Mike Varda and Ron Rosner point to the zoning borders in the Regent neighborhood of Madison.
UW-Madison students outside of their rental unit in the Regent neighborhood.
Ron Rosner talks about a house that was converted from a single-family home into a rental unit in the Regent neighborhood of Madison.
Madison planning director Heather Stouder calls for more housing in the city.
Phillip Klinker, a law student, is one of four roommates living in a rental home in the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood of Madison.
The zoning border in the Regent neighborhood of Madison is evident based on student flags, the number of bikes and cars parked outside and empty alcohol containers.
Mayoral candidate Gloria Reyes answers a prompt during a debate with current Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway at Madison Public Library’s central branch.
Local Government Reporter
Mike Varda and Ron Rosner have lived in Madison’s Regent neighborhood just past Camp Randall Stadium for 40 years. They can point out every house that used to be occupied by a family but now is home to college students.
It’s too many, in their opinion.
“My first house here I abandoned in 2000 because I felt forced out of the neighborhood by students who would ask me, ‘Why do you live in the student neighborhood?’” Rosner said. “Well, I got here before you did.”
They’re worried about the unintended consequences of recent zoning changes the city has made. In just three months, Madison has overhauled zoning for single-family neighborhoods in an attempt to address the city’s perennial housing shortage — from changing the definition of “family” in the city code, to allowing for more unrelated roommates to live together, to adding housing capacity along the city’s high frequency bus routes.
Varda, 73, and Rosner, 86, shared their views as they walked through the neighborhood with a Cap Times reporter and photographer. It was around 4 p.m. on a Thursday. They came across three college students playing “beer die” in a side yard along Lathrop Street, tossing one die high in the air and watching as the cube landed on a folding table, in an attempt to get it in their opponent’s cup and make them take a swig. The three students said they liked their house because it was a block from Camp Randall and close to the University of Wisconsin Engineering school.
“It’s definitely quieter in this neighborhood,” Jordan, one of the students, said, “except on game days.”
Rosner interrupted, “These guys have a different standard for what’s quiet.”
Rosner fears soon the entire neighborhood, once full of families, children and pets — “the students don’t even have dogs!” he exclaimed — will be overrun by student housing. He can even predict which blocks will be “the next to fall.”
Mike Varda and Ron Rosner point to the zoning borders in the Regent neighborhood of Madison.
That’s because in January, the Madison City Council loosened zoning restrictions near major transit lines, allowing properties within a quarter-mile of the routes to develop duplexes, including in several historic districts. And on the last day of February, the council authorized another change to the zoning code updating the definition of “family” to allow more unrelated renters to live together in neighborhoods that were mostly restricted to single-family occupancy. The new code also removes a distinction between owner-occupied homes and rentals, allowing five or fewer unrelated roommates to live in either type of housing anywhere in the city.
Supporters of the changes have applauded city leaders for opening up the housing market and removing stricter limits on renters than on owners. Those opposed have argued Madison is changing not just codes but the family-oriented character of neighborhoods.
The debate has divided the city, raised issues of racism and discrimination, and become a central issue in Madison’s mayoral election.
Just two doors down from Varda lives former Ald. Scott Resnick. He has spent hours debating the city’s recent zoning changes with his neighbors, and while they agree on some points, Resnick has a very different opinion about what the changes mean for the community.
UW-Madison students outside of their rental unit in the Regent neighborhood.
“The fabric of the neighborhood is changing,” said Resnick, who bought his home in the Regent area in 2020. “As you start seeing the neighborhood change, folks still want strong neighborhoods, and I believe that can happen between homeowners and renters, students and seniors.”
“I chose to live in this neighborhood, and I love the college students,” Resnick, 36, said. “They keep me young.”
Even so, he thinks there is nuance to the debate and that his neighbors have some valid concerns.
“We needed to change the family housing definition — it is rooted in institutional racism and it is used to abuse, primarily, people of color, which we have seen in the complaints,” Resnick said. “If I were the city, I would have just taken more time to think through and be intentional about the actions, but we do need to get rid of the law.”
On their own, each of the zoning revisions will have incremental effects that will probably take decades for most people to notice. But the changes are notable in another way: Madison’s steps mirror those taken in a different Midwestern community before that city eventually abolished single-family zoning altogether.
