Crowley Tours Unique Emergency Housing Facility

Housing Division Director James Mathy and County Executive David Crowley tour Hillview Building. Photo taken Jun 13, 2024 by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley embarked on a rare tour Thursday: touring a building that was recently purchased by the county.

For the past decade, the county has been reducing its footprint. Much of this was driven by an effort to save on long-term maintenance costs, and a general shrinking of county government in the face of state-imposed austerity and a self-inflicted pension fiasco.

But Crowley’s administration has made housing a chief priority, and the county’s Housing Division is unlike most other housing agencies. Its primary focus is on addressing street homelessness, and it has found success in a housing-first approach that, increasingly, is focused on getting individuals off the street and placing them directly into housing. Also, the division is located within the county’s larger human services agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, which means the same agency assisting with housing also has easy access to a wider array of supportive human services.

Earlier this year, the county purchased the Hillview Building at 1615 S. 22nd St., with plans to renovate and build out new emergency housing on the third floor. The county used approximately $1.1 million from a $3 million Neighborhood Investment Fund grant from the state; the same grant program funding new single-family homes in the King Park neighborhood.

The building is already used for housing for homeless individuals. Guest House of Milwaukee operates 27 rooms of emergency housing on the second floor of the building. It is likely Guest House will operate the additional housing units on the third floor once the county finishes renovations, James Mathy, Housing Division director, told Urban Milwaukee.

Crowley toured the building with members of the media, officials from Guest House, the Housing Division and DHHS. He remarked that this sort of investment — purchasing an old building to rehab and own — is not typical for county government.

“But all of this directly ties back into our vision of being the healthiest county in the state of Wisconsin,” he said, “housing is a critical social determinant of health.”

The county is the primary provider of the safety net programs for people living on the street, the county executive said. Enhancing the county’s ability to get people into stable housing should eventually lead to stress on the safety net programs and more investment in the “front end programs or services that lifts the entire community up,” he said.

“I want to give the county executive a lot of credit,” Mathy said. “It is not normal also for county governments to be buying buildings for this kind of work.”

The people living in the emergency housing on the second floor are already clients of the Housing Division, and the building represented the “perfect opportunity” to take control of the property and make improvements for them, Mathy previously told Urban Milwaukee.

Also, the county’s Housing Division has the largest street outreach team in Milwaukee, Mathy said. The new units on the third floor will give them more capacity to move people from the street into housing.

People experiencing homelessness want permanent housing, a place of their own, Mathy said. That is the goal of emergency housing, to take someone from the street and put them in housing, with the longer-term goal of getting them placed in permanent housing as soon as possible.

The units at the Hillview Building will provide individuals with their own private room, and operate similar to an efficiency apartment, but with 24-7 supportive services.

“A lot of our clients are struggling with mental health issues, addiction issues,” Mathy said, “that is not a barrier to permanent housing.”

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