Should Madison create a new Affordable Housing Task Force?

Returning to blogging in the nerdiest and most Madison way possible: should we make a new city committee or use an existing one?

I’ve wanted to get back into blogging for a while, and so I’m going to soft launch in a new home with a nerdy kick-off: should the Madison Common Council create a task force on housing affordability, or should it ask an existing committee to work on it?

It turns out that I’m a little bit pro task force but I think it’ll be fine if we leave it with the existing committee. (Alas, sometimes writing projects don’t turn out to be as compelling as you’d hoped when you start them.)

Also just to manage expectations, this blog post is narrowly focused on the question of ‘should the city create a housing affordability task force’ and is not a ‘here’s how Madison should solve its affordable housing problem’ piece. Part of the reason this piece has turned out so wishy-washy is that I think we generally know what we need to do for housing affordability and it makes the case for a new task force less compelling - but it also makes it so I don’t feel like I have anything interesting to add in a broad blog post on what to do to increase affordable housing. (There is a conversation we’re not yet having about what affordable housing will mean for us as a city and that will be a future blog post, so subscribe to this blog today for when that comes out!)

Part I: How did we get here?

In this post we’re only talking about a task force and not Madison housing affordability and availability in general, but here we can point to a specific event. Core Spaces proposed a building focused towards students that would have required a rezoning, and the Common Council declined to make that zoning change, and then later reversed course. Setting aside all discussions as to whether or not that was a good or correct decision, much of the conversation around those two Council meetings was on the affordability of housing in new developments, which is bigger than just that single rezoning.  In early July in the run-up to the second vote, Alder Tag Evers raised the idea of a task force to drill into the issue of affordable housing, and Alder Juliana Bennett was quoted in local media around the same time as saying she too thought that a task force was appropriate.  

Alder Amani Latimer Burris got there first, legislatively, proposing a task force at the August council meeting, which is currently working its way through the legislative process and will be back before the Council in October. In parallel, alders Bennett and Evers, along with alders Derek Field, MGR Govindarajan, and Sabrina Madison have sponsored an alternative to alder Latimer Burris’ proposal, asking the Housing Strategy committee to bring more focus to some priority questions around housing and report back to the Council. Their proposal builds specifically off parts of a memo that Matt Wachter, the director of the Department of Planning & Community & Economic Development, wrote for the Council, in what he called  the ‘alternative framework.’

(Both proposals are in Legistar under file number 79226. Legistar is kind of a pain for these - they’re under ‘Version 1’ and ‘Version 2’, which you can flip with a drop-down on the site. Good luck with this link working if you’re reading this a couple of years in the future).

As it stands, the Plan Commission has recommended that the Bennett et al proposal be the one moved forward and the Housing Strategy committee take on the affordable housing work. The Housing Strategy committee will soon take the two proposals and recommend one to the Council, and the Council will make a decision about a week afterwards. 

For reference and to have them in one place, there were a couple of other good blog posts by alders on the Core Spaces building and what to do next:

• Alders Bennett and Govindarajan from immediately after the first vote: https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district2/blog/a-win-for-student-housing

• Alder Evers right before the second vote, calling for the task force https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district13/blog/core-spaces-vote-up-for-reconsideration 

• Alder Regina Vidaver on her vote to support Core Spaces and housing in Madison: https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district5/blog/explaining-my-vote-for-housing 

• Alder Govidarajan on his thoughts after the second vote on Core Spaces: https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district8/blog/my-thoughts-on-tuesday-nights-vote-on-student-housing 

• Alder Field on the Housing Snapshot report: https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district3/blog/new-housing-market-snapshot-report-data-draft

• Alder Evers on Madison’s Housing Crisis: https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district13/blog/madisons-housing-crisis 

• Alder Bennett on her support for the Housing Strategy Committee as the appropriate venue rather than a new task force: https://www.cityofmadison.com/council/district2/blog/9-18-9-24-updates

Part II: Director Wachter’s memo, and a quick comparison of the two proposals

The Wachter memo came out after Alder Latimer Burris’ proposal, and spends the bulk of its time detailing much of the work the City is already doing with housing. It is a must-read if you are interested in housing in Madison, and I’m not going to rehash most of it. However, it does make the case that the City staff should revamp their workplan to better support what this new-ish Council wants to do. Wachter calls it a ‘framework’ and I’m going to quote it all here:

The second was a desire to undertake a targeted strategy development process focused on:

• How can the City support the creation of more ownership housing types (e.g. condos, coops, land trust, townhomes, etc.)?