When Minneapolis ended single-family zoning in 2018, allowing for duplexes, triplexes and the expansion of existing homes in 70% of residential neighborhoods, it was one of the final and more extreme zoning reforms the city implemented over the course of a decade.
The steps taken prior —relaxing regulations on transit routes, allowing additional dwelling units in all residential areas by request, removing the minimum amount of parking required for new developments — look very similar to recent changes in Madison.
The arguments behind the moves also sound familiar.
“Our goal was never to drastically change the landscape of single-family housing in Minneapolis,” said Meg McMahan, planning director for the Minnesota city. “Our goal really was to remove barriers to opportunities to expand housing choices in our neighborhoods.”
Madison planning director Heather Stouder calls for more housing in the city.
Nearly 300 hundred miles to the southeast, Madison is facing a population influx it’s not prepared for. The question is how much further will the city go to encourage more homes in the same 101 square miles of space?
The city is not moving toward the abolishment of single-family zoning, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said, “but I wouldn’t say it’s off the table either.”
“That’s something that I would definitely want to learn a lot more about because I really do believe in learning from other places,” Rhodes-Conway said. “But my focus is really on creating housing options for people in every neighborhood in Madison — and so I’m interested in any tools, zoning or otherwise, that help us do that.”
To Heather Stouder, Madison’s planning director, the intention is simple: Make every change possible to create more options.
“We need to accommodate more housing and more of everything within a smaller area of land. That equates to density, and that’s a term that brings forth a lot of feelings,” Stouder said. “We need more housing and we know we can’t continue to spread out and take up as much acreage per person as we have in the past.”
Madison may not be intentionally eliminating single-family zoning, but “in a way, we’ve already done that” by relaxing numerous zoning rules over the past two years, Stouder said.
What is the transit-oriented development overlay?
This recent change in Madison zoning code adds housing within a quarter-mile of the city’s new bus rapid transit line and other major transit routes, including in historic districts. The overlay adds to underlying regulations and allows for slightly more flexibility with new developments within those corridors.
In this case, the transit-oriented development overlay will essentially allow for the next increment up in developments within the zoning code. For example, a single-family unit would be allowed to be developed into a duplex, and a 24-unit apartment building could increase by 12 units in suburban residential zoning districts.
It also means properties within the overlay are allowed to be built closer to the street and require fewer parking spaces on streets and in lots.
The change took effect Jan. 26.
What does the family definition update do?
Madison’s zoning code dictates the number of and relationships among people who can live together based on three determinations: the type of zoning district, whether the property is rented or owned, and relational status.
Tighter restrictions are in place in less-crowded, single-family neighborhoods, and even more constraints exist for renters versus buyers.
Under the previous code, those who rented homes in single-family residential districts were limited to only one “unrelated” roommate. Those who owned the home in which they lived could have up to five unrelated housemates. With the code change, five unrelated people can live together, even if all five are renting. The revisions create the same standards for all zoning districts that allow housing in the city.
The change took effect March 11.
Every city in the United States has a code, exactly 100 years old this year — required by the 1923 Standard State Zoning Enabling Act — that makes it so a bar, a farm, a factory or a high-rise apartment, can’t be built next door to a family home.
But zoning, meant to regulate land use, has done much more than that. In Madison, where the city’s housing crunch is at a tipping point, experts say zoning restrictions have put up barriers to solving the problem.
That’s partly because 75% of the city’s residential space allowed only for single-family housing until this year. It’s the type of zoning most common in the U.S., and homeowners and local governments use it to protect suburban streets from large developments nearby.
If three-quarters of residential space allows only single-family homes, the majority of the city is off limits for “missing middle” developments, the building between a house and a high-rise apartment. These types of houses — duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes — typically cost less in rent than a mortgage payment and could create more affordable housing options.
The city’s recent moves directly address the missing middle, said Robert Procter, the government affairs director for the Realtors Association of South Central Wisconsin. In Madison, he said, that’s housing that costs less than $400,000.
“That’s what doesn’t exist. There’s just very little of it,” Procter said.
He also argued the city’s changes are “modest” and will therefore have only a modest effect on the city.
“Most of these neighborhoods that were built as single-family residential neighborhoods are subject to covenants and deed restrictions that are going to limit the impact that any of these ordinances have,” Procter said. “Most of those deed restrictions require that proposed properties remain single family.”
He knows because he helps draft those deeds.
