Freepik
The Madison flag on top of a collection of large buildings.
It’s a nice problem for a city to have.
Madison’s population is growing faster than its housing supply. As a result, recent rent increases have been higher here than in any other place in the nation, save Arlington, Virginia.
In a recent story, Wisconsin State Journal reporter Lucas Robinson explained why as succinctly as anyone could. He points out that college towns that also include government and high tech sectors tend to have these kinds of growth rates. “But here, all that is colliding in a small geography centered around an isthmus, historically low-density neighborhoods, a nonexistent regional transit system, and an urban skyline that can’t build up within a mile of the state Capitol to preserve a view of the building.”
Before we get to possible solutions, let’s take a moment to celebrate the problem. This is the result of Madison being a flat out great place to live with a vibrant economy, good jobs and an overall high quality of life, never mind snow and mosquitoes. I grew up in the Milwaukee metro area where the central city has lost 150,000 residents since 1960. In fact, Milwaukee’s ambitious mayor, Cavalier Johnson, has set a goal of getting the city’s population to 1 million, which would actually exceed its historic high of about 750,000. He’s not lamenting high housing prices; he’s trying to get people just to move back to his town. Given the two scenarios, I’ll take ours any day of the week.
Still, high housing prices are a problem for a bunch of reasons. They threaten to price out people who do necessary and important jobs but who don’t earn high wages, like teachers, firefighters and cops. And, historically, investing in a home is the way the vast bulk of Americans build wealth. If rents are high it makes it harder to save to buy that first house or, for that matter, just to get by. The State Journal reports that 48% of Madisonians are spending more than the benchmark 30% of their income on housing.
So, assuming that we don’t want to solve this problem by destroying our economic vitality or our quality of life (which would work just great!), what can be done?
Well, first off we have to look to the free market. The Republican Legislature has mostly sealed off any regulatory options, like inclusionary zoning or rent control, which are questionable strategies anyway. We have to build our way out of the problem. So, I think the city is doing the right thing in its controversial plans to increase density in neighborhoods that don’t necessarily welcome it. City staff and policy makers are doing a pretty good job of navigating those choppy waters, making strategic retreats here and there while basically staying on course.
Second, while the neighborhood plans are mostly about modest increases, we need to develop other nodes of really high density. Traditionally, the city has encouraged taller buildings only in the downtown and more recently along East Washington Avenue, but that is limited by the Capitol view preservation height restrictions. I would be fine with eliminating those — even though that would compromise my own view from my condo — but I realize that that’s a minority opinion and, anyway, those limits are incorporated in both state law and local ordinance. Trying to allow higher buildings around the Capitol is probably a waste of energy.
But it would make sense to encourage tall buildings at, say, East Towne and West Towne as those properties redevelop. That’s already happening at Hilldale and I think it looks great and works wonderfully. Perhaps we should even think bigger. Justice Castaneda, who leads Common Wealth Development, thinks we should encourage housing development in places like Janesville.
While that may be too far away, his point is well taken, which leads to my next suggestion. Housing and transportation are two sides of the same coin. We have to revisit a regional transit authority. We had one covering Dane County briefly in 2010. It not only would have extended bus service, and perhaps rail at some point, beyond Madison’s borders, it also would have provided funding through a local sales tax. But when Robin Vos and Scott Walker took over state government in 2011, they eliminated the RTA and its taxing authority. Of course, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would support reinstating it and even Vos may be softening. This year he supported a new sales tax for Milwaukee. And there’s an outside chance that the Democrats could take back control of the Assembly in the next session, though the Senate appears to be out of reach in this cycle. In any event, a new RTA is key and there’s reason to think that trying to get state government to agree isn’t a waste of time.
But even without an RTA, Madison’s new bus rapid transit (BRT) system is set to open later this year and it represents a great step in the right direction. The city has made it even more promising by encouraging increased housing densities along the line. I’m not sure why Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway doesn’t get more credit for this — maybe she’s trying to avoid what she sees as the short-term political blame — but this is an accomplishment of historic proportions. It won’t take long for people to take it for granted or to wonder how we ever got along without it.
So, overall, I think city government is doing the right things. It just needs to do even more of them. For example, there’s the endless debate over whether the city is too lax or too tough on developers. There’s no question that things have improved over the last couple of decades to favor development, but there’s always more that can be done. Along those lines the city should take a close look at recommendations made by the developer-advocacy group Smart Growth Madison. And it would probably be a good idea to take just a little bit of the money the city pours into direct subsidies for affordable housing and use it to hire more planning and zoning staff to get approvals done faster. This is a relatively easy call because we’re talking about the time it takes to get the final bureaucratic sign-offs, but after any tough political issues have been decided.
And don’t forget that property taxes add to the cost of housing. So the city should do all it can to avoid asking voters to exceed state-imposed taxing limits. It would also be great if voters would elect more school board members (or just one) whose first priority was a concern for taxpayers.
One final point. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t think of yourself as progressive and concerned about equity and at the same time oppose taller buildings and higher densities. Because taller buildings and higher densities, supported by better transit, are what deliver those progressive goals.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
