Buffalo Wild Wings TIF Could Fund Road Repairs
Repairs and speed bumps for 8 southside streets. Plus: a recap of week's real estate news.
W. Morgan Ave. near S. 27th St. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.
The City of Milwaukee is poised to tap one of its most unusual tax incremental financing (TIF) districts to fund a series of street repaving and traffic safety projects near S. 27th St. and W. Morgan Ave.
Under a proposal unanimously endorsed Thursday by the Redevelopment Authority of the City of Milwaukee (RACM), the Department of Public Works would receive $880,000 to repave portions of S. 20th St., S. 23rd St., W. Morgan Ave., S. 32nd St., W. Verona Ct., W. Wilbur Ave., S. Miner St. and W. Plainfield Ave. Speed humps would be installed near the recently rehabilitated Southgate Playfield and along W. Plainfield Ave. The portion of S. 20th St. between W. Morgan Ave. and W. Howard Ave. would be restriped and the intersections along the corridor would see pedestrian-safety-focused improvements.
The city often uses TIF districts to support projects to turn vacant, blighted properties into new, affordable housing or create new office spaces for family-supporting jobs. But in the case of the 27th and Howard TIF district, the city instead provided Illinois-based Frontline Real Estate Partners with a $50,000 subsidy in 2011 to redevelop the Foster Pontiac automobile dealership into a suburban-style retail complex anchored by a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant. In addition to the direct subsidy, the district was tapped for $125,000 for a reconfiguration of the S. 27th St. median to allow access to the 3.3-acre site and associated landscaping improvements.
The Buffalo Wild Wings opened in 2012 and is currently joined in the three-building complex by Jimmy John’s and Panda Express restaurants, a T-Mobile store, an uBreakiFix repair shop and Azara Smoke n Vape. The former dealership is now split into three properties, 3606 S. 27th St., 3632-3636 S. 27th St. and 3650-3658 S. 27th St. The district runs the entire way to S. Howard Ave., including all seven properties that line the east side of the street.
“We are generating about $190,000 in increment,” said Department of City Development economic development specialist Alyssa Remington of the increased annual property tax revenue. The district had a base value of $16.1 million, but was assessed for $23.3 million at the end of 2021. “We anticipate even with these new project costs, we would be able to amortize [the debt] by year 16, which is levy year 2025.”
The full Common Council must still approve the latest amendment, which in addition to the street projects includes $100,000 for “administrative costs.” The projects would be executed as part of the city’s High-Impact Paving Program where the top layer of the roadway is replaced, extending the street’s life by 10 to 15 years.
State TIF law allows for incremental revenue from the district to be expended on public improvements within a half mile of the district’s borders. TIF districts have a maximum legal life of 27 years and must be closed once their project costs are retired.
Photos and Project Map
Wildenberg Hotel
Weekly Recap
New Hotel Rises on City’s Edge
Construction of Wisconsin’s first WoodSpring Suites hotel is moving quickly towards completion.
Kansas-based New Era Development Group is behind the 122-room, four-story project. The extended-stay hotel rents primarily by the week.
The hotel is being built on formerly publicly-owned land near Interstate 41, N. 124th St. and W. Bradley Rd. at Milwaukee’s northwestern edge. The property, currently addressed as 12355 W. Park Pl., is left over from the redevelopment from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation‘s reconfiguration of the nearby freeway ramps.
The nearest Milwaukee resident lives approximately a half-mile from the site. The property is located at the southeast corner of an intersection that has seen a substantial amount of change in recent years. A Sam’s Club warehouse club store opened at the intersection’s northeast corner, 8010-8100 N. 124th St., in 2016. The northwest corner, located in suburban Menomonee Falls, is home to an Aldi’s grocery store that opened in 2019 and behind it is a Woodman’s grocery store.
City Providing Cleanup Loan To Redevelop Edison School
The Redevelopment Authority of the City of Milwaukee will use its brownfield cleanup loan fund to support the redevelopment of a former school into 75 affordable apartments. It’s the fourth piece of city funding going into the $27.6 million project.
The board unanimously voted Thursday to provide Gorman & Co. with an up-to-$1.13 million loan for cleanup work associated with the Edison School project, 5372 N. 37th St., in the Old North Milwaukee neighborhood. The funds will be paired with a $965,000 grant from the city’s Housing Trust Fund, a grant of $750,000 from the city’s allocation of HOME affordable housing funds and $875,000 from a tax incremental financing (TIF) district that will effectively rebate increased property tax revenue from the development.
Gorman, with partner Malik Cupid, would redevelop the school building into 63 apartments set aside at below-market rates for individuals at least 55 years old. Twelve three-bedroom townhouses would be constructed on the 3.5-acre property. Fifteen of the units would be reserved for individuals experiencing homelessness, with financing provided by the Milwaukee Continuum of Care.
Developer Ted Matkom, Gorman’s Wisconsin market president, told a council committee last week that his firm hopes to begin construction work by the end of January. The brownfield loan will be used to close a financing gap.
