Workforce Housing Dealt Blow In New Berlin
A project put on hold after petition drives and the Mayor of New Berlin is in retreat over affordable, or workforce housing.
This sounds like or feel like a replay of the open housing battles and backlash of the 1960's.
Are we going to have Iron Ring II? (Former Mayor Henry Meier said the suburbs had created an Iron Ring around the City of Milwaukee, closing off housing to minorities and inhibiting their search for opportunity.
Some suburbs have substituted exclusionary zoning for out-and-out discrimination: big square footage minimums, large lots, etc., as discrimination based on economics is doing the trick.
The slow starvation of transit links in and out of the city further reduces the movement of low-income and minority workers to suburbs and jobs there, reducing the chances that these "strangers," as light railophoble George Watts termed city rail riders, might actually find housing away from Milwaukee.
These are sad days for southeastern Wisconsin. Ugly history is repeating itself.
3 comments:
What you meant to say is that low-income, subsidized housing was dealt a blow in sprawlsville.
Nice try though buddy.
Further, it sure seems to me that New Berlin has just opened themselves up to a lawsuit, as I don't believe a plan commission can decline the project based on it being funded with WHEDA tax credits, only on design not fitting the zoning.
I agree, Dave, that New Berlin has opened itself up to a myriad of problems, and we won't see the full picture there for a while.
Regionally, this is bad.
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