Vote for Madison

On Monday I had the honor of joining West Allis’ reps for the Strongest Town Contest Championship Stream. It was a live stream where Norm from Strong Towns asked us questions about why we nominated our cities, what makes us “strong”, and why voters should consider us when casting a vote.

I’m honored to be at this stage at all. Strong Towns Madison (our local conversation) meets on the first Saturday of the month and I get to celebrate with everyone this weekend1 that we made it to the final round! As much as I’ve become a recognizable face for this campaign2, most of our story is born from hard work other than my own. Sure, I’ll commit to saving a meeting space every month. Go to a Common Council meeting in support of by-right duplexes. Sit in a car taking down speeds of drivers for two hours. But it was our other members who did the same things and more that made this year’s nomination so meaningful. Our members pushed our engineering staff over months and years to adapt a trial-mindset to traffic infrastructure. They biked 12 foot barriers to a parking spot to ensure we could host a Park(ing) Day. They made a public comment statement of 53-0 (support/oppose) for incremental housing reform. Win or lose, we have a championship resume, which is what I hope Madison can strive for each and every year.

I’m ecstatic that four Midwest cities made into the Final Four. It was cool to see people rallying around our culture and I hope it leads to a National Gathering in Wisconsin.

But I’ll be honest, I’m nervous. When I logged on to our Zoom call, I met West Allis’ nominators for the first time. “Mayor Dan Devine” was the name of their Zoom account. I was introduced to the mayor and to the nominator, who is also a West Allis city planner, Emily Wagner.

I’m excited to see city officials contend for the Strongest Town title. We wouldn’t be here without Madison officials aligning with the Strong Towns ethos. Politics is interesting to me, but it’s also an impossible challenge that I don’t foresee myself getting into because there are so many balancing acts at play. As much as I think Strong Towns gets things right, I’ve met many people who don’t agree. Those people vote in the same elections I do. I can push as hard as I want as a citizen, knowing that if I fail, I’ve failed only to convince officials and fellow citizens that my ideas are good and no blame can be passed on to me for not implementing them. When decision makers clearly announce how they intend to govern, it opens themselves up as a target. I sincerely hope Dan and Emily don’t receive backlash for nominating and pushing West Allis forward as a Strong Town. West Allis’ story can be seen in so many distressed, rust-belt cities and it takes courage to try something different. If it doesn’t work, people blame you, and that seems miserable.

At the same time though, there’s a whole city apparatus (probably) working for you. If elected officials and staff are aligned, so many things can be accomplished. I’m lucky that our Mayor and Common Council agree that duplexes by-right is important. But at the same time, they want to keep seldom used on-street parking on an important bike network connector and push those bikers instead to use an RRFB across a six lane, “35 mph” stroad called University Avenue.

This decision happened before a high schooler, Sasha Rosen, died two months ago after a vehicle going 62 mph crashed into them on a similarly designed stroad with an RRFB. I hope this tragedy can spark change and rethink the design of S Park Street, University Avenue, and every road that resembles them. We will certainly be speaking out to make these streets safer. But I’ve learned that change is hard and difficult and it can take months and years to see progress.

As the sole representative for Madison’s nomination (because our coordinators and members are working and take personal time for these passion projects), I felt isolated at the beginning of the live stream. We’ve garnered some news coverage, but we don’t have a city press release. We make mistakes like spelling our own freaking city wrong on expensive, color-printed flyers:

But when Norm (from Strong Towns) asked me the questions about why people should vote for Madison, it was easy to break out of that feeling. This is my passion.

• I love this City and the surrounding areas. It’s where I first fell in love and it has allowed me to be the person I want to be: the guy who goes to Common Council meetings on Tuesday nights (or writes about them)

• The people are willing to try new things and learn from each other. We don’t stay stagnant; we observe, hypothesize, test, and improve. That could be adding a missing bench to a bus stop or removing entire lanes to increase safety in a popular City District

• We do this for the love of the game. There’s no pay stub or election waiting at the end of the year. As much as I appreciate the elected officials and staff who have helped us implement these changes, because we can’t do it without their support, it means more to me that we saw bottom-up change blossom from our monthly gathering

I nominated Madison because we set goals that we achieved as a group of ragtag Strong Towns enthusiasts located in the Dane County area. We’ve shown that with optimism, consistency, and hard work, it’s possible to promote positive change, even in a city as large as 300,000 people. Win or lose, we are an example for ourselves and communities around North America to get to work now so we can compete on the championship stage in 2027.