City Approves Funding For Pedestrian Plaza, Protected Bike Lane
The Common Council unanimously signed off Tuesday on a proposal to allocate up to $3.8 million to a series of pedestrian and bicycle improvements to North Avenue on Milwaukee’s East Side.
Increased tax revenue from three new East Side apartment buildings would provide the majority of the funding needed for the creation of a pedestrian plaza at E. Ivanhoe Pl. as well as possibly raised intersections and protected bicycle lane segments along E. North Ave.
“The reason we are looking at this particular area is it’s on the top 10 of the pedestrian high-injury network,” said Department of City Development senior economic development specialist Dan Casanova to the Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee on Dec. 6. He said the city, under the direction of Mayor Cavalier Johnson, would use the tax incremental financing strategy where possible to make traffic safety improvements.
The effort would be focused on the intersection of N. Farwell Ave. and E. North Ave., one of the city’s 10 most-dangerous intersections according to a 2019 pedestrian plan and the busiest pedestrian intersection studied by the city.
City Selling 90 Lots To Advance Affordable Housing Effort
A potentially transformative housing effort for a neighborhood just west of downtown Milwaukee is gaining steam.
The Community Development Alliance (CDA) is working to build 120 houses on vacant lots in the King Park neighborhood. The nonprofit has identified key funding sources, selected development partners and is now moving to acquire the land. The goal is to sell the 1,000-square-foot houses to minority families for approximately $110,000 each, helping to build generational wealth and indirectly improving neighborhood conditions for existing residents.
The City of Milwaukee is happy to help.
“One of the assets the City of Milwaukee and the Redevelopment Authority has is vacant lots,” said Redevelopment Authority of the City of Milwaukee assistant director Dave Misky at the authority’s meeting Thursday.
Former Pan Am Motel Could Be Redeveloped
An aging, mid-century apartment building near the Miller Valley would be redeveloped under a $25 million plan from TEAM Management and Wisconsin Redevelopment. The building was originally known as the Pan American Motel before its conversion to apartments.
The development team would rehabilitate the four-story, 75-unit building at 3808 W. Wisconsin Ave., which is substantially set back from the street. The redeveloped building would have only 25 units and a new, 54-unit building would be constructed closer to the street. The new building would have an L shape, with the roof of an existing, small parking structure between the two buildings converted to a courtyard.
“We want to be the gateway to the near West Side,” said TEAM’s Darnell Williams to the City Plan Commission on Dec. 5. The property management company’s offices are currently located in a one-story building at the front of the 1.5-acre site. That building would be demolished and TEAM would move into 7,500 square feet of commercial space in the new building.
The new unit layouts would include a mix of one, two and three-bedroom floor plans. The existing building would see its 250-square-foot studios converted to 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartments.
Bauman Defends Historic Preservation Process
Is Milwaukee’s historic preservation process broken? So claimed developer Juli Kaufmann, in a column published by Urban Milwaukee yesterday.
That, in turn, provoked more comments, with Ald. Bob Bauman, in no uncertain terms, defending the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) that he has served on for 16 years. Meanwhile, developer Tim Gokhman, who went through a protracted, nearly half-year process before the design for his new home in the North Point Historic District was approved, supported Kaufmann’s view that the HPC process is problematic.
“There is a very clear problem in consistency whether a proposal meets the commission’s guidelines or not,” Gokhman says. “No one is willing to address it. I think it is time to address this.”
Bauman rejects this, contending there have been few problems with how the HPC operates. “Ninety-five percent of what we do is non-controversial,” he says.
County Finalizing Deal for Forensic Science Center
Milwaukee County officials are in the process of finalizing a complicated real estate deal with the state of Wisconsin and the Medical College of Wisconsin. If everything goes according to plan, the result will be a new $226 million Center for Forensic Science and Protective Medicine, a facility which has been in planning for months.
Before the legal paperwork is finalized and all the signatures applied, the Department of Administrative Services (DAS) is going before the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors and asking it to release approximately $112.3 million currently held in an account controlled by the board.
Funding for the project was originally part of County Executive David Crowley‘s 2023 recommended budget. The board amended the budget, placing those funds in an account to give supervisors additional oversight and approval of the project.
Aaron Hertzberg, DAS director, told the board’s Finance Committee that his department needs the funds released in order to move the project forward. If the funds aren’t released during this board cycle, he said, it could throw off the construction timeline and the building wouldn’t be completely enclosed by the arrival of winter adding “a lot more complexity to the project” and the potential for “a multimillion-dollar impact.” Construction is expected to begin in 2023 and be completed by December 2025 with the county moving in by February 2026.
Council Approves Fiserv’s Suburb-to-City Move
The Milwaukee Common Council completed its part of a complicated agreement Tuesday to bring the headquarters of financial services technology company Fiserv to downtown Milwaukee.
Without debate, the council unanimously adopted a tax incremental financing (TIF) district that would provide the company with $7 million over a period of 20 years. The agreement also dedicates $4.6 million in increased tax revenue from the development toward public improvements in the area, including redesigning W. Michigan St., improving Zeidler Union Square and creating Vel Phillips Plaza.
