Developers need more certainty if housing market to rebound for middle earners
The plan for Whitetail Woods in Altoona looks like the future in fast-growing Eau Claire County.
Ground will be broken before the end of this year for a senior living center. Over the next decade, 114 duplexes, four multifamily apartment buildings and 54 single-family homes are expected to be built and occupied on 64 acres of what was farmland just a few years ago.
Whitetail Woods is a lesson in what it takes to plan for and deliver much needed housing in a part of the state that is becoming more city and less country. People in the unincorporated Town of Washington, on the annexed territory of which the subdivision will be built, have begun the process of becoming a village to stop the annexations.
“It was definitely contentious,” Altoona’s planning director, Taylor Greenwell, said. “The process took two years, which was surprising. The people most affected aren’t happy about it. We understand that. That said, it’s not their land.”
The story in Altoona is a familiar one in a state that needs 140,000 housing units now and 230,000 by 2030, according to a Forward Analytics study.
Like places the Badger Institute has profiled — Manitowoc, Hobart, Door County and Vilas County — rising construction, land and labor costs have driven the cost of a smaller, more affordable “starter” home in Altoona well past $400,000.
Faced with rising prices, residents across the state are choosing to hunker down in those more affordable homes, further tightening the “affordable” housing market. Developers are increasingly turning to a mix of single-family and multifamily housing to make their profit margins work.
While the population in the state is expected to flatten in coming decades, Eau Claire County is expected to continue to grow, according to state Department of Administration estimates.
Spurred in part by the completion in 2006 of the U.S. Highway 53 bypass that parallels its boundary with Eau Claire, Altoona, one of the fastest growing small cities in the state, increased its population by 12.2 percent, to 9,302 people in 2024 from 8,289 in 2020, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
Grip Development’s proposal for Whitetail Woods reflected both the current housing need and market reality in the area, Greenwell said. The project, however, required that a total of 122 acres of land north of Nine Mile Creek Road be annexed by the City of Altoona from the unincorporated Town of Washington.
Zoning for housing in the Town of Washington had for many years dictated single-family homes on at least an acre of property. Grip Development’s owner, Jason Griepentrog, told Altoona officials that kind of single-family development “wouldn’t fly,” Greenwell said.
Griepentrog did not respond to a request to discuss the development with the Badger Institute.
Responding to the changing market, Greenwell and his department in 2022 changed the parcel’s zoning in the city’s comprehensive plan, which includes annexable land in the Town of Washington, to something called Planned Neighborhood Type A, which allows for several types of single- and multifamily housing.
A city’s comprehensive plan documents a community’s preferred pattern of future growth after extensive input from professional planners and community members. It differs from a city’s zoning code, which defines what legally may be built on a parcel of land. Wisconsin law does not require a city’s zoning to match its comprehensive plan.
Altoona’s zoning code is in the last stages of its first overhaul in more than 50 years. Greenwell said the new code is designed to clearly reflect the vision of and give teeth to the comprehensive plan.
“We consider ourselves development friendly,” Greenwell said. “Developers want certainty. They want to know what they’re facing in advance. The ideal situation is to have an alignment of the comprehensive plan and the zoning code to provide as many certainties as possible.”
At a hearing in February before the Wisconsin Assembly’s Committee on Housing and Real Estate in Madison, developers asked for legislation that would require all communities in the state to bring their comprehensive plans up to date and align their zoning codes with the updated comprehensive plan.
As many as a third of the state’s incorporated communities don’t know understand or use their comprehensive plans, one of the biggest impediments to new housing construction, Steve DeCleene, president of Neumann Companies Inc., a Pewaukee-based developer that has contributed to the Badger Institute, told the committee.
“It’s not a helpful document when people don’t want it to be,” DeCleene told the committee. “Make it a statutory requirement. Make comprehensive plans mean something. It’s just truth in planning.”
Brad Boycks, executive director of the Wisconsin Builders Association, who spoke at the hearing, said he is hopeful that statutory requirement is part of a package of housing proposals that could be filed with the legislature sometime this summer.
No amount of truth telling is likely to satisfy neighbors such as Charlene and Kim Lynum, whose home on four acres in the Town of Washington will eventually be surrounded on three sides, like a horseshoe, with development.
Resistance from neighbors to the rezoning that will permit higher density housing like the 283 units of single- and multifamily housing proposed in the Village of Germantown, or in Green Bay or in Hudson, has become a predictable part of housing development in the state.
The Lynums say they recognize everything Altoona is doing is legal. They grant that the area is growing and that more housing is needed.
It’s just that they can’t get past a time when you couldn’t see a neighbor from your house, only trees.
“It’s about the money, no question about that,” Kim Lynum said — “Altoona for the tax base and the developer for the money. It’s always about the money.”
Greenwell said the Lynums were “very, very organized,” using social media to stir up opposition. They drew on the growing frustration over annexation of officials with the Town of Washington.
In February, the Eau Claire City Council ended a fight of more than three years when it approved the first stage of Orchard Hills, a much larger single- and multi-family development unfolding on land annexed from the Town of Washington.
The town had little choice but to file a petition last August to incorporate as a village if it didn’t want to be whittled away by the cities, Town Chair Robert Solberg said. The process, which will be completed with a referendum before town voters, could take years, he said.
State law allows for cities the size of Eau Claire to claim “extraterritorial zoning” to annex as much as three miles from their border with an unincorporated town. For a city the size of Altoona, extraterritorial zoning goes 1.5 miles into a neighboring town. The law allows developers to get city services such as sewer and water not typically available from towns.
In 2023, a bill to designate developed unincorporated areas as “urban towns” as a counter to extraterritorial zoning was filed, but it never made it to a vote. That bill, like many others, has been around for years and hasn’t gotten the traction necessary to become law. It would allow towns with urban centers to incorporate and essentially freeze their borders. The potential downside would be that communities that wish to remain largely rural and are generally in areas where growth is already occurring could end up with requirements that exacerbate the problem of unaffordable housing.
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
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