Area affordable housing crisis worsens as brutal winter arrives

Susan Garcia Franz has spent her two years as the Vice President of the Fox Cities Housing Coalition pushing a rock uphill. Over that time, the rock hasn’t grown any smaller and the summit seems as far away as ever.

The underpinnings of the affordable housing crisis in the Fox Cities – and around the country, for that matter – are complex, the solutions to the crisis no less so. Between the shortage of houses, investment companies buying up available houses, high interest rates, labor and land shortages, zoning laws, NIMBYism, lack of political will and government investment that simply can’t keep pace with need, it’s hard to know where to start attacking the problem.

But Garcia Franz remains undaunted, aware that becoming overwhelmed is a luxury she and the people she advocates for simply don’t have.

“This is a lot,” Garcia Franz says with a wry laugh. “It has taken me two years to really understand it and I’m still scratching my head.”

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when considering the affordable housing shortage and the often harrowing fallout from it –  homelessness – but it is enough to say that it is getting worse, not better, and that there is little reason to think it will improve any time soon.

Affordable housing can refer to everything from young adults’ inability to buy a house to lower-income workers who are forced to choose between other essentials and paying their rent.

Then there is outright homelessness, which is where the urgency currently falls as another brutal Midwest winter settles in.

The Fox Cities Housing Coalition is a collection of nearly 40 agencies and government entities working together to try to identify and address needs in the area. Partner groups include the area school districts and churches, Leaven, Pillars, the Salvation Army and a host of other organizations dedicated to helping those in need, various housing authorities throughout the region and municipalities.

Crisis can be traced to the 2008 housing bubble

Garcia Franz, whose paid job is as a community health strategist for Winnebago County, spends most of her time on the Fox Cities Housing Coalition’s Affordable Housing Subcommittee, whittling away at the list of several hundred people identified as unhoused or as precariously housed. The latter refers to those who are on the verge of homelessness. She says her frustration is that the list never seems to shrink. The Continuum of Care monthly data they were receiving showed only about 10% of the people on that list finding housing every month while the numbers remained the same.

“We formed the affordable housing subcommittee to really look at that situation, and where we were missing,” she says. “What’s the housing that’s missing in our community that really would address some of these resource issues people were having in terms of lower socio-economic backgrounds. And then other issues like domestic violence. So looking at the whole housing situation, where are our gaps in terms of moving more than 10% in any given month. Where was the root of that problem?” 

The worsening of homelessness and the precarious circumstances of others who currently have housing can be traced to several things. Wages for laborers, when accounting for inflation, continue to be flat, growing just two percent since the Covid pandemic. People – working-class people, especially – simply don’t earn enough to cover all their basic needs. Meanwhile, the housing shortage itself goes all the way back to the 2008 housing bubble, Garcia Franz says. 

“So really, anything that we were putting up in terms of fulfilling some of the needs in these areas of people getting more affordable housing, a lot of that came to a complete standstill because your builders weren’t building,” Garcia Franz says. “And then you add some of the other crises that came along that piggyback on that, where they were having a hard time finding workers to put up houses because it’s seasonal so some people don’t go into that as a full career. 

“And then some of the money to support affordable housing is really tenuous in our community.”

The numbers are worrisome

It all adds up to what Freddie Mac estimates nationwide is a shortage of 3.7 million living units.

The local numbers are no less grim.

According to an Appleton neighborhood plan report from 2022, the entire Fox Valley would need anywhere from 11,000 to 18,000 new living units by 2030 to meet expected demand. The demand, specifically, is for mixed (a development with both market-priced and affordable units) and dense housing combined with single family homes (current zoning laws lean toward lower density and larger single-family homes); rental units for various income levels to stabilize the overall market; and housing for first-time homeowners.

Currently, for a full-time worker to be able to afford – without economic stress – a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rate of $1,130 a month they would need to make at least $21.71 an hour. Garcia Franz says if she could wave a magic wand to deal with the crisis it would be to create enough of such units to cover the people who need them. 

“Units that are reasonably priced so people could fall in that category where no more than 30% of their income would go to rent,” she says. “That’s the guideline that we shoot for and it’s a HUD guideline, too, for the Fair Housing Rate. What we’re seeing now is obviously higher and higher and higher percentages of people’s income going for rent.”

According to a monthly count by Appleton’s Coordinated Entry specialist in April of this year, there were 251 households with children waiting for housing and another 446 households without children in the same straits. The average wait time for placement was around 140 days. Another 213 households, according to the same report, were in danger of losing their housing within the following two weeks.   

Developers need incentives 

The difficulty in generating sufficient affordable housing is that it simply does not turn profits for developers. That’s where tax credits and other government subsidies come into play. For housing the two key players are the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Association (WHEDA) and the Division of Energy, Housing and Community Resources (DEHCR), which offer low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC). Community Development Block Grant money from the municipality or county can also sweeten the deal.

A developer who builds such housing – usually multi-family units and apartments – is obligated to keep a certain number of units available as low-income housing over the following 15 years. 