To earn the subsidy and a still undisclosed state subsidy, Fiserv would relocate all 530 jobs from its current headquarters in suburban Brookfield and create 250 new jobs.
Fiserv would lease 144,000 square feet of space in the eight-story HUB640 building at the corner of W. Wisconsin Ave. and N. Vel R. Phillips Ave. and invest at least $37 million into the project. It’s one of several major office developments the 42,000-employee company is engaging in across the globe.
Deal On Affordable Housing Adds Bay View, Edison School Projects
Avoiding political gridlock, the Milwaukee Common Council unanimously approved an amended agreement Tuesday that will allocate all $10.7 million from its Housing Trust Fund to advance 14 affordable housing projects. That includes two newly included proposals, the redevelopment of the Edison Middle School and the proposed redevelopment of the Filer & Stowell factory complex in Bay View.
“Today is a really special day,” said Alderman Michael Murphy, who led the creation of the fund 17 years ago. The fund is intended to plug financing gaps in affordable housing projects and often has only $1 million to award. “These $10.7 million will leverage nearly $140 million in construction work.”
Last week, Murphy’s colleagues on the Zoning, Neighborhoods & Development Committee voted to hold the allocations because of concerns over what wasn’t included, notably southside projects and projects the Department of City Development was recommending funding. A citizen-led technical review committee recommends what projects the trust fund should fund.
Council members Robert Bauman and JoCasta Zamarripa worked to allocate a record $10 million to the fund in 2021 as part of the city’s $394.2 million American Rescue Plan Act grant, only to see a record number of projects need funding because inflation was driving up costs. Bauman, last week, said that the review committee’s recommendations didn’t appear to consider projects that were “shovel ready.” Zamarripa said the South Side was being shortchanged.
Is Historic Preservation Process Broken?
Last week was a controversial one for Milwaukee’s historic preservation process. Developer Juli Kaufmann and her partner Mike Maschek, who now live in Riverwest, had wanted to build a new home in the North Point Historic District. But after two attempts to get approval for the two-story, 2,997-square-foot house on N. Terrace Ave. from the city’s Historic Preservation Commission (HPC), they’d had enough.
“We concluded we were unwilling to continue participating in the HPC process,” Kaufmann told Urban Milwaukee reporter Jeramey Jannene.
It was a clear slap down of the HPC by one of the most respected developers and supporters of urbanism in town.
“The historic preservation process is so broken,” Kaufmann said in an interview yesterday with Urban Milwaukee. She said the process of getting approval took six months of work and cost her tens of thousands of dollars with nothing to show for it.
New Youth Prison Gains Plan Commission Approval
Depending on who you listen to, the proposal to develop a 32-bed youth incarceration facility on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side is a welcome plan to rehabilitate offenders closer to home and create jobs or a blighting influence that will bring crime and lower property values.
After a three-and-a-half-hour meeting Monday, the City Plan Commission sided with the former argument, giving the first design approval in the complicated, lengthy process of building a local replacement for the troubled Lincoln Hills youth prison. The Common Council must still approve the plan for a site near N. 76th St. and W. Good Hope Rd.
“I’m extremely proud of the presentation before you today,” said Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) Secretary Kevin Carr in introducing the plan to the commission. He said the proposal would keep youth closer to home compared to the Lincoln Hills facility north of Wausau, enable the hiring of a more diverse workforce and improve rehabilitation outcomes by providing better programming and therapy for both inmates and their families.
State Senator Lena Taylor is the leading elected official behind the proposal. “This has not been quick and it has not been easy,” she told the commission.
Why Black Homeownership Rate Is Low
Regina Williams purchased her first home in 2020 and said the road to buying was a long and rough one, but sleeping in her own home was worth it.
Williams, 45, knew how important homeownership was because she’d grown up in homes owned by her grandparents.
She’d planned to take over one of the mortgages of their properties originally. But after a family fallout, she had to go the traditional route.
“I slept on my friend’s floor for about nine months while I just fixed my credit and saved money,” she said. “I knew what I wanted, so I made the sacrifices to get it.”
Supervisors Approve Affordable Housing Plans
A Milwaukee County Board committee provided key approvals that will allow county administrators to move forward with two major affordable housing projects.
One project is aimed at building more than 100 affordable homes in the King Park neighborhood that will eventually be sold to first-time homebuyers in the majority Black neighborhood. The second project will invest more than $2 million into a fund purchasing houses to keep them out of the hands of out-of-state investors gobbling up Milwaukee’s housing supply.
County Executive David Crowley and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) advanced a number of affordable housing initiatives in 2022; most have been made possible by the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) stimulus funds the county received. Crowley implemented the government’s first strategic plan in 2020, creating an overarching mission for all county departments to make Milwaukee the healthiest county in Wisconsin by achieving racial equity. Stable housing is an integral piece of this equation for the county executive.
“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 in July when he signed a spending resolution with funding for affordable housing projects in suburban communities.
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