The mayoral challenger offers a half-baked and incoherent approach to Madison’s housing crisis.
Each week in Wisconsin politics brings an abundance of bad policies, bad takes, and bad actors. In our new recurring feature, Capitol Punishments, we bring you the week’s highlights (or low-lights) from the state Legislature and beyond.
Amid a media landscape inundated with stale housing takes, Tone Madison has been in a sisyphean struggle to move the discourse with more nuance, thoughtful re-framing, and yes, some snark.
So it’s really frustrating to see the same stale points brought up in the Madison Mayoral race.
What is tricky about this mayoral race is that Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway has made progress on some of the key agenda items she ran on in 2019—especially implementing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), now currently under construction after years of study and planning. Her policies sound fine overall, but it’s hard to give her a full-throated endorsement because at this stage we don’t know what the outcomes will be.
But when it comes to housing, at least her platform is based in reality: We need more housing, we need more different types of housing, and we need it in all neighborhoods. It may not have the sense of urgency most renters feel nor provide the immediate relief they need as they watch their rents climb every year. But at least Rhodes-Conway understands what is happening and what the city needs to do.
The same cannot be said for challenger Gloria Reyes, whose housing platform seems to be tailor-made for homeowners who want an equity sheen to their opposition to multifamily units and the specter of density, even if it’s not based in reality.
During one of the primary debates, Reyes said Madison doesn’t need to change its neighborhoods and instead needs to get more Black and brown families into homeownership. During her March 7 interview with City Cast Madison, she reiterated that point.
“Not all people of color want to rent their entire life and be in an apartment,” Reyes says. “We have to move people of color from renting to homeownership so they can start building generational wealth.”
In neither discussion does Reyes address the elephant in the room: into what houses? On this date, March 14, I am searching for homes under $200,000 in Madison on Zillow and have found four condos, about a dozen mobile/manufactured homes (which, despite the much-touted virtues of “ownership,” are at high risk of eviction), and the rest are empty lots. If you can scrape together enough money to get a $200,000 loan, you can buy a plot of dirt. Oh, and all of these lots are on the edges of the city.
While it should be shocking that a mayoral candidate didn’t spend five minutes comparing real estate prices with rent and doing a little math before talking about homeownership, it’s not surprising. Reyes served as deputy mayor under former Mayor Paul Soglin, who believes not only that Madison has $1,200 rentals that could accommodate a family of five, but that a single income could support all of them. Soglin took some time to find himself after Rhodes-Conway unseated him in 2019. Now, he’s endorsed Reyes and is vigorously backseat-mayoring on his personal Facebook page, in posts like this, from January 26:
The end of Madison for families is within reach. This is the most racist inequitable housing proposal that will only benefit slum landlords who will pile in as many people as they can.
Take this simple example. A three bedroom apartment or house is available for rent. A low income family of five with one adult working and the other tending to the three kids will be able to afford a monthly rent of $1200. Now five unrelated adults will pull their incomes and pay $2000 ($400 each) a month rent.
The family does not have a chance. This is exactly what happened around the campus. Soon public schools will close since there are no children. And even more families will leave the neighborhood.
Funny thing. There is a rush to adopt before the next election coming from council members who are retiring.
It has happened before. Fools who know nothing of Madison’s history are about to repeat it.
The comment was in response to a rule change the Madison Common Council eventually passed that allows up to five unrelated people to live together, which will give everyone (not just students) more housing flexibility and the chance to share the cost with chosen family.
In the City Cast interview, Reyes started talking about her opposition to the family definition change, but the conversation drifted into the real issue: zoning.
“We open these housing opportunities for developers to come in and build apartments and single-family homes start moving out of these neighborhoods,” Reyes says. “Then we start losing enrollment in our schools and we lose our schools. That’s what happened in downtown Madison near the campus area. We lost schools in that area.”
The problem is, you don’t need to own a single-family home to have a family. Throughout human history and geography, people who lived in cities lived in multifamily or multigenerational housing. Working-class people who did own a row-house or brownstone routinely took in boarders.
This idea of one little house for one nuclear family with a yard in a city is an invention of the post-World War II economy, meant to bolster war industries’ transition to peacetime by running lots of infrastructure under lots of new roads so people would have to drive their shiny new cars to their new houses.
And people bought those houses because once you’ve signed the mortgage, that’s your monthly payment until it’s fully paid off. Not everyone buys a house because they want a house; many want the financial stability that comes with a house. If we had more multi-family units with more than two bedrooms that you could purchase or were part of a cooperative, we’d have a lot more families living downtown.
Now that there’s little room to build, single-family houses have appreciated in value to where they’re unaffordable for most, and we’ve learned that the suburbs are not only financially but also environmentally unsustainable.
Reyes also invokes the specter of out-of-control developers and landlords to argue against density, but offers no suggestions to reign them in so renters could have affordable and stable housing. In fact, she wants to give them a seat at the table.
Reyes’ solution: a mayor’s housing advisory committee with developers, realtors, landlords, and residents from neighborhood associations.
Notice who Reyes did not include in that list: renters. The people who need housing. The people who are clamoring for change, because what we have right now is not working.
The groups in that committee? They created and benefit from the housing ecosystem we have now. What are the odds their solutions would be more of the same?
