A new development could add multiple homes to the Village, but we have challenges ahead of us to ensure equity, affordable housing, and traffic safety for everyone.
How We Got to Today
In early Summer of 2023, a developer approached the Village Board with a new development for a trio of properties they owned on the North East corner of Hampton and Santa Monica in Whitefish Bay. The initial design was intended to be four stories high, with parking underground, and the first-floor dedicated to commercial space (for something like a coffee shop or other small business).
The first design required many code variances due to a complex and perhaps outdated building/zoning code that may be old and a patchwork of changes over time. The developer asked the Board to use a process called a Planned Development District (PDD) which would allow the Board to potentially blanket approve many of these variances, without burdening our volunteer committees. The current code limits this process to lots larger than the one in question, so it needed to be amended - this is what the Board declined to do.
As a result, the only remaining avenue was going through the Plan Commission (PC), and Architectural Review Committee (ARC) process. The ARC made numerous requests regarding the look and feel of the building and has currently declined to approve it. The developer is appealing to the Board of Appeals on Feb 13. The formal appeal is now online and it really shows some of the flaws in our process including delays due to quorum, and arbitrary visual grievances.
Housing In Whitefish Bay
Why this project and it’s outcome are so important goes beyond small details like if it has the color brick we prefer, or if the parking configuration is optimal. In the past, our Village has made use of racial covenants and generally been a place that has excluded people implicitly or explicitly on the basis of race. Bay Bridge is a local organization that has done significant work in helping WFB residents understand that our legacy requires repairing some significant faults. One only needs to look at our demographics to see that our diversity does not match that of our region, state, or country. To be a stronger community, we absolutely must embrace the power of different experiences, backgrounds, ideas, and culture. Housing and it’s relatively high cost in Whitefish Bay is a key barrier to reaching a more just, and equitable town. We should at least be asking why, and curious about how we can right the wrongs of the past.
While it’s not possible to say with certainty that this specific project is bogged down because of it’s relative affordability, these long-standing systemic imbalances are a head-wind on any project that might make living here within reach of many more people. Something as seemingly impartial as the building code can serve as a very effective artificial barrier. Limiting the types of homes we can build, and add significant expense to a given projects final cost.
It’s easy to hide behind the process as “necessary” and “virtuous” by adding thoughtfulness and consideration to the development of housing here, but in many cases it does far more to slow or entirely prevent any new housing that is within reach of many people.
What It Improves
This is being built on a corner that contains a vacant office building, and two multi-family homes. The remaining three corners are a CVS, a strip mall, and a gas station. So from that perspective alone, it will help the gateway to Whitefish Bay by replacing an aging, vacant office building with a place people can call home. Adding large new developments also significantly adds to the tax base which helps us do things we like, such as making streets safer and improving our parks.
As a location to live more affordably, it sits directly on the 14 bus line (stops just outside the door) and the Oak Leaf Trail. For someone who wants to save money by driving less, they would have two very good options for getting to the Milwaukee Downtown, Silver Spring downtown area, Bayshore, and Glendale. One could live here without a car at all, and be able to do quite well.
Additionally, families that live here are nominally as close to schools as many other areas in WFB without crossing many busy streets like Silver Spring, or Santa Monica (Hampton is still a factor for elementary ages, however). It’s not pushed out to the fringes of the Village, which helps a bit to minimize the time spent getting to and from school without driving.
An Improvement to Our Resiliency
While the current designs regrettably do have a lot of surface parking (because of various codes, not because it’s particularly desirable to have them), one can hope that future street safety improvements on Santa Monica, and Hampton (to name a few) will make it easier to choose to leave the car at home and bike, take the bus, or not own a car at all. Perhaps developers would be interested in working with the Village to drastically improve the safety of that and other intersections, which is very old one and lacking many modern safety considerations for pedestrians and bicyclists. As mentioned earlier, the property will also significant add value to the tax base, which will directly increase the funds we’d have available in the budget to make those very street improvements.
