The Quisling Terrace apartment building in downtown Madison. Photo by Warren LeMay on Flickr.
We don’t have to settle for half-measures and market-driven solutions.
Local debates about Madison’s housing crisis were reignited by the proposed Johnson and Bassett high-rise development in downtown Madison. The developer, Core Spaces, proposed demolishing 68 units of “naturally affordable” student housing in order to build 232 luxury student housing units. The Common Council initially rejected the project on a 13-6 vote, before reversing course just two weeks later and approving it 17-2.
Frankly, this entire saga made everyone involved look pretty clueless, but it was productive in two important ways. First, it brought the severe limits of Madison’s current housing strategy into stark relief. Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway’s “Housing Forward” plan includes many good ideas, but it also consists largely of vague political buzzwords and incrementalist solutions that are clearly unequal to the scale and urgency of one of Madison’s most pressing problems. It states that we must build 10,000 housing units every five years to keep pace with projected demand, but it provides no realistic plan for how to achieve this goal, much less how we can provide enough housing for 115,000 additional residents by 2050. It offers no clear path to building the 16,540 new affordable housing units that are needed just to meet current demand in Dane County. At a time when UW-Madison is enrolling thousands of additional students, it is silent on how to house those students. It offers no hope for aspiring homeowners unable to afford Madison’s median home sale price of $400,000, which is on track to reach $1 million by 2040. It offers no answers to the students who will be displaced by the Johnson and Bassett development, and proposes only inadequate half-measures for combating gentrification, displacement, and racial and economic segregation.
Second, the Johnson and Bassett development has also sparked a renewed public debate about housing affordability in Madison. Alders Juliana Bennett and MGR Govindarajan called for a housing “revolution,” while Alder Regina Vidaver responded with several specific suggestions as to what she thinks “revolutionary” pro-housing reforms could look like. Alder Tag Evers also wrote that “we need to see our city’s housing crisis as a local emergency,” and argued that “the city must expand its investments in affordable housing.”
How to actually solve Madison’s housing crisis – Tone Madison