Gorman Building Affordable Housing for Veterans

Gorman and Company has plans to take a former Milwaukee Public School and turn it into affordable housing for veterans.

Kudos to Gorman. This is another project in the city being taken on by the development company that will help solve the crisis of affordable housing. The company also created a Tiny Homes project for youth aging out of foster care.

The city needs all of these kinds of projects it can get, considering the research by Matthew Desmond, the Princeton professor who literally wrote the book in eviction in Milwaukee. This city was the centerpiece his book Evicted, and while his later research has found there are 59 cities with a worse rate of evictions than Milwaukee, the rate here is still high with one of 25 renters evicted each year, as Urban Milwaukee’s Bruce Murphy reported.

Among many possible solutions to the problem is to create affordable low-income housing. Milwaukee Business Journal reporter Sean Ryan reported that these apartments Gorman plans to build will be marketed to veterans with families.

Ted Matkom with Gorman told Ryan that there aren’t many affordable housing options veterans with families. His firm has been interested in the site at 2001 W. Vliet St. for a while now. And the large classrooms could work well for units with two or three bedrooms.

Gorman will be going after historic preservation tax credits and affordable housing tax credits for this one. And Ryan notes the project will likely hinge on the firm’s ability to secure them.

Design Firm Relocating Nearer to Central City

A design firm with offices in Mequon and downtown Milwaukee is consolidating and moving its employees to a building in Halyard Park.

Corrinne Hess at the BizTimes reported this very cool news. The company, Retail Works Inc., is moving its offices out of Downtown and a suburb, at the same time, and setting up shop in one of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods!

It’s an interesting decision by the company, and might also suggest how the impact of redevelopment in the city’s Brewers Hill neighborhood is spreading west to the next neighborhood, of Halyard Park.

Two Big Projects Progress

The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra got approval from the City Plan Commission for its project transforming the empty Warner Grand Theatre into its new home, as Jeramey Jannene reported.

This project, once completed will transform the 200 block of W. Wisconsin Avenue where the currently vacant theater sits, and provide a huge boost for the western part of Downtown.

And west of there, on the Marquette campus, at 17th and Clybourn, the university broke ground this week on their new $18.5 million building, as Jannene reported.

The 44,000-square-foot building will house the school’s physicians assistant studies program.

In Other News:

-El Rey bought a vacant dental clinic on the south side as an investment property, reported Tom Daykin of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

-The Wisconsin State Fair bought a building for storage on S. 76th Street.

-And Jannene has an update and photos of a new school in Walker’s Point being built.

If you think stories like this are important, become a member of Urban Milwaukee and help support real independent journalism. Plus you get some cool added benefits, all detailed here.