There’s also something to be said for housing that may be suitable for people who work in or near the Village. Not everyone has the funds, time, or desire to maintain a full home and all the responsibilities that brings. Our local businesses, schools and other public institutions would benefit from being able to have more of our workforce live nearby. Expensive housing is an indirect tax on local businesses because they will find it harder to find good, reliable, hourly workers. Many jobs in Whitefish Bay simply do not pay enough to also live here.
This housing isn’t highly affordable, or perfectly-suited for families, but every new home made available relieves the pressure on other units that might be suitable as people move up a level of housing. We need more homes, hopefully more dense, soon.
What Could Have Been
As mentioned earlier, the original design had more homes, underground parking, and ground floor retail. All of these likely would have made the homes more affordable, and created an opportunity for even more people to make Whitefish Bay their home. Retail on the ground floor could have been the beginnings of a new revitalization of the area. Perhaps a coffee shop, or restaurant that would bring neighbors together in an area generally not known for being a destination to visit or relax near.
Another often ignored issue is the School District. Every last student we add to the School District directly increases the funding the District receives. Whitefish bay has declined in population by over 3,000 people since the 70’s, which puts significant pressure on the District. We need to be finding ways to get this back up before the District is forced to make cuts to the quality of education we get. It becomes imperative to find ways to increase the number of students that call WFB home, to help keep the School District performing it’s best.
Very Real Challenges
This project is not without challenges.
Existing Residents
Some families currently live in the units that would be demolished for this project. We are actively considering ways to make the transition to a good home in Whitefish Bay as easy as possible for these folks. If you have ideas or would like to help, please reach out. We must expand housing, but make sure we aren’t pushing people out while we do it. This is a complicated situation for individuals to influence in a positive way, but we must be demanding that the Village become an active participant in this process of systemic change.
As a Village, we need to be focusing far more on how to comprehensively make it affordable to live here. These homes are not the perfect solution to many people who are kept out of WFB, and we will need an all-of-the-above approach to truly solve this. It’s not about this one development as much as it is about the broader problem.
Traffic
Another issue is the problem of our streets. When new developments like this come up across the country, a typical refrain is “what about the traffic.” Hampton and Santa Monica are both very busy streets, serving some twenty-thousand drivers per day according to the DOT. They are also wildly over-built, with zero protections for bicyclists and pedestrians. Both are wide boulevards, that are designed to feel very comfortable at 40mph. Recent police chases have reached 60+ mph, or going the wrong way on these roads, which illustrates vividly that they are not designed for neighborhood traffic speeds of 25mph where hundreds of kids live, play, and go to school.
But, we can’t wait for the streets to be perfectly safe to start making it affordable to live here. There are many cheap and easy ways to make streets modestly safer, until we are able to make more significant and permanent changes. An example from Toronto shows how you can quickly set up a protected lane for bicyclist that looks great too.
However, the concerns about traffic are completely valid and important! Though, when someone is concerned about traffic, the root issue might not be always the same. It might be that they perceive a lot of reckless driving, or speeds that seem way too fast, repeated crashes and drunk driving, or an uncomfortable level of noise, or regularly witnessing pedestrians being put in danger by inattentive drivers, or just an endless stream of cars at certain times of the day.
For each of these, the solution might be different, but we can usually work to mitigate most of them with good results. Importantly, the addition of a dozen or so homes is barely going to make a difference in the thousands of cars per day at this intersection. We can make the street safer, calmer, quieter, and less dangerous even if the traffic volume doesn’t change. Most importantly, we must explore what the “traffic” concerns are, and deal with the problem rather than just refusing to ever add homes. There’s a high probability if we could only get everyone to drive the posted 25mph consistently, the area would rapidly feel noticeably safer.
Read more about safe intersection designs.
We need to be having these discussions as a Village much more frequently, and not only in response to the pleas of a few residents who have personally taken on the burden and found the time and shared goal of fixing a single location important to them. We have the tools, we know what areas are most dangerous (or most risky) - we need to just start. Everything else is just excuses. It would be absurd to make everyone come to multiple meetings over the course of a year to make sure NSFD is able to respond to a fire near their home, but we require this for people who want moving about the Village to be safer.
It’s not you, it’s zoning.
