City officials are looking to collect more data on housing in the downtown area to find affordable solutions for student housing.
Ald. Zach Wood, District 8, and City of Madison Housing Initiatives Specialist Matt Wachter held a discussion Wednesday night to present problems in
Wachter, who graduated from UW-Madison, gave a presentation in which he said the city does not have a lot of quantitative and qualitative data, partially because student housing affordability is more complicated than traditional affordable housing.
Before the recession hit in 2007, the city was losing renters, but between 2007 and 2015 the rental housing market exploded with 17,000 renters, according to Wachter. While more than 1,000 renters were moving to Madison annually, almost all of whom were millennials, there were only hundreds of units being added each year.
As a result, the vacancy rate has dropped from around 5 percent to around 2 percent, which, according to Wachter, has driven up
Those factors affect both student housing and traditional housing. The solution to making student renting affordable is more ambiguous.
The city can use tax increment financing, or TIF, to encourage constructing apartment buildings in Madison by loaning funds to developers at a
Wood also acknowledged the substantial costs students face in attending the university, such as student loans, but said the city can’t really change that.
“I think part of the reason we are having this conversation about student housing is when it comes to the whole picture of affording the college experience and trying to make that accessible to everybody from all backgrounds,” Wood said, “housing is really the only area we can directly affect.”
Wood said he hopes to hold more discussions in the future.
