Are we certain that's the price point on these residences?
Absolutely not, so I'm glad you called out my speculation.
This is the best thing I could find online in terms of the developer "opening up the kimono" in an attempt to demonstrate project feasibility--scroll down a bit to scrutinize the scans of their cost and revenue projections. Key caveat: pre-pandemic! (when everyone was already highly skeptical about the project's viability in the first place...)
Anyway... 500 rental units, 500,000 sf, per that story. In terms of comps, it looks like luxury apartments in downtown Providence might be getting $2 psf these days--
this handsome Beaux Arts building is advertising on at a rate of almost exactly that ($2,695 for a 1,325 sf unit, as advertised on Zillow).
I really wouldn't know how to crunch the numbers using a blend of the scanned documents from the first article, Zillow, etc., etc. Regardless, I still don't seeing having a snowball's chance in hell of working within this market's parameters.