County Seeks Suburban Affordable Housing Projects

Milwaukee County’s Housing Division, in partnership with the Community Development Alliance (CDA), is seeking proposals from affordable housing projects in Milwaukee County suburbs that need gap financing.

Earlier this year, county officials approved a plan to use $15 million in federal funds from the county’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) allocation to support affordable housing projects in suburban communities. The project is being driven in part by the lack of affordable housing options in the suburbs, which limits the mobility of county residents.

“What we’re looking for is multifamily affordable housing projects, geographically dispersed in as many suburbs as possible,” Housing Administrator James Mathy told Urban Milwaukee.

What the county is offering, Mathy explained, is gap financing. The funds can be used to cover construction costs, to be used in conjunction with Low Income Housing Tax Credits, or to reduce the rent on units that would otherwise be leased at the market rate. All projects will need to maintain the affordability for a period of at least 20 years.

The county plans to solicit projects for funding in two rounds, with the first round offering $12 million and the second $3 million. With both, the plan is to maintain a rolling request for proposals that remains open until the funds have been expended or allocated to projects. The funding pool for these projects do come with a deadline, though, as ARPA funds have to be allocated to a project by the end of 2024, per federal rules.

Mathy said the county is not currently concerned about the ARPA deadline for this project. The most heavily-weighted criteria for scoring project submissions listed on the RFP is “project readiness.”

The RFP process is being managed by CDA, which is a network of community development financiers and developers that are collaborating on projects that increase affordable housing in Milwaukee. Successful bidders on this pool of funding will also have access to other affordable development funders with the CDA for additional financing. Teig Whaley-Smith, the chief executive of the CDA, was formerly the director of the county’s Department of Administrative Services from 2015-2020.

When the proposal was first discussed, Mathy said projects in the city of Milwaukee would not be excluded from consideration, but noted that the city received its own sizeable ARPA allocation and the suburbs have significantly fewer affordable housing options. The county’s suburban communities have been historically opposed to affordable housing projects, and historically racist housing practices have excluded county residents of color from buying homes and building wealth in these communities.

“The foundation of housing is one of the main social determinants of health, and there still remains a large gap as relates to homeownership for African-Americans throughout Milwaukee,” County Executive David Crowley said when he signed off on the spending proposal.

Under Crowley, the county has begun to implement a strategic plan for the entire government that seeks to make Milwaukee County the healthiest in Wisconsin by achieving racial equity. Supporting affordable housing, especially in areas that have had historical discriminatory housing practices, Mathy said, “is certainly and issue of racial equity.”

Mathy said that he’s seeing the suburban resistance to affordable housing beginning to crack. “One of the things I’ve noticed is that, in the past few years, municipalities appear to be way more open to affordable housing, in their respective municipalities than they were before,” he said. Not only are some of the municipalities open to the projects, they are actually seeking them out, he said.

Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride joined Crowley at the signing of the county resolution setting this funding aside, and said that the suburb he represents is “a city of wealthy homes” with a “problem of affordability.”