Please vote! And at this point, please vote for Madison. You have until Friday (4/3) at 9am central. The winner will be revealed next Monday.

Vote for Madison

Addendum: West Allis (as revealed by Emily at the live stream) has also strategically employed teachers to encourage their students to partake in a form of voting that they are allowed to vote in. I worry that there is an engine of elementary and middle school students southwest of Milwaukee powering the Midwest Miracle, then Madison, and finally West Allis, to victory. Madison needs every vote it can get.

The women’s hockey team is a consistent championship performer (they won yesterday!), including this year’s class of seniors that have made it to the final game of the Frozen Four for their entire collegiate careers. Wisconsin vs. Ohio State also feels inevitable.

When I got a first look at the Strongest Town bracket, I felt confident about Madison’s chances. We could do well as long as we continued to remind people to vote.

But I was looking at two behemoths on the other side of the bracket. Chicago, which has over 1,000x the population of Cave City, AR, is still a concern for me just because of the large population in a popularity contest. All it takes is one viral moment to get tens of thousands of people to do the easy thing and vote.

Vote for Madison in the Final Four!

I know our Local Conversation was wary of Spokane, WA too. They are nearly a housing-ready city with most of the reforms coming from a push in 2022. They have a form-based code for the Hamilton Street corridor. Top goals for this year include expanding a sales tax deferral for converting surface parking lots into affordable housing and allowing cities to implement “universal building exemptions” that would exempt “buildings and improvements” from taxes, moving the tax incidence to the land. There isn’t a “single-family only” zoning option but an “R1” zone that includes “Middle Housing” by right and a minimum lot size of 1,200 square feet:

Madison (mostly) requires 5,000 square feet for its residential zones. The large exception is SR-C1, the most common zoning district in the City, which requires 6,000 square feet1. We made a lot of progress in 2025 with “Housing Forward” that contributed to our Strongest Town nomination. There’s no denying it’s a step in the right direction. But I hope City Staff can see other cities are implementing strategies to make more housing possible with success and reduce the concerns regarding maintaining neighborhood aesthetics and existing build character. Just because we required 25 foot setbacks in a neighborhood at some point in time doesn’t mean all buildings need to maintain that standard in perpetuity.

To put it another way: if we somehow win this thing, I still hope some Spokane representatives are at the national gathering to help start discussions with Madisonians.

But Spokane lost! West Allis pulled through, along with Madison, Chicago, and Sheboygan, to round out a Midwest Final Four.

Midwest Magic

The easiest way to explain this is “taste voting” that exists in bracket tournaments like this one. I live in the Midwest, I may feel that I should vote for other Midwest cities2. There are thousands of voters in this popularity contest and if we all have a similar taste, that will be reflected in the end results.

The important thing to remember is that all nominations were vetted by the Strong Towns organization, so being here at all is a testament to working towards making these communities stronger (through fiscal, housing, or transportation means). I don’t have to make sense of who moves on and why, I just get to learn more about what they’ve accomplished.

Now put the voter hypothesis to the side for the rest of this article. Here’s my preferred hypothesis: the Midwest is an incubator for Strong Towns because cities were formed before the Growth Ponzi Scheme became an origin blueprint for cities.

That doesn’t mean any city can’t be a Strong Town; this contest shows that what matters is progressing forward towards better communities. Even if you are a zoning restricted, stroad-loving, punt-the-tax problem suburb town there’s still an opportunity for you to make a difference by removing parking mandates on your Main Street corridor.