• How can the City help scale up the development of new affordable rental units beyond the current 400 per year pipeline (e.g. 4% tax credits, TIF, City/CDA led development)?

• How can the City support the creation of affordable student housing?

Based on input and questions from a number of alders, staff have identified an alternative framework to creating a new Housing Task Force that would utilize Community Development and Planning staff working through the Housing Strategy Committee to answer each of the three key questions above. This effort would entail:

• Conducting the research already planned in staff work plans, including:

  • Completing the 2023 Housing Snapshot Report

  • Completing an Analysis of the Impediments to Fair Housing Choice

  • Completing the 5-Year Consolidated Housing Plan

  • Updating the Housing Forward strategy

• Combining the experience and learnings of our existing efforts with additional research scans to answer questions about what has been done or tried to date, what best practices are elsewhere, and who are the key entities with a role to play in potential solutions.

• Inviting expert guests to provide input into key questions around opportunities and barriers, and potential solutions.

• Utilizing the above information to form recommendations that the Housing Strategy Committee could make to the Mayor and Common Council.

Now, let’s just take a quick look at the two proposals. To keep things simple I’m just going to call them the “Task Force” or “Housing Strategy” from here on out. All city resolutions follow the same structure - a bunch of background info in the ‘WHEREAS’ clauses, but then finally a “what do you actually want them to do” clauses in the RESOLVED parts. Both of them are simple enough that we can pull out the RESOLVED clauses and we can compare them directly.

The “Task Force” proposal broadly wants to:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the charge of this Housing Taskforce is to:

• Specifically examine ways the City may add to the cost of housing through fees (such as and specifically the Parks Fee)

• Review the process in relation to its lengthy reviews through committees, inclusivity and contemporary inclusive outreach

• Invite developers of all types of housing including apartments, subsidized housing, single family homes, and condominiums, upstarts, neighborhood groups, and community based organizations to testify before the Taskforce

• Explore and debate best practices and practical or tailored implications, proposed possibilities and solutions

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Taskforce invite the managers, developers and others of successful low/moderate income, affordable, workforce and starter housing entities to testify as to how they are successful in regards to both cost and management of their housing and challenges the face and potential unknowns and other issues of interest and effect on affordable housing.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Housing Taskforce and City staff make inquiries with developers, major employers and other entities in Madison about a partnership where the employer leases units or the developer constructs units for the employer who can then provide  workforce housing at a reduced rental to the employees (as is done by New York University (NYU) for example)

(Everything else is either background, compositional for the task force, or directing the task force on timeline)

Now, the “Housing Strategy” proposal broadly wants to:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that staff and the Housing Strategy Committee shall answer:

• How can the City support the creation of more ownership housing types?

• How can the City help scale up the development of new affordable rental units beyond the current 400 per year pipeline?

• How can the City support the creation of affordable student housing?

For each question, staff and the Housing Strategy Committee should consider:

• Recommendations that support increasing housing options that meet the needs of people at all income levels, particularly at >30% AMI and <80% AMI.

• Recommendations that support increasing housing options in every neighborhood and district in Madison to improve equitable access to city resources.

• Recommendations that account for higher need amongst hard-to-reach communities.

• Recommendations that lend guidance on how to optimize zoning, land use policy and approvals, and bonding authority to increase housing options.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that staff and the Housing Strategy Committee shall engage subject matter experts and those directly impacted by the housing crisis through public hearings with Madison area residents and housing stakeholders, including, but not limited to, developers (market rate and affordable), nonprofits with specialized interests in housing, construction industry professionals, and housing policy experts.

(Everything else in the proposal is either background or directing the committee on timeline. There is no need to address the composition of the committee since that’s already set)

So two observations:

First, the research work that the staff proposes to do in the ‘framework’ I think would largely support the work that either proposal wants to do, so at least research-wise I don’t think one proposal is more burdensome on city staff than the other. 

