Creating new Single Family Homes in Madison: The power is with Veridian, not Mayor Satya and the City
Since 2009, Veridian has built 68% of the new single family homes in Madison, more than twice as much as everyone else combined. I built a web map app to look at the data.
I’ll be upfront that I don’t think there’s a deep lesson in this post. You probably already strongly suspected it’s main takeaway, which is that when it comes to new single family homes, Veridian completely dominates the market in the City of Madison. But I didn’t know the actual number, and so I decided to find out. I crunched some numbers and then built a web app to visually explore them and to try to see which entities are behind different developments. (tl;dr: There have been 4,146 single family homes built in Madison since 2009, Veridian was involved in 2823 of them, and all other developers and individuals combined built the remaining 1323.)
But maybe there is a deeper lesson, which is that for all of our debates about land use and housing policies, at the end of the day someone’s got to go out and build the damn things. And when it comes to actually deciding what to put on land that the City says can be used for single family housing, it’s almost fair to say that those decisions have been entirely made by Veridian.
First, the clicky stuff
I used data from the City’s open data portal to work out some numbers, but I realized that I wanted to better understand it in ways that were hard to do from just a spreadsheet, so I built a web map with some helpful UI tools to select groups of single family homes and look at them in bulk. When property developers take on new development projects, for many reasons they create new legal entities to actually transact properties. By my count, Veridian has used at least 49 different LLCs on projects in Madison. There’s nothing sketchy about this and I’m not accusing Veridian of anything. What it means is though is that sometimes when you look at clear visual clusters on the map, those clusters might not have been immediately obvious from just the spreadsheet view, so being able to look at and visually select a large set of properties and compare common business entities is a handy tool to discover the story behind a new development.
Here are some screenshots. Red dots are homes that I believe were built by Veridian, blue dots are things that I don’t know if Veridian had anything to do with. (There are a few places where it’s a Veridian development but data on that parcel is not available, so that’s why you’ll see the occasional blue dot in the a sea of red.)
The first screenshot is zoomed out and shows a clustered view without individual dots, the second screenshot zooms in on the Grandview Commons North neighborhood and shows individual homes with a number of them selected to compare common sellers.
You can access the app at https://epaulson.github.io/madison-new-single-family-homes/
Some Takeaways
Single Family Homes and Owner-Occupied Household Trends
We don’t build a lot of single family homes in Madison - only about 300 a year. That really shouldn’t be surprising because we are a well-established city (we have a total of 49,237 single family residences) but I admit that I still did a double-take when I saw the actual number and first checked to make sure I wrote my code correctly.
But no, that lines up with the data from the City’s Housing Snapshot Report:
How this turns into a real problem is we know the number of new “owner-occupied households” is growing at about 3.8% a year these days:
You can take a look at Table B25118 from the US Census - Madison has about 56,600 owner-occupied households. If that’s growing by 3.8% a year, that’s 2,150 new owner-occupied households a year, so where are they going? Alder Field has been out front on flagging this trend: We know these new households aren’t going into new condos because no one is building new condos. Instead, we’re seeing some formerly rented single-family homes turning into owner-occupied single family homes. From Alder Field’s summary of the Housing Snapshot:
On single-family home rentals (not owner-occupied), in 2020 there were more than 6,000 renter-occupied single-family homes; in 2023, there were around 5,000 single-family rentals. A net change of more than 1,000 single-family home rentals were purchased for owner occupancy over this period, leading to fewer rental options on the market.
Whether or not it’s important to be able to rent a single-family home is something that not everyone agrees on, but it’s worth knowing that the ability to do so is going down in Madison.
What does this have to do with Veridian?
As you can tell from the map, Veridian’s modus operandi is to acquire a large land area and redevelop the area into a new neighborhood. Forgive the outdated imagery, but Veridian is “expanding the frontier” of the City. Take the east side: Veridian built Grandview Commons, and then Grandview Commons North, and as that finishes up (they’re literally down to about the last 5 lots to finish out of the 350 or so in the project) I would guess that they’ll continue to move north and east and create new neighborhoods.
In a post like this normally this is where I’d talk about the tradeoffs with density and land use for single family homes and talk about sprawl and urban service areas, but if you’re reading this you’ve already read a million blog posts covering that so I’ll skip over the abstract details and get to the Veridian-specific bits.