But the Midwest developed in a time before the expansion of the personal car. Madison in particular has a thriving Isthmus that’s foundation is built on a “street-car suburb” so strong that we still send the “C” bus down Jenifer Street instead of Williamson. The main streets in these communities blossomed before cars changed many American’s ways of living. Sure, we retrofit those streets to make them convenient for cars and expanded further using the newer car-oriented template. That’s entirely visible in the Madison property tax value per acre chart that I think should help inform every Madisonian’s opinion about housing, transportation, and municipal finances:

I also see it in sections of Monroe Street, an area with local businesses, schools, and many different housing forms, that can still feel like playing Frogger when trying to cross the street at specific intersections:

But because we had areas like Monroe Street before the car took off, we have existing, physical models to help realize how we can go back. These streets and neighborhoods weren’t built directly to accommodate driving, at least not initially. The “bones” are visible and all we have to do is take a walk down them to see what we could go back to.

We are the model

The Midwest is seeing population decline in most areas. Chicago is down nearly 900,000 people from its 1950’s population peak. Milwaukee is down nearly 150,000 people from its 1960’s peak (although the county has seen recent growth). Madison and Dane County are growing, and growing fast, but that is likely at the expense of other communities in Wisconsin.

The Sun Belt is not. Millions of people are migrating to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, the Carolinas and the like. Innovations in A/C make these areas habitable year round while we get stuck with blizzards in March.

We’ve been around long enough that our previous investments are now coming up for maintenance. Land is limited in capacity; we can’t just expand to more farmland or desert. Because of population decline, we already experience a declining tax base. My generation may face the generation of defaults, where cities over-committed to infrastructure they could never maintain go bankrupt.

Here’s Madison’s financial picture as of the 2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report.

Our story is complicated. We face a structural deficit. Voters approved an expansion of our property tax levy (the state restricts property tax increases to “net new construction”, there’s no peg to inflation) in November 2024 alongside large increases in the school tax levy. The school levy finally made it onto bills and many people are uneasy3. Alders emailed constituents to make it clear the city’s part of the bill is considerably less and increasing by a smaller % than the school’s portion.

But you can see that Madison’s budget has been looking better as of 2019. It’s stabilizing, if not improving. There’s more work to be done here, but what this year’s Strongest Town Contest can help highlight is that eventually, most cities are going to have to get on board.

“On board” means building your streets to foster prosperity. Putting homes and businesses together so people invest in their community. Ensuring that places are safe from reckless drivers and that no person, but especially a second person, has to die on your street. Not wasting “free” space for private vehicles or other entities that could instead make a place more interesting. Nothing is free, everything is an asset, and cities should ensure that they are getting value (thriving neighborhoods, tax revenue, cherished institutions, etc.) from their infrastructure. Be skeptical when infrastructure comes up for maintenance; “is this working the way we want it to be?” The Midwest cities are going to take the first crack at it and everyone else can hopefully learn from our mistakes.

There aren’t many people who are truly willing to pay for the luxury of isolating homes from the places people want to be. The deferred maintenance has a cost and it would be best for people to realize this is happening now rather than decades down the line and finding someone to hand the bag off to. Eventually these debts will be due. I don’t want to be left holding the bag.

“They always get you” is how I approach taxes in my life. There’s no way around it; some kind of tax (property, income, sales, wheel, etc.) will exist to ensure the government can sustain itself. There are costs associated with the Growth Ponzi Scheme. Not everyone will get a free ride.

But Madison, and the remaining Midwest communities we are going up against, can hopefully be the vanguard for incremental changes leading to exponential benefits. Our community showed that a local business hub doesn’t need to prioritize pushing vehicles through a choke point at the expense of safety. This led to potential lane removals for a different local business hub, which might lead to even more lane removals, until the default form is a street built for people. These hubs generate millions in tax revenue for the City and they could generate even more with these reforms.

We pushed for small changes to ADUs, which led to larger changes to specific kinds of homes, which led to larger changes allowing duplexes by right everywhere a single family home can be built. It’s incredible how four months can change the outlook of we are never going to get duplexes to wow, we voted for duplexes unanimously, with no public comment against! These are seeds we are planting that will take years to blossom, but they are so valuable to start planting now rather than five years from now.

We are never going to get everything in one fell swoop. But serious, committed work from the bottom-up is leading to larger and larger positive knock-on effects. This contest helps identify those small changes. My hope is that the Midwest can show how any community can take these actions now and get the ball rolling.

Vote for Madison in the Final Four!

