GREEN BAY (NBC26) — With nearly $3 million in city funding and loans, a workforce housing development seeks to provide a place to live for a population that's been left out of housing conversations.
- A piece of land donated to the city along Guns Street near a Walmart Super Center will soon be home to a 95-unit apartment complex.
- The complex, with financial backing from the city, focused on a place to live for working families, is a first-of-its-kind project for the developer.
- Construction is set to begin in September and finish in September of the following year.
Get a bird's-eye view of the future site of the apartments in the video below:
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story.)
This empty lot will one day be home to working families. I'm your Green Bay neighborhood reporter, Pari Apostolakos. The city's housing authority lends money to help start a project designed to house people who make too much money for low-income housing, but maybe not enough to buy a place of their own.
The 95-unit apartment development with one, two, or three-bedroom apartments is set to start construction Sept. 1 and finish a year later.
[Ted Matkom, Gorman & Company Wisconsin Market President]
"The workforce housing platform really tries to serve people who are, as we call, 'The missing middle,'" Ted Matkom, Wisconsin market president for the developer, Gorman and Company, says the apartments will be available to people who make between 80% and 120% percent of the county's median income. So, Matkom says a single person would have to make about $50,000 to $70,000 to live there.
"The missing middle are the people who do not qualify for the low-income tax credit housing, but can't afford to buy their own home," Matkom said.
"How much is it going to take to build this thing?" I asked him over Zoom Wednesday afternoon.
"All in all, Green Bay is providing us almost $3 million of gap financing," Matkom said.
Matkom says tax incremental financing district funding and a loan from the housing authority, plus the city-owned land, make this project possible.
"Do you think that Green Bay is in a housing crisis?" I asked Green Bay Housing Authority Chair William Vande Castle at his law office downtown Wednesday morning.
"Everybody's in a housing crisis," Vande Castle said. "Everybody needs housing, it's getting more and more expensive."
Vande Castle says projects like this help the housing authority's goals.
"It's designed to help them find a place to live," he said. "Then to also hopefully provide them with a base to move out to actual single-family homes."
Matkom says the site being walking or biking distance to businesses and the fact that the city will build a park in the area will help the development feel like a neighborhood.
Vande Castle says there are other similar housing projects underway in the city. But, this is the first one the housing authority has helped make happen.
