BEFORE moving into her new apartment at a housing development for elderly Asian-Americans here, Wai-Chun Chiu lived alone in an apartment building where everyone spoke English and no one spoke Chinese.

Mrs. Chiu, 88, said she felt lonely there, even though it, too, was senior housing. Her limited English made it hard for her to make friends.

But the Chinese Christian Church of Rhode Island saw the isolation of Mrs. Chiu and others like her in the congregation.

An evangelical congregation based in Pawtucket, the church raised $1.8 million two years ago to buy and convert a small jewelry factory into 17 one-bedroom units.

The 12,000-square-foot two-story building, which became available to tenants in January, is next to the congregation’s new church, which was also once a factory. Residents can walk to services and other activities and to a small library in the church’s basement that is well stocked with Chinese movies.

“Before this housing, they were all isolated,” said Jane Song, a church volunteer, who runs a weekly tai chi class for residents.

The church’s project is just one of dozens of Rhode Island developments designed to address the needs of the state’s aging population. According to the 2000 census, Rhode Island ranks sixth in the nation for the proportion of residents over age 65. For people over 75, the fastest-growing segment of the state’s population, it ranks fifth.

“Certainly, there is a growing need to provide more senior housing, especially in urban areas,” said Susan Boddington, deputy director of the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation, the state’s affordable-housing agency.

There are currently 204 federally subsidized senior housing developments in Rhode Island with a total of nearly 20,000 apartments. Additionally, many local housing authorities offer some subsidized senior housing.

But many of those units are taken by disabled adults, who are not necessarily elderly, Ms. Boddington and others said. A recent report by Rhode Island Housing found that the number of subsidized elderly housing units in each of Rhode Island’s 39 cities and towns does not always meet each community’s need.

“Some communities can house elderly households in assisted housing almost immediately, while some have long waiting lists,” the report found.

Corinne Calise Russo, director of the state’s Department of Elderly Affairs, said the shortage means that some elderly people may have to move from the community they are accustomed to, away from family and friends.

“We clearly know what the problem is,” Ms. Russo said. “The problem in Rhode Island is we don’t have the options older people would like to see.”

These options include financing programs that enable homeowners to repair or rehabilitate their properties so they can continue to live in them as they age, Ms. Russo said. They also include more age-restricted developments; older residents are often surprised to learn that there are sometimes nonelderly in senior housing, she and others said.

Another issue is cost. Ms. Russo and others said there is a need for programs that help low- and moderate-income elderly people afford assisted-living facilities. Rhode Island Housing began a program five years ago that provides 200 Medicaid waivers to help offset the cost of low-income residents in assisted-living facilities, but there are 200 more on a waiting list for the waivers.

Of course, not all of Rhode Island’s growing elderly population have low to moderate incomes. Because of a surge in the state’s housing prices over the last 20 years, many older Rhode Islanders are better off financially than their parents were at their age, census data show.

They are also healthier and more active.

“We have a very different elderly population now than we had in the ’60s,” Ms. Russo said.

At Harbor House in Newport, some of the tenants still go out to work every day even though they are at least 62, said John M. Byrne, senior property manager. Then there are retirees like Herb Reid, an 85-year-old career Navy man, who spends many mornings sipping coffee in a spacious dining room overlooking Narragansett Bay.

Mr. Reid said he had come to know all the tenants in the four years that he had been living at Harbor House. “It’s like a big family,” he said.