I went for a bike ride this weekend to treasure the false spring we have in Madison. It was almost 60 degrees, sunny, and just a tad windy (but doable). It can be so easy to forget how far you’ve gone when you’re just ecstatic to be out of your living room enjoying the outdoors. This was just over 27 miles.

We are expecting 6-8 inches of snow this upcoming weekend, so last weekend (and yesterday) was the time to enjoy the wonderful weather.

On this bike ride, I got hungry. It was just before lunch. I had visited Level 5 Donuts on Atwood the weekend prior and thought they were pretty incredible. The flavors are unique (my favorites were Shirley Temple and Blueberry Lemon) and the donut has a great texture. My friend had not been, so as we approached the north side of Lake Monona we figured this was the perfect time to stop by1.

Level 5 Donuts is located on a “main street” (Atwood Avenue) in Madison home to Barrymore theater, several other bakeries, and great restaurants. It’s a convenient area to be when you want to snack.

I bring this up because most of the time I’m not going to drive 5, 10, 20, or 30 minutes for a snack. I might for lunch or dinner, but I’m not going to do it consistently. I stopped here because I was biking for leisure and recreation and found myself craving a donut. I knew it was close by and convenient.

Was I inspired by Angie Schmitt’s most recent column? Yes, she makes a great point that unplanned trips in walkable areas result in experiencing more shops in that area.

Love of Place

Which comes first: Small scale retail or walkability?

Today was an awesome lazy Saturday in my neighborhood. In the morning my son had a basketball game at this sparkling new gym nearby…

Read more

3 months ago · 38 likes · 3 comments · Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️

There are a number of trips I made today that I wouldn’t have if I wouldn’t have happened to be walking past:

• The donut shop

• The book store

• The vintage clothing store

• The Dollar Store

• The corner store

Atwood is not perfect; it’s wide to allow for parking. But cars drive slower in my (more limited) experience and it’s just off the Lake Loop bike path. There’s ample enough bike parking too. These are attributes that make me want to randomly stop and buy something. And I think Madison businesses would be better off trying to cater to the whimsical buyers like me drawn to a unique place instead of the planned drivers of Regent Street.

Regent should cater to the spontaneous

There was a long and arduous Transportation Commission last week that covered the proposed reconstruction of Regent Street. You can listen to all 4.5 hours here. If you aren’t familiar with it, I hinted towards the contention but ultimately you have two groups in opposition: pedestrians and bikers vs. commuters and businesses. I’m going to dub these groups “something new” and “business as usual”.

To give you a sense of its current state and why it should be reconstructed:

This is not a fun street to walk on. The sidewalks are narrow, no one remembers when peak-hour lanes are in effect (causing short merges for vehicles before they hit a parked car), and students are crossing constantly to get to and from the Vilas neighborhood for cheaper, off-campus housing. There are infrastructure concerns that made reconstruction a top priority and the City is taking advantage to redesign it.

There’s been a lot of jockeying for public opinion. At previous information meetings, survey results revealed the following preferences:

These show safety as the top priority, followed by pedestrians and traffic flow. The bottom considerations are parking and event operations, with bike comfort and sense of place in between.

The problem is a lot of these are at odds. You can’t get safety for all users with high amounts of traffic flow. There won’t be a sense of place without pedestrian amenities. I’m glad we can all agree that parking isn’t important.

Right?

RIGHT??

The Preferred Option

Staff is leaning towards option 3 (dubbed “the preferred option”), reducing Regent Street to two lanes but maintaining a lot of the existing parking. So are many of the “business as usual” crowd including the local business owners and UW Health clinic in the area. Bike advocates would prefer to see the option 2 that would add bike lanes to the street (they don’t exist currently) that simultaneously reduces crossing lengths exposed to vehicles.

UW Health had a spokesperson, Matt Phair, who seemed to recognize that option 1 (4 lanes of traffic) was not going to be viable and they might as well sue for peace via option 3.

“When UW Health evaluated this, our priorities were what’s good for patients and what’s good for employees. As you can imagine, a vast majority of our patients and staff travel to the clinic in the car, our top priority is to improve safe vehicle access. Regardless of what we all might hope and wish would happen, we’re always going to have patients traveling to our clinics from all over Dane County in a vehicle. That’s probably not going to change for a long time.