“These housing changes aren’t going to dramatically change the character of Madison. What’s going to dramatically change the character of Madison is the fact that we’re going to add 100,000 new people,” Procter said. “There seems to be this artificial creation that the rental units and homeownership are adverse to each other. That’s a false premise.”
Ald. Bill Tishler, who represents the University Hill Farms area primarily made up of single-family homes, echoed a similar sentiment despite voting against both city zoning changes.
“I have nothing against duplexes. I have nothing against building more apartment buildings,” he said. “I just don’t think it should be done at the expense of single-family housing. The two can coexist. I don’t think it’s an either/or, but the conversation around single-family housing has negative connotations to it. That’s not fair or accurate.”
Ron Rosner talks about a house that was converted from a single-family home into a rental unit in the Regent neighborhood of Madison.
Varda, born and raised in the Madison area, has spent his life watching the city change. He lives in a large renovated house built in 1911 that he bought with a $5,000 down payment. He didn’t answer when asked if he thought that same purchase would be possible today.
A group of nurses lives together three blocks from his home, and he said he’s OK with them — or any group of young professionals — “bunking up” to save money on rent. It’s students with short-term investment in the community that he’s worried about.
“Renters are essentially geared to a transient occupancy. They’re not there for the long term,” Varda said. “I’m not saying renters shouldn’t be able to get reasonably priced housing, but if you’re only renting and you’re short-term, you’re a part of the risk you ask landlords to take on.”
For Varda and Rosner, their chief concern is absentee landlords buying up blocks of property at a time. They’re not alone in that fear, with dozens of residents showing up to City Council meetings worried about the same thing.
“There are 50,000 homes in this city which are called ‘single family,’ and they’re not all the same. There are different qualities and, more significantly, there are different locations,” Rosner said. “For a single-family home in this neighborhood, there is only one trajectory for it — if it’s for sale, it goes to a landlord.”
“That’s what the city failed to acknowledge,” he said.
The city released a report the same day the council voted on the update to the family definition on Feb. 28, responding to questions about real estate speculation by absentee property owners. That issue also arose at a Madison Plan Commission meeting Feb. 13.
The report addressed the “extreme fear” voiced throughout the process of changing the family definition, said Katie Bannon, the city’s zoning administrator: “If we’re opening up more housing choices for renters, does that mean we’re going to have these out-of-state or even local investors rush in and buy up full neighborhoods to turn them into rentals?”
“We don’t think it’s likely,” Bannon said. “We certainly may see some additional rental housing that we don’t have today, and (we) don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.”
The city’s building inspection division director, Matt Tucker, also cast doubt on a sudden growth of real estate speculation: “We have very limited experience with any of that occurring in our city.”
Varda and Rosner said they’ve had plenty of experience with housing turnover in their Regent neighborhood. Once a house goes from owned to rented, they said, it almost never transitions back. They believe their neighborhood is “vulnerable” to more of those changes.
For 20 years, they’ve been the self-identified “zoning police,” complaining to the city anytime a property is a nuisance or a safety issue — when too many cars are parked next to a house, bikes are blocking front entrances, or noise is too loud late at night.
Madison’s population grew by 16% between 2010 and 2020, from 233,209 to 269,840. While the city expanded by nearly 37,000 people, Madison added just 16,270 housing units in that decade, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data. With the city’s population expected to grow by over 100,000 between now and 2050, experts project that Madison will need at least 10,000 new homes every five years to keep up — and that’s a conservative estimate.
Newcomers are attracted to Madison’s state Capitol, university and tech startups. The city’s technology industry workforce — largely supported by the health care software company Epic and the cancer-detection developer Exact Sciences — grew by 6.2% from 2015 through 2020, gaining more jobs in the first year of the pandemic than in the prior half-decade, according to a Washington, D.C. think tank report.
“Lots of people want to live here. Job growth has been good, income growth has been good and housing demand has been really strong,” said Kurt Paulsen, a professor of urban planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We’ve underbuilt housing relative to demand. That’s the squeeze — more people chasing fewer units.”
The proof is in the city’s vacancy rate, the percentage of available units that are unoccupied, which measures if enough housing is available.
A healthy vacancy rate is around 5%, according to planning division staff. A 2022 end-of-year report found the city’s rate is well below that healthy level, at 2.5%.
“Because of demand exceeding supply, as well as drastic increases in construction cost, most new rental units are not affordable to the median renter household,” the report states.
