Bus Tour Showcases New Path To Affordable Homeownership

NextGen Homes tour participants in front of a Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity home at 3260 N. Palmer St. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Two buses full of housing advocates, bankers, funders, politicians and organizers got an up-close look at six new affordable homes Friday morning.

The Community Development Alliance‘s NextGen Homes bus tour showed off many of the projects the organization has been working to stitch together for years.

Those on the tour got to see a new Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity home in Harambee and meet future homeowner Janae Terry. They also met early childhood educator and future homeowner Shatorya Jones in front of one of 42 homes being built exclusively for early childhood educators.

The tour buses took visitors to Amani and Metcalfe Park, where different developers showed off their affordable homes and participants discussed financing strategies.

The cluster of homes in Harambee is part of a “backbone” tax incremental financing (TIF) district that CDA worked with the City of Milwaukee and other partners to craft. The strategy involves using future property tax revenue generated by developing homes on vacant lots as part of a subsidy mix to reduce the cost to purchase the home to a sustainable price.

Most of the homes shown off on Friday were three-bedroom, approximately 1,000-square-foot homes. Through a variety of strategies, the development teams worked to close a financing gap between the roughly $275,000 cost to build the home and the desired, affordable sale price of $105,000. At each stop, developers, contractors and politicians discussed small adjustments to reduce costs and deed restrictions to perpetuate the subsidy while enabling homeowners to build equity.

One of those adjustments was demonstrated by Keith Turner of Turner Community Partners. Faced with the high cost of building a basement because of the need to dig out the remains of a home previously demolished and buried on the site, Turner opted to build basements of roughly 60% of the size of the other new homes and instead add a second story. “As part of my value engineering process, I found that some of the biggest cost of new construction was groundwork, so I thought, ‘What if we did a second story?'” he said. Turner’s homes, located on N. 35th Street, were originally part of the early childhood educator program, but they will no longer be subsidized with the same federal funding. Instead, Turner’s homes will be sold for the same price to anyone with an income of approximately $25 per hour.

The homes are part of CDA’s work to close the racial homeownership gap in Milwaukee by creating 32,000 new Black and Brown homeowners across several decades.

CDA and its partners saw success in 2025. A total of 986 individuals, with 80% identified as Black or Latino, successfully completed homebuying counseling programs and purchased homes.

“We are not just building homes, we are building community,” said Johanna Jimenez, CDA policy director and a former Habitat homebuyer.

Terry, the Habitat homebuyer in Harambee, said the program has “taught her to budget.” It will also be a source of financial stability. Terry and her four sons have lived in apartments for years, paying between $1,500 and $2,000 per month in rent. Her Habitat mortgage, with a below-market interest rate, will be closer to $1,000.

There continues to be more demand than supply, with CDA and its partners trying to identify new funding sources to close the gap between the cost of construction and an affordable sale price.

LISC Milwaukee, led by Theo Lipscomb, has played a key role in allocating a $5 million grant it received from the state’s American Rescue Plan Act allocation and mixing in other financing sources, including the Harambee backbone TIF district, where needed. Other partners, like Northwestern Mutual, have pledged millions of dollars in loans or grants to close financing gaps in targeted neighborhoods.

Developers hosting tours for Friday’s event included Turner, Habitat, Oby Nwabuzor of Envision Growth, JoAnna Bautch of VIA CDC and Jacob Weiler of Milwaukee Community Crossroads.

The third annual tour drew a who’s who crowd of attendees, including state Sens. Dora Drake and LaTonya Johnson, Reps. Kalan Haywood II, Supreme Moore Omokunde and Sequanna Taylor, Alderwoman Sharlen P. Moore, Zilber Family Foundation Executive Director Lianna Bishop and program director Demetria Smith, Milwaukee County Economic Development Director Celia Benton, Northwest Side CDC Executive Director Willie Smith, developer Juli Kaufmann, Milwaukee Community Crossroads Executive Director Karen Higgins, MGIC market engagement director Irma Yépez Klassen, several Northwestern Mutual representatives, Department of City Development associate planner Khari Bell and Acts Housing program manager Jordan Villegas.

The homes sold by Turner and other developers participating in the early childhood educator program include deed restrictions that allow the homeowner to receive a 2.5% annual increase in value from a future sale. The cap is designed to preserve the subsidy in perpetuity while still enabling the homeowner to build wealth.

The early childhood educator program has been under development for several years.

Escaping the “seventh tier of hell”

A cluster of homes, part of the early childhood educator program, was shown off in Amani. The neighborhood is targeted for the latest backbone TIF district as part of an effort to replace what CDA Chief Alliance Officer Teig Whaley-Smith calls “demolition by abandonment.”

The neighborhood, centered around N. 24th Place and W. Locust Street and one of the city’s most impoverished, has lost more than 500 housing units in the last 10 years, said Whaley-Smith, to demolition. The CDA director said gentrification is an issue, with about 50 homeowners with higher-than-average incomes moving in, but the bigger issue is neglect.

Whaley-Smith said the downward cycle started in the 1960s when white homeowners didn’t sell their homes to Black and Latino families.

“They either rented it out or sold it to a landlord,” he said. “That landlord couldn’t make good on that property, so they sold it to a second-tier landlord, who extracted more rent and more value and didn’t put money into the property. And then the third landlord, and the fourth landlord. And now we are in the seventh tier of hell, folks. We have landlords coming into communities, buying properties with cash, not paying their property taxes, not paying their water bill because that’s added to the property taxes, not paying insurance because they don’t have a mortgage company to require it, and not putting money into the property. And so they are cashing in on these homes, making their money back in a year or two, and waiting for the property to become so dilapidated that it now almost becomes our problem rather than [their] problem. That’s what abandonment by displacement is.”

The CDA’s fix for the problem is creating new homes for new homeowners who are put in a position to succeed with affordable mortgages and committed to investing in their properties. Its “all of the above” approach to creating those homeowners includes things like the early childhood educator program, but also support for Acts Housing’s homeownership acquisition fund, which buys properties in bulk and renovates them for homeowners.

“We can do this, and we know how to do this,” said Whaley-Smith. “And for the first time in the last 15 years in Milwaukee, because of the work of the people in this room, we have seen the first increase in Black and Latino homeownership in Milwaukee in more than 15 years.”