The second priority is for a pedestrian friendly street, it was a priority for our staff in particular… we want to see this street continue to be a vibrant one… where it’s safe to walk to restaurants and shops after work or during a break. And they also want to feel as they drive to/from home and work that pedestrians are safe as they go through the corridor.

Parking is really important for small business owners.”

And I can’t help but feel like this is a win. This is how I described it at our Local Conversation (LC) in February: we fought hard for making Willy Street two lanes, we showed it was workable, and staff recognized we could do the same with Regent Street. Staff also makes a lot of points:

• “28’ is the magic number. We cannot go narrow than that. 28’ between curbs or parked vehicles.” - Tom Mohr on emergency vehicle requirements

• There are over 20,000 vehicles/day entering and exiting Regent Street from Park Street

• There’s an existing bike network option with the Southwest Commuter Path (to the ‘Bike Mafia’: how about we make this path better instead?)2

• There are going to be redevelopments here in the future

But after my bike ride this weekend, I can’t help but feel like we are being shortsighted here. I can’t meaningfully predict knock-on effects for every decision or explain why we should reevaluate these decisions and specifically how we made them, but I’m going to call it out.

1. Like I described on my bike ride, walkers and bikers are more likely to frequent and spend at local businesses that are accessible. I’m not driving to Level 5 Donuts every weekend but I will seriously consider it any time I bike the Lake Loop!

2. By the same measure, businesses usually overvalue parking spaces and catering to drivers. Especially when they don’t turnover the parking spots. This would be a great opportunity to enable a Parking Benefit District and make the area even more attractive for business. Parking spots don’t draw people, interesting (and safe) places do.

3. This will be controversial, but UW Health needs to either bear the cost of the high cost of parking they are burdening the City with or they need to incentivize their patients and employees not to drive and remove the parking. This is the central core of Madison and we should not kowtow to the convenience of drivers. I’m not saying they can’t drive here, but is it unreasonable to ask them to drive slower? To have to pay for parking (Street View shows no payment required)? 20 S Park Street (where the clinic is) pays less in taxes than the Qdoba/Apartment complex directly across the street ($222,000 vs. $257,000) despite using 6x the amount of land! The staff recognizes that having a vibrant street is an incredible perk. Making it easier for private vehicles to get in and out makes it less vibrant.

4. Our LC is looking into the 28’ remark but the Meriter Hospital is a Level IV trauma center, that should be used to stabilize patients until they can get to a Level II center. The nice thing is there’s one just down the street (I marked it with the bigger circle)! There still might be concern for ambulances or fire trucks coming from the West side near Monroe Street, but I think we need to have a serious conversation about traffic fatalities and how wide roads (seemingly for emergency vehicles in this situation) contribute to the problem. Madison Fire dispatches engines all the time (over 30,000 times in 2024) despite responding to EMS emergencies 67% of the time. This might be a scenario where we aren’t burning the village to save it, but instead leaving them vulnerable to multi-ton vehicles driving recklessly3.

Driving isn’t everything

I won’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. The “business as usual” team is moving closer towards better pedestrian infrastructure. “Something new” can walk away proud knowing the preferred option likely wouldn’t have happened 5 years ago. It will be better for the community—residents and businesses alike. But I’m still perplexed by this comment from staff:

There’s a part of it where it’s good to funnel people into one crossing, rather than all over (in reference to a question about not adding mid-block crossing)

This mindset is still too focused on vehicle throughput. Regent Street, as a place where apartment buildings are going up fast and business is expanding, should be safe enough to cross at any point. Like the Dutch cities I got to experience, cars should defer to people. Bikes would be able to safely ride in front of the storefronts, window shopping until deciding at a moment’s notice to stop in and buy a donut. The street would be easy to shutdown for Football Saturdays to avoid messes like this:

But that’s the remaining mission for our Local Conversation. Staff is allowing for streateries. Parking doesn’t need to be required. We can show businesses that it’s the foot and pedal traffic that brings most of the energy that allows for prosperity. Bike facilities likely won’t be introduced now, but in a decade, who knows?

