPA workers built or repaired 671 miles of highways, roads and streets and constructed or renovated 35 bridges and viaducts in Rhode Island. They also built 10,300 feet of airport runways and constructed or repaired five landing fields.

Infrastructure was another one. In Rhode Island, the WPA built or renovated 222 schools, 395 other public buildings, 34 parks (including Blackstone Boulevard, presumably), 54 playgrounds and fields, seven pools, seven power plants, and 184 miles of new sewers.

WPA employees in the state also served 818,187 school lunches; sent housekeepers on 85,558 visits; and manufactured 2.8 million garments of clothing. And 21,317 people attended WPA-produced musical performances.

In addition to the examples I mentioned earlier, the College Hill Independent put together a list of some WPA-funded public structures in Providence, including Hope High School, the Pastroe Building on Exchange Terrace and Roger Williams Park. And this site lists some other WPA murals in places such as the East Providence Post Office.

There were also the famous Federal Writers’ Project guides to the states, including 1937 editions exploring Rhode Island and Massachusetts, both available online in full for free from Google Books.

Work for the jobless

The WPA gave a lot of people work in the Ocean State during the Depression.

Over its first five years, from 1935 through the end of 1940, the WPA was employing more than 10,000 people in Rhode Island – including 17,144 people at its peak, in the summer of 1938.

That would be roughly equivalent to employing 25,000 people today, considering that Rhode Island’s population was 713,346 in 1940, compared with about 1 million now.

Have you noticed WPA signs in your neighborhood? Let me know in the comments.