The core problem here is that the Village has traditionally taken a very passive role in development in the Village. We’ve responded to developers who already want to build here, and largely filtered them through our standard processes. But this attracts developers and businesses with the time and money to do so, and for projects that are most likely to actually be approved here (why bother proposing something that’s going to cost you months of time, and fees to redesign it anyways?). Our zoning and building codes do a lot of heavy lifting of silently blocking anything other than a single-family home. In areas where you can build a larger building, the land is pretty much fully utilized already. Even then, the commercial stock is aging and often must still go through the process meat-grinder for all kinds of trivial things like using some adjacent space for outdoor seating.
We need to re-evaluate whether these are actually healthy for the Village - rising home prices might be good for people who want to sell their home very soon, but we could be setting ourselves up for significantly problematic times if it becomes so expensive to live here that our school attendance collapses, and the appeal of other areas around us becomes much stronger for younger people, new families, and people who have been historically excluded. It will be very hard to quickly build new, cheaper homes in response to this trend. Existing property values would likely plummet as well if the demand for living here drops precipitously. The demand for places like Fitzy’s, or Winkies, or Stone Creek will dwindle, and we’ll all be forced to more frequently drive miles just to have lunch with a friend rather than a short walk from home.
Every system is designed to get the results it gets.
Where do we go now?
We have a Community Development Director starting any day now, and this should be one of their top priorities - examine our current housing situation, and understand if we need to rethink what types of homes we allow or don’t allow, and where. If we do this carefully, it’s not hard to imagine adding an incredible amount of diversity in housing, small businesses, and other amenities - all of which will make our Village more vibrant, and resilient for the future. Hopefully our Village Board is willing to be open to influence, and willing to embrace change and new ideas, knowing that the only thing that’s constant, is change. At a minimum we need to begin having community conversations about our values, and what experiences are important to us, and whether the way we do things now is helping, or hurting that. Rarely does “do what we’ve always done” result in prosperity.
A parallel effort MUST be figuring out how we will make our streets safer. Recently, the Milwaukee DPW announced their 2024 plan for making streets safer. At one point they went as far as to say this is “A war on reckless drivers, speeders and all dangerous behaviors on our roads. And this is a war we intend to win.” This is really just incredible for an institution that typically is not known for making waves or broad proclamations. They have seen that what people and businesses want and need is streets that are safe for everyone. Dangerous streets make people not want to visit businesses, and dangerous streets make people not want to live nearby. We can’t wait until a place is great to live to finally make the streets safe - or we probably won’t get either one.
By making streets safer now we begin to prepare for the next decade. If we intend to make housing more affordable and add more neighbors to our community, it’s imperative that we have ways to move about the Village outside of a car, and safely. Walking, rolling, and biking are healthy, and build community just by putting us in touch with our neighbors, and seeing their humanity rather than a blurry face through a windshield. We make connections, new friends, and notice that a neighbor is perhaps struggling with the un-shoveled crosswalks or bus stop. At a more practical level, cars require vastly more parking space and costly road repairs than any other method. One bike rack can hold a dozen bikes in the same space as a car that one person drove to the store. We don’t need everyone out of their cars, but just a fraction would be a very notable difference. And with a modern e-bike, most trips around the Village on a bike is faster and more convenient. You don’t wait in long lines of cars, or jockey for parking 2 blocks away. And it’s fun!
What Can You Do?
At this point, let the Village know you are not happy with the “do nothing” approach. Ask them to proactively examine the issues of affordability, and what tangible solutions they are exploring. Tell them you aren’t afraid of adding diversity to our neighborhood, and believe we can solve many traffic issues by focusing on biking and walking infrastructure. Demand that our DPW take an aggressive stance on reducing driving-related injuries. Come to meetings of the Architectural Review Board, Plan Commission or Board of Appeals to learn just how many barriers there are to anything that doesn’t perfectly fit a certain style, size, and shape of home or business.
How To Contact the Village Board
This link should open a new email with all the names added and the current emails are available on the Village website if any of these aren’t working.
Upcoming Meetings
- Board of Appeals (this one will have the developer present to appeal their current rejected status): February 13th, 6:15pm
- Architectural Review Commission: February 15th, 5:30pm
- Village Board: Next meeting is early March