Progress is incremental, we just need to keep pushing forward.

Remember to vote in the Strongest Town Competition!

Cast your vote for Madison!

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In the first round you can vote for a “top four”. Eight (of sixteen) cities and towns will move into the bracket format. There are great candidates. I’m not going to name them because you could really just put down one city and have made an excellent choice: this beauty on the shores of Lake Mendota and Monona.

Cast your vote for Madison!

But if you haven’t cast your ballot yet and you need convincing, here’s why I think you should vote for my beloved Madison, WI.

We are goofy

Our city bird is phoenicopterus plasticus—the Pink Plastic Flamingo. You’ll see it everywhere. We don’t have a flamingo flock2 that migrates north from Florida, instead we recognize the 1979 UW-Madison students who covered Bascom Hill with 1,008 flamingos. The bird has stuck around since. The same students also inspired Toga Party I and II, Boom Box Parade, Lady Liberty on Lake Mendota, and Dizzyland, all on the Pail & Shovel Party platform.

Madison artists are iconic. Here are 4* of them:

*Okay, Elvis isn’t actually from Madison but he did break up a fight “without throwing a punch” at age 42 on East Washington Avenue. Georgia O’Keeffe grew up just north of the city and attended high school in Madison. Nirvana recorded several songs that ended up on their breakout album Nevermind. That took place one hundred years after Frank Lloyd Wright dropped out of UW-Madison.

The writers of the best headlines in the world founded their publication in Madison. The fastest wiener in the Daytona 500 comes from a stalwart of industrial Madison.

Every city can make some claim to fame but it takes Isthmus magic to play host to so many iconic characters and moments.

We have the best University

America’s greatest college town. Traditions like Jump Around (or my favorite “Buttercup”) and a dancing badger. A top research institution that discovered vitamins and blood thinners. 20 Nobel Laureates and the only physics two-time winner. Home to Fighting Bob and Tunnel Bob, two former vice presidents, and the founder of Earth Day. Also the most Olympians on the legendary 2026 gold medal US Women’s Hockey team.

Despite all those accolades, what captured me eight years ago was the incredible integration between the UW-Madison campus and the City. Even though the alignment is not perfect, Bascom Hall is one State Street away from the beautiful Wisconsin State Capitol building pictured at the beginning. Lakeshore and Picnic Point is full of peace and nature while Mifflin hosts one of the largest block parties every year. There are plenty of reasons to want to be a badger3 and there are over 500,000 of us.

We live in the best* City

For those of us who grew up and stayed or moved and stayed, we are here because there’s so much to love about Madison. Parks are around each corner. Restaurant newcomers join a talented scene of eats (I don’t care how many of you caveat the statement with “it’s not New York or LA”, it’s the “but it’s better than I expected” that warms our ~300,000 hearts). The arts are alive, discovery is bountiful, and innovations are around every corner. There are seasons that allow you to explore the highest of highs (May) and the lowest of lows (February). We also have an awesome flag.

For my Madisonians: we are the best because we make this place our home and we invest in it.

For my non-Madisonians: come and join us, celebrate at one of our wonderful summer festivals, and experience why this place is so interesting.

For everyone: go vote for Madison as the Strongest Town.

Cast your vote for Madison!

That’s it! Thank you for reading! Thank you for voting! See you in two weeks when we vote in round 2!

For my Strong Towns Madison Crowd

This is a popularity contest. We’ve already done the hard work this past year that got us through the nomination process into a selected contestant. I will shamelessly pander to my alumni and Madison faithful to try and win this thing. We have to go up against that big city southeast of us; it’s going to take everything we have.

wait a moment… non-Strong Towns people I said you are free to go! Thanks for reading! No need to stay. If you want to learn more about Strong Towns Madison that is of your own volition. Okay?

Alright.

I’m very proud of the work we did last year and covered a lot of it on this blog.

We had our Willy Street Lane Closure:

Our push for a housing-ready city:

And we continue to learn from tragedy, including Sasha Rosen, who I hope inspires all of us to keep fighting for safer streets in Madison:

We hosted a Park(ing) Day, attended countless meetings, sent hundreds of emails, and met each month to keep progressing towards our goal of having a noteworthy submission for the Strongest Town competition. I think we did it. Strong Towns certainly thinks we did.

