GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — A plan 30 years in the making is taking shape on Green Bay's east side despite ongoing push back from some residents.
In the Red Smith neighborhood,167 acres owned by Moski Corp. will soon become the home of nearly 400 new units, including 227 single-family homes and more than 100 apartment rentals.
"We need them live as soon as possible because we have neighbors who don't have homes right now," Green Bay Alder Alyssa Proffitt said.
This month, the Green Bay Common Council approved the developer’s agreement, including water distribution plans that addressed voiced resident concern about water pressure and storm water damage.
A pressure-reducing valve will be installed near the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay campus, where Alder Proffitt says students looking for housing may benefit from the project.
But neighbors in the area have mixed feelings.
“(It) is good in a way, but in another way, it's crowded," said Rick Kreutzberg, who built a home in the Red Smith neighborhood more than two decades ago.
Kreutzberg and his wife, Sandy, say they’ve seen a lot of development in the area and they’re accepting of new neighbors, but they have concerns about the new units.
"I think it's the traffic that it'll cause, and the pressure on the school system here, too," explained Sandy Kreutzberg.
Red Smith School sits on Sussex Road, a busy street during the school week.
To connect the new units to the rest of the neighborhood, streets off Sussex will have to expand, funneling even more traffic to that road.
"I don't know how it's going to handle it," Rick Kreutzberg stated.
Watch the full story by Jessica Goska here:
Some neighbors say they're accepting or indifferent to the project. Moski Corp has planned for years to develop the area, though the details of that plan weren’t always clear.
For other Red Smith residents, though, the construction is enough to drive them out.
Just up the road from a single-family home listed for sale on Church Street, one man says his property taxes are already too high, and he plans to put his home on the market before the new market-rate units move in.
The single-family homes and apartment units in Red Smith will make up about a quarter of the approximately 1,600 new units approved by the Green Bay Common Council this year.
