Graham Kilmer

Habitat Breaks Ground on King Park Homes

Homeownership project will build 120 single-family homes near westside park.

By - Jun 6th, 2023 03:17 pm
Habitat Milwaukee King Park groundbreaking. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Habitat Milwaukee King Park groundbreaking. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

Habitat for Humanity held a groundbreaking ceremony for its piece of a huge homeownership project in Milwaukee’s King Park neighborhood.

That project involves the building of approximately 120 homes that will eventually be sold to low-income first-time home buyers. Habitat is building single-family 80 homes and developer Emem Group is building another 20 duplexes, which will be rented at below-market rates for 15 years and then sold to homebuyers. The majority of homes built by Milwaukee Habitat are sold to Black and Hispanic families.

The project was drawn in part from a city-wide affordable housing plan created by the Community Development Alliance (CDA) in 2021. The organization worked with the county on the King Park project and has been leading the development of the project. Teig Whaley-Smith, CDA chief executive, said that the community development plans created with the input of neighborhood residents show they are “screaming for homeownership” and “they are asking for help.”

Since taking office County Executive David Crowley has made housing a strategic priority for advancing racial equity in Milwaukee, which is an overarching goal for the county affirmed by county ordinance. The influx of federal funding following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed Crowley’s administration to make historic investments in housing that otherwise would have been difficult for the cash-strapped county.

“Affordable housing is not merely a basic need,” Crowley said. “It is a fundamental right that every person deserves. It is the cornerstone of a thriving and equitable society.” Crowley said he was evicted three times before he was a sophomore in high school and that supporting a project like this is “a dream come true.”

In 2022, the county’s Housing Division proposed using $6 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to help finance the 120-home project in the King Park area. The housing investment is one piece of a much larger investment by the county in the neighborhood. In 2021, the county joined the area’s four major health systems to build a new Mental Health Emergency Center, which was finished the next year; and in 2022 the board approved a $42 million plan to build a new human services building for the Department of Health and Human Services at 1230 W. Cherry St., just north of the Marcia P. Coggs Human Services building, 1220 W. Vliet St., which it will replace and whose name it will take; and another $1.5 million was allocated for the rehabilitation of the King Park Community Center.

Brian Sonderman, executive director of Milwaukee Habitat, said the organization is “much more than just a construction company. At our core, we’re a homeownership organization.”

Sonderman noted that many families have seen the cost of housing outpace the growth in their wages and that many families are being priced out of the market. That is where Habitat has a role to play. And Sonderman said that the organization plans to double the number of Milwaukee families it serves every year by 2028. “Our plan is to consistently build more than 30 homes per year, on our way to 40 homes by 2028.”

Habitat Milwaukee will build ranch-style homes for the first time in the King Park neighborhood, Sonderman said. “These single-story homes are more efficient to build. They will be safer for our volunteer base to build as well as our staff, and they’ll help maintain affordability for future homebuyers. ” The new home design is named the Allen, for longtime Habitat volunteer Bill Allen.

The other 40 homes developed by Emem Group will be duplexes, so there will be 20 structures. These homes will be financed in part with low-income housing tax credits, so they will be rented at below-market rates for 15 years, at which point they will be sold to Habitat for sale to homebuyers, said Michael Emem, president and CEO of Emem Group.

“So this is a very innovative and collaborative effort, and as real estate development projects get harder and harder innovation and collaboration is what you need,” Emem said. “If costs aren’t going down we have to think outside the box.”

Emem Group applied for state-managed federal low-income housing tax credits, but was not awarded the credits in the latest round. Emem told Urban Milwaukee that the company will go after non-competitive federal tax credits, which can be applied for at any time and are awarded on a rolling basis. “So we’re confident we’re going to obtain the federal tax credits and we’re backstopping what we lost within the state tax credit equity with other funding sources.”

Update: This story has been updated to remove reference to a $110,000 or less sale price and to reflect that the county funding for the project was $6 million, not $6.5 million, and to clarify that the 120 homes are not all single-family and that they will be sold to families based on income but that the majority of Milwaukee Habitat homes are sold to Black and Hispanic families.

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Categories: MKE County, Real Estate

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