First, I will note that Veridian’s neighborhoods are often “denser” than what most critics of single family housing developments rail against, and this is not new for them. You don’t hear the term “New Urbanism” as much these days, but when Veridian’s Grandview Commons neighborhood was getting started decades ago, its New Urbanism bonafides were talked up, even to the point of including it as a tour stop when the Congress for New Urbanism came to town for its annual conference, and the deviation from what some saw as that concept led to a hugely contentious debate over a grocery store on the edge of the neighborhood.
And it’s true, many of the homes here are packed in much tighter than other subdivisions, with smaller lots and much less space left to yards.
The cynic would say this is just Veridian cramming in as many units as they can while still building detached single family homes, but compared to alternatives it is definitely creating a denser environment and so many housing advocates would celebrate what Veridian is doing.
But if Veridian wanted to go denser, I think they could.
Let’s look at Veridian’s newest plans, the ‘Midpoint Meadows’ project. (See the State Journal’s coverage here.) Under the preliminary plat, the project will add a bit over 600 housing units - 363 apartments, 96 units in 48 duplexes, and 144 single family homes. (There will be a final plat so these numbers might move around a bit). Here’s how they’re laying this out:
Midpoint Meadows is proposing to use an interesting zoning district, the “TR-P” - “Traditional Residential - Planned”. A TR-P planned district is covered in the staff report but the gist is that it’s meant for areas that are created via a master plan that is submitted as part of the rezoning, and that the plan has to choose at least three different housing types off a menu of choices. The menu includes some variations on single family homes, duplexes, accessory dwelling units, and multi-family units.
There’s not a lot of requirements on what breakdown Veridian needed to pick for its mix of housing types, except that at least 10% of the units must be duplex or multifamily, which they easily hit with either of their multifamily sites. The rest of the mix that Veridian picked was 96 duplex units on 6.5 acres, so about 14.8 units an acre of duplexes, and 148 units of two different types of single family homes on about 20 acres, so about 7.4 units an acre of single family homes.
To finally pay off the headline, and my claim that Veridian holds the largest portion of the power here, is that Veridian could have varied that mix if they had wanted, but Veridian is building the number and types of homes that they want to build (or what they perceive as what the market wants to buy.)
Here’s the Comprehensive Plan Generalized Future Land Use map for the area:
Under the comprehensive plan, if Veridian had wanted to skip the duplexes and just build all single family homes, they could have done it - the ligher-orange is “Low-Medium Residential” which targets 7 to 30 units an acre. The lighter yellow is “Low Residential”, which targets no more than 15 units an acre, so under the Comprehensive Plan, if they had wanted to skip the single family homes and put duplexes everywhere, they could have done that, too.
(OK, technically this area is still under the Highpoint-Raymond Neighborhood Development Plan, which has different categorizations for land use and uses four types of “Housing Mixes” rather than the Comp Plan’s GFLU categories, and unfortunately the Housing Mixes that the NDPs use are historically more restrictive than the comp plan, and the lowest target is an average of 6 dwelling units per acre instead of up to 15, so maybe Veridian wouldn’t think about doing all duplexes. But I think Veridian could have gotten support from the Plan Commission and Common Council if they had gone to the Alder and said “The Comp Plan supports the denser use and the NDP is going to get retired next year with the new Southwest Area Plan, let’s plan in line with the future”, but I admit that this darn NDP is kinda arguing against my thesis, but I’m rolling with it anyway)
Wrapping Up
The housing debate in Madison has gotten unfortunately very heated, and if you listen to some quarters there are claims of almost dictatorial powers coming from City planners, some parts of the Common Council, and the Mayor. Some of it was offered originally as hyperbole but I think the line has started to blur and there are people participating who know longer know what was just loud voices and what is a very confused reality. This is unfortunate and it’s starting to affect our ability to address community challenges, and I hope we can cool things down.
To be sure there are some things that I wish the City could just dictate to Veridian or anyone creating new construction do in Madison. If cities weren’t preempted by the state legislature, we should require that all air conditioners be true heat pumps so they can be used for super-high efficiency heating in addition to cooling, and homes should be built to be EV-charging ready and solar panel ready so the wiring is all added when it’s cheap to do so and no one has to drill through concrete to run new wiring.
But on just land use, under current policies we’re pretty close to being able to build something other than non-single-family homes anywhere in the City. At the same time, it’s only a very small group of people who would advocate that we should prohibit new single family homes in Madison. So for at least the foreseeable future it’s going to be a mix, and that mix will be up to the market and not policy makers. And given Veridian’s size in the market, they have an incredibly outsized role in deciding what as a City our mix will be. As the saying goes past performance does not guarantee future results, and perhaps other developers will shrink Veridian’s market share, but at least for now I’m not betting against them.