Second, I think the questions that both proposals raise largely overlap. The Task Force touches maybe on some very specifics that the Housing Strategy proposal does not (park fees, institutional housing support e.g. NYU), and the Housing Strategy proposal explicitly includes student housing as a priority area, which is maybe more implicit in the Task Force proposal. I think this similarity is a good sign, and points to maybe a few quick tweaks to some RESOLVED clauses and then no matter which proposal moves forward, the Council can be sure that either proposal answers the questions that supporters of either proposal might have. 

Personally I suspect that modifying the Housing Strategy proposal to include a few missing things is the easier change to make so if the Council is looking to make an ‘everyone wins’ compromise and move quickly on the floor next week, that’s where I would start.

Part III: Pros and Cons of the Housing Strategy proposal

The Pros

There’s some really good reasons to ask the Housing Strategy committee to take on this work - first of all, because we already have it! And if the issues here are not what this committee is supposed to be working on, then what are we even doing?

There’s also precedent for sending these sorts of big issues to a committee and asking them to come back with recommendations. During the Edgewater saga, Mayor Dave Cieslewicz got it in his head that neighborhood associations ‘had too much say’ in our development processes, and charged the Economic Development Committee with a top-to-bottom review of how development projects went in Madison - a good deal of which are obviously housing projects. In fact, before we go too far with anything, it’s probably a good idea to go back and read the report from that process in 2011. The Planning Department made a helpful implementation guide to show how they were doing a couple of months in. (Lots of it happened, some of the tech upgrades got forced on us due to COVID, and alas a few things are still not as good as we’d like, and some of the suggestions turned out to be things we didn’t really want to do) The original work of the EDC is in Legistar 18121 and the adoption by the Council is in Legistar 21454. (I found my comments to the EDC in that process, I think they’ve held up pretty well)

At the time we didn’t have a Housing Strategy committee - that would be broken out of the larger ‘Housing Committee’ a year later (legistar 25837) , and Dave wanted to make a broader point about this being an economic issue rather than a housing issue, so Housing Strategy is probably a better committee to ask to review this work rather than EDC, but I hope the committee doesn’t spend a lot of time re-doing the work the EDC did in 2011. 

The Cons

Why not send this to the Housing Strategy Committee?

First, something that is hopefully easy to fix: the Housing Strategy Committee historically doesn’t meet all that often. Thankfully this isn’t an issue of them not being able to get quorum, which has plagued some of the housing committees in Madison in the past, but they just haven’t had much work sent to them. But this would be a big change for them and a lot more work, and maybe not what its members signed up for. 

Second, there’s a proposal to completely revamp the Housing Strategy committee in file 75926 - this would combine three city committees: the (joint) City-County Homeless Issues Committee, the city-only Landlord and Tenant Issues Committee, and the city-only Housing Strategy Committee, and merge them all into a single joint City-County Housing Policies and Procedures Committee.

Combining all three committee is a whole other discussion, and so in the interest of space I’ll just say that having a city and county wide perspective is important and having the Housing Strategy committee be greater than just the City of Madison is a good idea - however, the timeline for this revamp is that a decision would be made sometime in December, so realistically the combined committee is not going to get fully appointed and have its first meeting until February of 2024 at the earliest, and I don’t think you start a big project in a committee two months before it’s about to be completely rebuilt. 

Part IV: The Pros and Cons of the Task Force

The Pros

The good thing about a limited time task force is you can play with composition, and for this body, I think you’d like it to be somewhat large - much bigger than the 7 member Housing Strategy committee. You can imagine a task force where you’d want  2 or 3 members who are market rate developers and 2 or 3 affordable developers, and students, and people with lived experience with housing insecurity, and policy experts, and folks who have done non-traditional housing setups like intergenerational housing or co-ops, and many many other voices. This might be a good body to have like 15 members or even bigger. 

A time-limited task force might also help you bring in folks who would normally turn a Madison Board/Committee/Commission down - knowing you’re only on the hook for a year instead of our usual three year appointment.  

The Cons

So, why not create a task force? 

The main reason not to create a task force is that we’ve literally got a Housing Strategy committee, and if this isn’t in their bailiwick then what is?

Another body also eats a lot of staff time and committee member time. Now, while I think research-wise the workload is comparable, the logistics of another body are not to be underestimated. Scheduling, managing agendas, updating legistar, handling membership appointments and required filings like ethics trainings and financial disclosures, keeping up with communication for the body - it eats just a ton of staff time. And if we did make the task force bigger, then all that work gets harder. 

