Mayor Rhodes-Conway announces next steps on housing agenda
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As part of Madison’s ongoing efforts to create more housing of all types, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway is announcing new housing goals, an interactive housing tracker for the public to monitor progress, and an update to her Housing Forward initiative to guide City actions over the next two years.
This work builds upon the 2024 Dane County Regional Housing Strategy report and the Mayor’s 2021 Housing Forward initiative by detailing a Madison-specific housing goal in step with Dane County targets. It also outlines near-term actions that incorporate the City Housing Strategy Committee’s 2024 recommendations.
In order to keep up with our current pace of growth and address one of the lowest rental vacancy rates in the United States, the City of Madison is setting an ambitious goal to support the creation of 15,000 new homes by 2030, with an additional goal of at least 25% of those homes – 3,750 – having long-term affordability at below-market rates for those making 60% of the Area Median Income or less. This level of growth would keep pace with population growth and also help bring Madison to a healthy vacancy rate to ease housing price pressures.
To track progress toward these goals and share that information with the public, the City of Madison is introducing the City of Madison Housing Tracker. The Tracker is a new public dashboard that will show how many homes are currently under construction or have been completed since the start of 2025, where those homes are being built, and how many are affordable. It also includes historical context of how many new homes have been added in the past decade. Data for the Housing Tracker will be updated monthly.
District 2 Alder Juliana Bennett supports this data-driven approach to the housing challenge.
As part of this effort to set ambitious goals and track progress towards those goals, the Mayor has updated her 2021 Housing Forward initiative. Since Housing Forward was first introduced, it has acted as a guide for City priorities and led to several notable accomplishments that have made it easier for more housing to be developed and make more types of housing available for people with a wide range of incomes.
The 2025 update to Housing Forward released today summarizes some of the successes made in achieving the goals set out 2021, while also recognizing there is still a lot of work to do to address the housing needs of the community. Housing Forward also outlines plans to accommodate future growth, with more than 115,000 new residents expected to be living in Madison by 2050.
Some of the accomplishments outlined in the Housing Forward update include:
- Using the Affordable Housing Fund and TIF funding to generate thousands of new homes: Since 2022, the City has committed a total of $47 million from the Affordable Housing Fund and $12 million in Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) funds to support the development of 2,544 new homes, while also ensuring 2/3 of those homes have long-term affordability.
- Purchasing land for housing in neighborhoods facing displacement pressure: Some of Madison’s historically affordable neighborhoods are facing increasing growth pressure, which makes it harder for long-time residents to stay in their neighborhoods. Madison adopted a land banking policy that allows us to purchase land in these neighborhoods and ensure it remains available for affordable housing or local economic development. The City is actively purchasing land in South Madison and other historically-underinvested neighborhoods, and will add more affordable rental and ownership homes to those areas.
- Secured funding and began construction on Madison’s first-ever purpose-built men’s shelter. As part of Housing Forward’s work to end homelessness, a combination of City, County, and federal funding was secured to build Madison’s first building specifically designed to be a men’s shelter. Construction began in 2024 and is anticipated to open in early 2026.
In order to address our continued need for housing and make progress toward our new goals, some of the strategies for the future outlined in the 2025 Housing Forward update include:
- Continuing a historic commitment to affordable housing: The City of Madison will commit another $32 million to the Affordable Housing Fund over the next two years.
- Pursuing additional code and process changes to support “Missing Middle” housing: Not everyone can afford to buy a single-family home, and not everyone wants to live in a large apartment building. Madison needs more options in the “middle,” including duplexes, triplexes, smaller apartment buildings, and townhomes, and additional changes to city ordinances could make it easier for those types of housing to fit into the fabric of Madison neighborhoods.
- Advocating for state and federal policies that support condominiums and other homeownership options: Madison needs options, including condominiums and townhomes, that provide opportunities for people to own their homes. There are a number of factors in state and federal programs that make condo developments difficult for the private sector to build. The City of Madison is committed to advocate for changes to make them more feasible options for builders.
District 3 Alder Derek Field was part of the Housing Strategy Committee that developed recommendations related to key housing challenges in 2024.
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