But there is a finite amount of WHEDA and DEHCR money available, far short of what is needed to develop the number of units needed.

An added barrier is new proposed cuts by the Trump administration to the Continuum of Care Program, through which homeless people have been provided long-term permanent housing either directly or through rental assistance. Under the new proposal, those funds would be used instead to provide for merely transitional housing, such as halfway houses. And the new criteria would begin at different times of the year for the various organizations that utilize the funds, resulting in a lot of confusion and red tape and adding more chaos to an already chaotic process.

The state of Wisconsin, along with 19 other states, is suing the administration over the proposal on the grounds that it is unconstitutional.

Garcia Franz says transitional – as opposed to permanent – housing results in the injection of yet more uncertainty into the lives of those folks desperate to gain some traction. 

“That means a lack of stability for some of those folks that need it to be permanent,” Garcia Franz says. “And that’s when there is that instability of potential eviction or constantly changing circumstances.”

Homelessness impacting students and their families

Garcia Franz says she’s also frustrated by the constant and sudden rule changes or new requirements that end up scotching projects that are on the verge of fruition.

“Someone changes the criteria, and then their developer falls out and it all falls apart,” she says. “At the state level you’ve got between eight and 20 projects that come from some of (these affordable housing subsidies). If those folks got to that point in the process, that means they’ve worked with the developer. That means they have the land ready. That means they have all these things that are ready to go, and they’re just waiting for that funding. So a lot of them get denied and put back in the pile. The problem is, then it sits another year.”

The impact hits across a range of sectors, not just working class people who can’t afford rent, but senior citizens on fixed incomes and folks exiting substance abuse housing with nowhere to go, even high school students and their families. Appleton Area School District reported more than 600 homeless students this year, with Neenah and Menasha reporting a combined 225 more. 

“How do you perform as a student when you don’t know where you’re sleeping at night, or if where you’re sleeping at night is not an environment that’s conducive to being a student?” Garcia Franz says. “It’s heartbreaking for all of those involved, because I know I’ve been with those people at five o’clock on a Friday and you know that family is living out of their car for the weekend. A lot of the providers that come to our meetings have those stories all the time.”

‘What are we doing?’

With shelters at capacity this time of year, organizations are turning to faith communities, even hotels (though the ARPA money that funded that has run out). It’s still not enough, Garcia Franz says. NOVA, a substance abuse treatment center in Oshkosh has taken to offering a 90-day extension for people who have concluded their program but have no transitional housing to move into.

“Because sometimes you’re done with the program on this day, but that doesn’t always mean there’s somewhere to go on the next day,” she says. “This is that challenge for all of us where Pillars and all the organizations that serve these populations struggle. When we get to the end of days and we get into this type of weather and the folks that have been kind of caught in between. Where do they go? Because our shelters have been at capacity for a long time.”

Some communities, Garcia Franz says, have even gone so far as to use incarceration as a means for sheltering people. Now, living out of cars has become a last resort for a lot of people. There are even parking lots that provide bathroom facilities and security for those people.

“That’s where we are,” Garcia Franz says. “Some days I’m like, what are we doing? Yes, that is where we are. And I’ve come to the conclusion  that a lot of people don’t know that. They don’t know that that’s where we are. So they’re walking along with their day, and they don’t have any idea that there’s a housing crisis, you know?” 

Maddeningly slow pace

Garcia Franz says it’s more than a moral issue; it’s an economic one as well. 

“The frustration is that the municipalities are oftentimes saying we need more people in our municipalities,” she points out. “Because, one, we want a bigger tax base and two, we have businesses in our community that are looking for employees. We want people to live in our communities. And three, you’re trying to build your community.”

She says rural areas have it even worse, and notes how hard it is for rural school districts to recruit teachers. 

“Where do people live in some of these rural areas?” she says. “They just haven’t developed them in so long, and they don’t have places for people to live, so people have to live far outside the communities that they work in. And I hear a lot from school districts that are having a hard time finding a teacher because you’re only coming in at a certain level of pay.”

Garcia Franz and the FCHC will continue to recruit and train volunteers. The Education and Engagement Committee, on which Garcia Franz also sits, offers comprehensive tutorials for people wanting to get involved but who might be daunted by the complexity of it all. Garcia Franz also plans to participate in the FCHC Point in Time count in January, when folks go out in the streets to determine how many unhoused people there are in the area. She says she will invite elected officials to join her so that they can see what’s happening in their community.

Garcia Franz says there needs to be a balance in housing development, not just more multi-family and affordable units but just more options on housing in general. 

“We probably couldn’t make it more complex if we tried,” Garcia Franz laments. “If we made it easier for everyone, it would just take away all those particular barriers that stop people from those next steps.

“The work we’re doing now, we won’t see a unit built for another two years. The pace is maddening. So we need to acknowledge that as a community to have backup plans. Because we’re not going to get there fast enough for the people who need this.”

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