Beyond staff time, there’s an issue of committee member time. The task force as envisioned draws from other committees. Signing up for this task force while being a Plan Commission is asking a lot, and finding a timeslot that 4 alders can regularly meet at will not be easy. 

If this task force does move forward, there are some changes that are needed. The resolution really needs to specify how many people should be on the task force - is the goal to have one member from each of the named committees, or just that the membership should be drawn from those committees but maybe not every committee will be represented? I would also take a couple of those committees off - the task force doesn’t need Finance Committee representation, and despite the name, the City-County Liaison does not actually work on important City/County issues (they just set policy for the City-County Building and have only met once since 2019.) I also don’t think you need the Urban Design Commission nor the Board of Parks Commissioners to be represented for most of the work the task force would do.

Part V: What is the end-goal?

Alder Bennett’s blog post really touched on this and so I’d urge folks to be sure to read it if you haven’t yet. I don’t entirely agree that one proposal is more action-oriented than the other, but I think it’s important that the Council keeps a focus and gives very clear directions as to the expectations of what they’re looking for. 

At one extreme, the Council could literally tell Streets to bring a box of hammers down to the Council chambers, establish a task force and give each task force member a hammer and tell them to go out and build some housing. (I’m not sure you’d get many task force applicants)

Does the Council want a report, and if so, who is the audience for the report? The work that the EDC did in 2011 was aimed at the Council, the Mayor, and City staff with specific suggestions for process things we could do to make it easier to do development projects in Madison. Maybe it’s time to do an updated version of that report, with more focus on affordable and student housing. However, I don’t think we need that - I think we largely know what the menu of policy choices are. Maybe there are some things we haven’t thought of but I’d be surprised if any report brought back things we hadn’t considered. 

We could have the task force write a report that’s aimed at the broader community about what our choices are. I know not everyone would agree but the Race to Equity report ( https://kidsforward.org/race-to-equity/ )  made an impact when it came out and I think did help move some improvements forward. A similar report on housing could be helpful.

Rather than waiting for a big report with a whole host of options a year from now, is having a more proactive Housing Strategy Committee that offered up specific individual changes on a regular cadence more useful? So instead of waiting until August of 2024 for anything, is it better to get back a recommendation in March of 2024 of ‘the Park impact fee should be reduced, it will cost us $XXX over the next 10 years but will create #YYY housing units over that time period that might not have happened”, and then in May of 2024 send up another proposal that says “If we relax the owner-occupied requirement for ADUs there will be ZZZ new ADUs built per year based on this study” and just keep churning through ideas? I think this is what Alder Bennett is suggesting. 

Alder Evers often makes the case that in some of our most pressing city issues, we need deeper cooperation with the business community, and he’s made a good case that difficulty in finding housing should be a top concern of the business community because it’s directly impacting their workforces and their ability to recruit and retain talent in Madison. To be more blunt about it, I think he’d say it’s time for the Madison business community to partner with some developers and make more construction happen by directly investing in housing even if it’s not great for their bottom line in the short term, because not only is it good for their bottom line in the long term, it’s also their civic duty. And that’s part of what a task force could be doing. 

(That’s also the argument against having the task force be a city government organized entity. We may not always like to admit it, but sometimes things happen in town not because we got our committee act together, but because a couple of folks got together and just poured money on it and made it happen - be it the Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association or the creation of the Overture Center. So there’s probably opportunity for civic-minded folks to get together in a (smoke-free) backroom over drinks after a Chamber meeting or in a suite at the Kohl Center or in the groupchat or something else that’s not subject to open records and step up)

Part VI: Conclusions and why are you still reading?

If you’ve read this far you’ve probably realized that I can’t make a good case for why a task force over using our existing Housing Strategy committee. I think the opportunity to have a larger body for this work might be helpful and so I lean towards the task force, especially if the Housing Strategy committee is about to be reorganized. However, I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason to put a big new burden on city staff to spin up and support an additional committee. 

I’m glad the Council is interested in taking this up so early in its term. I thought that perhaps after a somewhat contentious election earlier this year, where there was so much heartburn over what I thought were pretty modest changes in the Transit Oriented Development Overlay District and the Family Definition that there might be more interest in a year or two of focus away from housing. I hope this is just the start of more good things from the Council and the Mayor.