Low vacancy rates can also be disruptive to tenants’ rights and stability. When there’s a shortage of housing options, landlords gain more control. They can demand higher rents and kick out renters who can’t pay because there are plenty of others to take their place.
Kitnoki McCorison, 42, lives with five roommates near the Capitol after being forced to move from a previous apartment because of a rent increase. The group of six decided to bunk together to afford Madison’s record-high rents.
She found the city’s previous definition of “family” that required roommates to be married or otherwise related worrisome and limiting.
“We’re a found family of six adults. Four of us are disabled. We have very, very low income and we’re basically just living off of what we can,” McCorison said. “Even though we aren’t related, we are very much a family.”
The group has lived together since before they collectively moved to Madison a decade ago.
“Just because we’re unrelated doesn’t mean we will want to split up and go different places,” McCorison said. “And even as a family living together, we’re living right at the edge of our means. We’re living here just barely.”
Phillip Klinker’s rent is spiking at an alarming rate — it increased by $200 a month this year — but rather than search for a new apartment, he renewed his lease out of fear he wouldn’t be able to find anything else.
“There are three of us in a four-person house — we don’t even have a fourth roommate — but we re-signed because we didn’t want to risk getting stuck out in the cold,” the 23-year-old UW law student said. He lives on the near east side in the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood.
Klinker is in favor of greater density in the city because, like many, he hopes it will lead to more housing and therefore more affordable rents.
“These zoning changes, they’re not a panacea. It’s not like gonna fix everything, but more housing will mean easier-to-find housing,” Klinker said, “and, hopefully, cheaper rents.”
Phillip Klinker, a law student, is one of four roommates living in a rental home in the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood of Madison.
Zoning is just one piece of the puzzle to solving Madison’s severe housing shortage — and yes, Paulsen, the urban planning professor, thinks it’s a crisis.
“We are in a housing crisis, and we’ve been in one for a decade,” Paulsen said. “Zoning reform allows for more housing and a greater variety of housing; it is necessary but not sufficient to address this housing crisis.”
To understand the changes the city is making, it’s crucial to learn the history behind it, said Walter Stern, an assistant professor in educational policy at UW who researches residential segregation and urban development.
There are dozens of types of zoning uses: commercial, industrial, single-family, multifamily, agricultural, planned development, mixed-use and more. When policymakers drafted zoning laws a century ago in cities across the United States, single-family districts were an “explicit means of achieving not just class segregation, but racial segregation, too,” according to Stern.
The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated residential segregation ordinances in 1917 and so “permissible and not permissible zoning” — dictating what can happen and where — became another mechanism for achieving the same end.
To this day, “those restrictions still serve the purpose of limiting who can move into a neighborhood,” Stern said. He attributed that result to the fact that economic opportunity and race remain closely linked.
“There’s a really significant racial wealth gap that affects people’s ability to purchase homes,” Stern said. “Marking off wide swaths of cities for single-family residence just restricts the amount of socio-economically and racially integrated housing stock that’s available.”
Community leaders, including Ruben Anthony, the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison, and Sabrina Madison, the founder and CEO of the Progress Center for Black Women, have seen that struggle up close.
“Landlords are in the catbird seat where they can pick and choose who they want to be in the apartments,” Anthony said. “A lot of times, African Americans find themselves not being the top choice. I’ve heard directly from poor people how difficult it is today to find a proper place and, as a result, you have people couch-surfing and sleeping on a kitchen floor.”
It can be hard to see Madison is facing a true crisis, but it feels that way for lower-income people trying to find a place to live, Anthony added.
“The city is trying,” he said. “Madison doesn’t have a lot of room to expand, so there’s a lot of infill development where they’ll take something down and put something new up. The problem with that is when they put something up, it’s usually not affordable housing.”
Sabrina Madison, who also serves on City Council, said she stands behind the change to the family definition, though she wished the city heard from more communities of color during the process, especially because she hopes it will help people of color find more affordable housing.
“The (family definition) language felt like a relic from the era of redlining and making people illegal before they can even step foot in the community,” Madison said. “For the folks I serve, we’re looking at families living illegally when these are folks trying to save money by rooming together.”
“The (family definition) language felt like a relic from the era of redlining and making people illegal before they can even step foot in the community … these are folks trying to save money by rooming together.”
– Sabrina Madison
Minneapolis eliminated single-family zoning because the city found the entire system was “predicated on patterns of segregation, redlining and restrictive racial covenants,” according to Minneapolis planning director McMahan.