No matter how we fair in this contest, there are more humble observations and small improvements to be made. A freeway may expand in our backyard. Vacancy rates for home ownership remain at .6% and many renters are cost-burdened (Madison 2025 Housing Snapshot). Our financial position is stable, but we need to be building resilience.

These are large problems that can’t be fixed all at once. But if we continue to notice the neglected smaller projects where we can improve, and we make the changes to make them better, I have hope that we can always be a Strong Town, every single year.

Thank you and seriously cast your vote.

Cast your vote for Madison!

There is not a traditional “two-party” system in Madison. The last time a Republican represented the area was 35 years ago and Mark Pocan won his last election in 2024 by over 50 points (or 182,706 votes). I think most people expect it to be an even larger margin this November. But that doesn’t mean the City and its residents are one-dimensional. In particular, I think about the Madison Metropolitan School Board Member Seat 3 race between Martha Siravo and Bret Wagner. This race was within 10 points and speaks to the type of people that make up the City’s political scene.

Martha’s first point in her plan is to “Help Every Student Win” by introducing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into classrooms to remove barriers between special and general education. A lot of this stems from her advocacy work with MadTown Mommas and Disability Advocates that started with her personal experience of her child enrolling in special education in Madison.

My work is driven by a belief that public education must be inclusive, accessible, and truly serve the needs of every child

Bret’s front page still reads “Every child deserves to read at grade level. 50% of Madison students, 75% of Latino students, and 90% of Black students read below grade level. We must do better.” There are plans to restructure reading instruction time and improve the existing tutoring programs.

Both want to change something, but in my opinion they draw from the two different sets of principles: emotions and efficiency. Martha saw an injustice in her child’s education system and wants to make sure that no other child experiences the same issues her child experienced. Bret sees a systemic problem with literacy rates that raises concerns for many children; too many to be a tragedy. Instead, they are a statistic that nonetheless needs to be fixed.

Madison is full of bleeding heart, analytical people

The Cap Times ran an article last year from Marc Eisen characterizing a “one-party game” in town that prevents debate and discussion. Paul Fanlund (the publisher of the paper) is a proponent of this thesis, presumably because his preferences are not reflected in the current political climate. But Eisen’s piece is too focused on the national dichotomy of “Democrats vs. Republicans” when we know that’s something that would take decades to take shape again (if ever). There’s a dichotomy here and Paul knows it because his friend and former mayor Paul Soglin was on the losing side back in 2019:

I don’t think moving from a 24 point gap to an 11 point gap in 4 years frames a “uniparty” in Madison. There’s clearly some movement against the incumbent as the total opposition vote count went up nearly double.

But Reyes said it best herself during a debate that Rhodes-Conway is “a policy person… someone who really understands policy” compared to herself who wants to “lean on the voices of our residents” to “build housing in our city that’s practical.” This was in response to a question about the causes of the lack of affordable housing in Madison, to which Rhodes-Conway simply said “we just didn’t build enough housing. And for many years, our housing production, both in terms of rental and ownership, did not keep up with our population growth.”

Mayor Satya has always been the efficiency candidate for housing in Madison. It was proven true this year when she introduced three different housing reform packages (under the Housing Forward label) that passed Common Council, including allowing duplexes in all single-family zoning districts by right:

Reyes was the “emotions” candidate who represented voices like Fanlund, Soglin1, and Nextdoor posters who see allowing building by right as an attack on neighborhood character and the favorably slow approval process. These themes were repeated in the other big 2023 issue, BRT implementation, which Reyes said “won’t benefit all of Madison equally” because it moved from coverage models to ridership models. Rhodes-Conway countered that bus rapid transit is designed to be fast and frequent and “does not go everywhere, sort of by definition”. By making ridership the goal, riders would have faster and more convenient commutes that would increase overall ridership (which we have seen in year-over-year data).

Because the “conservative” faction isn’t a political force in Madison, we now move to these emotionally-driven (justice, compassion, frustration, betrayal) themes vs. pragmatic, analytical, and results-driven motivators. But every issue exists on this spectrum and it’s impossible to say that one person is always going to vote “emotions” or “efficiency”. I certainly didn’t!

