BE PROACTIVE ABOUT YOUR COMMUNITY’S HOUSING SUPPLY

From small towns to major metropolitan cities, housing challenges, particularly for workforce attraction, consistently rank as one of the top concerns of Midwestern communities today. The housing crisis may not look quite the same everywhere, but the crunch poses very real challenges:

  • Shortage of attainable housing for workforce 
  • Lack of affordable single-family homes for first-time buyers
  • Racial inequity in housing
  • Lack of walkability to daily needs
  • Gentrification and displacement of low-income residents
  • Lack of housing options from rental to single family to senior housing
  • Zoning code restrictions 

FIVE ANGLES OF HOUSING SUCCCESS. In such a complex and fast-changing environment, every community must creatively assess and address all five angles of housing success: 

  1. Comprehensive Planning & Zoning
  2. Needs Analysis
  3. Subdivision & Land Planning
  4. Financing Strategy
  5. Development Management

Vandewalle & Associates is the one planning partner who can help you build a complete strategy with all five angles well covered

HOUSING RESOURCES YOU CAN USE. We have put together some excellent materials to help you get started on understanding the housing market and proactively managing factors unique to your community:

  • Housing Crisis Education: Walk through this interactive presentation to learn more about the housing affordability crisis in the US and Wisconsin — what led to it, and where it most affects communities and the people who live and work there.
  • Proactive Tips: Register with us for access to our presentation offering ‘Proactive Tips for Housing.’
  • Using TIF to attract housing: Register with our free TIF Talks series and check out video #4 “Using TIF to Address the Housing Crunch.”
  • Call us at 608-255-3988 or email us to ask for a free diagnostic evaluation of your community’s housing situation.
NEIGHBORHOOD AND SUBDIVISION DESIGN

Vandewalle & Associates offers the most comprehensive package of subdivision planning tools and services available to help address the housing crisis. V&A’s successful approach comprehensive neighborhood and subdivision planning can help assess and address these issues to create a strategic housing plan that answers your community’s needs and minimizes risk now and into the future.

We offer:

  1. New neighborhood site selection and acquisition
  2. Site reuse strategies
  3. Market assessment
  4. School enrollment projections, site selection and other considerations
  5. Mixed-use components
  6. Housing mix strategies 
  7. Tax credit housing
  8. Sustainable infrastructure planning for solar energy, energy micro grids, electric charging stations, stormwater management
  9. Phased infrastructure plans
  10. Design guidelines
  11. TIF management
  12. Recruiting developers and builders
  13. Zoning code analysis and rewrites

Our expertise has been hard at work shaping a new wave of welcome neighborhood development in Wisconsin communities such as Brookfield, Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Horicon, Waupaca, Jefferson, Verona, and Altoona, as well as Waterloo, Iowa and Muncie, Indiana. We are also hard at work throughout Wisconsin and the Midwest on comprehensive zoning rewrites that helps add needed flexibility and address housing challenges in places like Middleton.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING

The issue of housing affordability is a persistent issue in urban communities as well as in many rural ones. As areas redevelop in particular, keeping affordable units in the mix requires a deliberate effort employing specific tactics that can help balance property value increases, keep units attainable, meet the needs of various income levels, , and allow an aging population to hold on to their single family homes or to age-in-place in their current neighborhoods.

ZONING

Restrictive or outdated zoning can keep many of the more innovative techniques for creating affordable housing and a mix of housing types out of reach for many communities. V&A is a Midwest leader in innovative zoning code rewrites that can help communities add a healthy new mix of housing for affordability, aging in place, growing first time homeowner options, and senior housing options. Changes to land use, mix of uses, lot sizes, unit sizes, materials, infrastructure, granny flat restrictions and countless other creative code adaptations can help create the healthy housing mix a community will need to remain vibrant into the future. Check out our “Tap into Experience: Housing” video for more insights. 

ADDRESSING GROWING MARKETS

The pace of growth in many communities is far outpacing its ability to provide sufficient workforce and attainable housing to meet demand. Employers hoping to recruit talent often are eager to participate in sponsoring workforce housing initiatives, as illustrated in our work in Waterloo Iowa for the Deer & Co. workforce. Other growing V&A client communities such as Hartford, Madison, Middleton, Deforest, Fitchburg, Milwaukee, Grafton and more are working with us on similar growth, talent attraction, and retention issues. We have also helped create a number of studies and partnerships to devise plans that creatively answer the growing housing demand.

PARTIAL LIST OF HOUSING-FOCUSED PROJECTS: