126 Langdon St. has sat empty since 2008. But that is soon to change.
Steve Brown Apartments, most notable for developing Lucky Apartments near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus in downtown Madison, secured approval from the city to build a new, lower-cost apartment complex on Langdon’s famously empty lot.
The approval comes after at least four other proposals for the area had been rejected, including the twice proposed — and twice rejected — Hub II, which failed to secure city approval after local residents objected to the building’s height and luxury amenities, according to Wisconsin State Journal.
District 2 Ald. Juliana Bennett said Steve Brown’s newly approved apartment complex does not include luxury amenities in the proposed plan.
“Students are saying ‘we do not want some luxury skyrise. We just want a modest place where we’re not living with cockroaches,’ and I think that’s exactly what Steve Brown has delivered in this project,” Bennett said.
District 8 Ald. MGR Govindarajan echoed Bennett’s statement, telling The Daily Cardinal the new apartment complex is a promising project.
“[It is] able to prove that you don’t need to have pools, and you don’t need to have bar rooms,” Govindarajan said. “You can actually still make affordable student housing without the need for all those amenities.”
MGR and Bennett told the Cardinal they hope the project inspires other developers to build more midrange or low-cost housing in the future. Bennett in particular was hopeful that in time, the project would put “a lot of pressure on the 2021, 2022 housing developments to lower their rate.”
Jason Illstrup, President of Downtown Madison Inc., was also hopeful about the project, citing that Steve Brown Apartments is a “strong, locally owned company.”
For him, a development on this vacant lot was all but inevitable, but Steve Brown’s proposal for the lot was “one of the strongest ones we’ve seen.”
Despite the rising excitement around the development, Bennett, Govindarajan and Ilstrup sympathize with student concerns. However, all three told the Cardinal that construction in the area was “the cost of having new housing.”
As the alder who represents Langdon Street, Bennett recommended residents who might be disrupted by the construction reach out to her or the city so arrangements could be made to mitigate disruptions.
Govindarajan also encouraged residents to reach out to the city and empathized with locals who may feel disrupted by the project.
“Construction is the bane of my existence,” Govindarajan said. “But when it’s for something such as student housing, it’s something that we just have to move towards. So yes, it is very annoying and very frustrating, but the city does have ordinances in place to reduce noise.”
Ilstrup called Steve Brown a “fantastic company” that will “work with their contractors to ensure that construction has the minimal amount of disruption possible.”
He also called the construction “relatively temporary” and estimated that it should only last “between 18 to 24 months.”
If approved, construction will begin in spring 2025, and the apartment could be open as soon as summer 2026.
