County Building 24 Single-Family, Affordable Homes in Oak Creek

Map of proposed subdivision site in Oak Creek. Milwaukee County.

Milwaukee County’s Housing Division is in the very early stages of developing affordable single-family homes in Oak Creek.

The plan is to build 24 single-family homes on two vacant parcels between E. Puetz Road and E. American Avenue. The site is bordered on the east by a Union Pacific rail line and subdivisions to the west. Milwaukee County acquired the site in 2006 via property tax foreclosure.

James Mathy, Housing Division Director, went before the Milwaukee County Board’s Committee on Finance Thursday to request $2 million in affordable housing money be transferred to the Oak Creek housing project. The funding comes from a $4 million allocation in the 2024 budget set aside for affordable housing; $2 million has already been applied to the Concordia 27 mixed-use affordable housing project at 2743 W. Wells St.

The project also received a $5 million Community Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which will be used to bring utilities, roads and other infrastructure to the currently vacant parcels.

“It is very, very hard to develop single-family home ownership projects,” Mathy told supervisors. “It’s very hard to raise that amount of money, so it took us quite a while.”

The county plans to work with a developer to build and sell the homes at affordable prices to first-time homebuyers, to support homeownership and wealth generation for low-income families. It is similar to a much larger project in the King Park neigborhood, where the county provided funding for 120 new affordable, single-family homes.

The two parcels in Oak Creek went undeveloped for so many years, in part because the ground was thought to be contaminated. The site was used as a small landfill in the 1960s and 1970s. Environmental testing by The Reese Group found no significant pollution beyond some areas of contamination already known about, as Urban Milwaukee previously reported.

“So a vast majority of that land is clean, which allowed us to finally move forward with this,” Mathy said.

The plan is to develop the homes and then use a legal mechanism to control their price, not just for the first buyer, but potentially in perpetuity, Mathy said.

The county will likely restrict the home prices using deed restrictions, Mathy said. Though, the county may also pursue a community land trust, which would own and control the land. A nonprofit land trust was recently launched in Milwaukee.

The county wants to prevent homeowners from purchasing at a subsidized lower price then flipping the county’s investment for a profit. But, a major reason for pursuing homeownership projects like this is to help families build wealth through homeownership. So, it’s likely a price escalator will be built into the restrictions allowing families to sell the homes down the road for some profit, albeit much less than what they would make on a market-rate home sale, Mathy said.