“The neighborhoods themselves exist because they were built on the backs of racist systems, to the harm of people of color in our region,” McMahan said. “And I’m sure that’s true of other regions.”
Madison city leaders have acknowledged those inequities.
The city’s revised zoning ordinance with a new definition of family states that people of color and lower-income residents are disproportionately affected by the current zoning because they are statistically more likely to be renters and need to share housing to afford rent.
Just 15% of Black households in Madison own their homes — one-third of the U.S. rate, according to a May report from the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum. For Hispanic residents, Madison’s homeownership rate is the lowest of the state’s five largest cities at just 30%, compared with about 41% statewide.
Madison also had the most expensive housing market based on the most recent 2019 census data, with the median home worth more than $246,000 — $66,000 more than the state average.
On top of that, the recent update to the family definition was in part prompted because of complaints about violations of the city code targeted at immigrant or multigenerational households of color, said Bannon, the city’s zoning administrator.
“Given the well-documented exclusionary and racist history of zoning, particularly single-family zoning, I think it’s pretty much indefensible as an ongoing strategy,” Stern said. “The language of preserving neighborhood character, preserving property values, whether intentionally or not, often functions as a cover for the preservation of class and, often by extension, racial privilege.”
The zoning border in the Regent neighborhood of Madison is evident based on student flags, the number of bikes and cars parked outside and empty alcohol containers.
Rosner and Varda are among many who have pointed to the city’s housing shortage in the 1960s and ’70s as an example of what could go wrong with the city’s plan, when a UW-Madison enrollment spike drove families to the outskirts of the city to make space.
Former Mayor Paul Soglin, who served five terms from 1973 to 1979, from 1989 to 1997 and again from 2011 to 2019, thinks Madison will see something similar now.
“If I was mayor, I would never adopt zoning conditions that would drive up the cost of housing for the very families that are our concern, and that’s what this is going to do,” Soglin told the Cap Times. “The consequences of this are enormous because, in many cases, it will be multiple adults with incomes who rent these homes, and that’s going to end up depopulating the schools. We’ve already seen what that’s done to Madison.”
Rhodes-Conway, who is facing reelection in April against one of Soglin’s former deputy mayors, Gloria Reyes, said she understands why people are afraid but said these steps must be taken to grow the city’s housing stock.
It has become increasingly difficult for people to find places where they can afford to live, forcing homeowners and renters to move into neighboring cities including Verona, Middleton, Sun Prairie and as far as Janesville, according to Rhodes-Conway.
All of those suburban cities saw their populations boom between 2010 and 2021. Middleton experienced a 23% spike, gaining just over 5,000 residents. Verona grew by 3,500 residents, a 25% boost. Sun Prairie attracted over 6,000 new residents, a 19% jump.
Growing outward is not an option, Rhodes-Conway said. Every neighborhood in Madison needs to become more crowded, and more available to renters, the mayor believes.
Mayoral candidate Gloria Reyes answers a prompt during a debate with current Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway at Madison Public Library’s central branch.
“People who love and have invested in their neighborhoods look at any change as being potentially harmful to them, and I don’t really blame people for being afraid,” Rhodes-Conway said. “It’s certainly possible that you will see properties convert from ownership to rental, but we don’t think it will happen in nearly the volume that people are worried about.”
Reyes has opposed many of the city’s zoning changes, partly because she says Rhodes-Conway’s administration has charged ahead without listening to the community. At a recent mayoral debate, she said she’s worried about friction at council meetings with residents calling each other NIMBYs, the derogatory slang for “not in my backyard.”
Soglin noted something similar to the Cap Times, saying he is concerned about “know-it-alls accusing thoughtful people of NIMBYism and racism, when those know-it-alls are presenting proposals that are going to have racist impacts.”
“This change in Madison is nothing more than an invitation to these absentee landlords to buy up multifamily housing from single-family housing,” Soglin said. “We have no data or evidence that this modification is going to help.”
Rhodes-Conway maintains the city must take every step possible.
“When we look at change, we tend to worry about all the things that could go wrong, and we forget to look at the status quo,” Rhodes-Conway said. “I would argue that the harm that is currently happening to working-class families in Madison is substantial and that if we don’t at least try to make it easier to afford housing in Madison, we are doing real harm to real people’s lives.
“There is a cost to maintaining the status quo.”
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