EAU CLAIRE — “The fact is it’s nobody’s fault,” said Julian Emerson, a former journalist for the Leader Telegram who recently spoke about the housing shortage at a City Council meeting Monday night. “Addressing affordable housing is a really complicated issue, especially as the cost of building has gone up substantially.”
He, Paul Savides, and Susan Wolfgram all spoke on the issue during Monday night’s city council meeting, advocating for the city to invest in low-income housing.
Both Savides and Wolfgram are members of the JONAH Affordable Housing Task Force and the Tenant-Landlord Resource Center.
At the Council meeting, Wolfgram said that 36 percent of households in Eau Claire are currently “at the ALICE threshold plus poverty.”
“Again, more than one out of three meet this threshold, many earning $30,000 or less per year,” she said. “These neighbors cannot afford the essentials and many of them are paying 50 percent or more of their income on rent and are one crisis away from the possibility of falling into homelessness.”
“The cost of housing in Eau Claire has doubled during the past five years and we have an extremely low vacancy rate of less than two percent,” said Emerson. “That is part of the doubling. There is just not enough supply to house people in Eau Claire and in the surrounding area.”
He added, “As housing has become increasingly expensive — as it has across much of the nation — the number of people who are losing their homes or who are in danger of losing their homes has grown dramatically.”
Emerson said this issue includes both the high cost of home ownership and the increasingly high cost of rent.
“The average home price in the city of Eau Claire was about $330,000,” he said. “Rents are most often above $1000, and some people report paying close to $2000 a month.”
Emerson said that in the past, the city tried to address this issue through the use of LIHTC or Low Income Housing Tax Credits.
“Starting in 2018, I believe, a lot of new housing developments that developers were proposing in the city of Eau Claire — the City Council and the Plan Commission were requiring that those developments have a certain number of either workforce or affordable housing units that were a part of them,” said Emerson. “And that was a really well intended effort. The problem was (that) the only real mechanism for helping developers build and subsidize those units and make them affordable was the LIH tax credits.”
However, he said that the problem was that “hardly any of the developers qualified for those tax credits. Most of those units were, in fact, built, but they were not built at the reduced rate. They just built them at market rate. So that just added to more higher cost apartments.”
He explained that there are only so many tax credits offered, “and the majority of them go to developers in Milwaukee and Madison.”
He said that there has been some talk about rehabilitating older structures for affordable housing, “but that has been complicated too because the cost of rehabilitation is so expensive. Materials and labor costs have gone up significantly related to construction since the pandemic.”
He also said that another way the city has been trying to address the issue is by changing zoning restrictions, but this “can be controversial.”
“We are not building enough affordable housing and senior housing,” said Savides. “I think we need to incentivize developers to do that. Whatever it takes to do that could be tax incremental financing or some kind of outright grant or loan.”
At the City Council Meeting, Wolfgram, Savides, and Emerson supported the city’s plan to add $1,000,000 annually to fund the Flexible Housing Initiative, Affordable Housing for the years 2025 to 2029, but they felt it was not enough.
“To accommodate funding this program, (the) Downtown Parking Replacement (project) would be reduced by $5,000,000 in 2028 which still leaves $10,000,000 in this downtown replacement parking fund,” said Wolfgram during the meeting.
Three representatives from downtown businesses spoke at the meeting about the need for downtown parking. City officials spoke of the limited financial resources to address all the city’s needs.
Wolfgram said, “I would ask us to step back and reflect on how we are upside down on valuing parking over people.”
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