In 2023, I voted for Mayor Satya. In 2024, I voted for the City referendum but neither of the two school referendums2. In 2025 I voted for Bret Wagner. I would say I fall heavily on the analytical side of the debate.

But at the same time, I’m adamantly supportive of making sure no one else has to die on a dangerous street and I would decrease car speed and volume to achieve those goals. This would be at the expense of adding 1, 5, and maybe up to 10 minutes per commute multiplied by the number of vehicles making those “more efficient” daily trips. It would be worth it. I think we made the correct emotional decision by removing peak-hour lanes on Willy Street and I hope we look for more opportunities to bring safety to streets with vehicles driving recklessly because they are designed to accommodate that recklessness.

Each Madisonian has their list of priorities. They are likely to be emotionally or analytically driven. It could even be a combination, like someone who is personally frustrated by a $200 rent increase that they understand is a symptom of under-supplied housing units. The “uniparty” doesn’t exist, and it certainly wouldn’t exist to just box Fanlund out, but the feeling exists because problems need to be solved and more people feel that those in charge are working towards fixing them.

Where do we compromise?

This all brings me to Fanlund’s most recent Madison-focused opinion piece about an “appeal to Madison’s ruling ‘uniparty’ ”. He restates Eisen’s thesis and then draws on the newest disagreement about the resulting property tax increase from the school referendums. But he jumps right back into his biggest axes to grind including name-calling and dismissing of his allies, the fake housing “crisis” that he instead prefers to call a situation, and the focus on bike network expansions and road diets for traffic safety. The “appeal” to the “uniparty” is to not “demonize any voice concerned with retaining some charm of the city and its neighborhoods3, and keeping roadways passable for constituents who drive cars” and to “find a balance between staggering tax increases and spending restraint — maybe even by deigning to listen to people outside the uniparty bubble.”

These Madison opinion pieces always get a rise out of me. It’s frustrating to read that cities can’t change because they match someone else’s ideal vision and I’m problematic when I recognize that the vision doesn’t work for me and a majority of Madisonians. When we try to remedy failed policies, it’s seen as ignoring voices even though those voices made decisions for decades and we decided this democratically. I also initially misinterpreted what Fanlund was asking for. He is not proposing a compromise on policies “we” (I disagree with Fanlund on most things so I must be a part of that group) believe and have been working on implementing, instead he is insisting that people who disagree with him should reevaluate their opinions to match his.

I don’t think this will go anywhere, but that’s the one great thing about being in the minority of political power: you get to complain. Sometimes that swings enough people your way to regain control, other times you are stuck in perpetual backseat driving.

For example:

As a result, you have large, nondescript, Soviet-style apartment buildings4 popping up on any available ground throughout the city. It makes me yearn for those long-ago days of debate about Sequoya Commons, the comparatively attractive retail and housing infill development at Midvale and Tokay boulevards on the west side. That project, which includes a branch of the Madison Public Library, began in 2007, those bygone days when considering neighborhood input was still a thing.

Sequoya Commons made it through because of alders recognizing what was best for the City. It was not guaranteed. The Common Council meeting that granted approval ran past 1 a.m. and had over “50 speakers, mostly residents who opposed the development.” The scope of the project may have changed due to input, but doing this over and over again only makes it harder for residents to find housing. If we had it the way neighbors wanted it, it would not be the attractive build that it is and we would be in a deeper housing hole than we currently are.

Fanlund might need to adopt new positions that don’t alienate the renters that makeup the majority of the City or otherwise find positions that net more voters for his goals. For now, renters and future homeowners are looking to find housing options that don’t cost more than 30% of their income.

Of course, you can tell those voters to kick rocks, work harder, move somewhere else than Madison, and don’t expect things to be given to you. But I don’t think that’s a viable strategy. He framed a sizable opposition this summer to making duplexes by-right (it passed unanimously at Common Council), which is how to build incremental housing by choice of the property owners without needing “Soviet-style” housing. It’s really hard to persuade people, who spend the largest portion of their income on housing, that the ideal policy is no new, timely apartment buildings and also no expanding any of the smaller owner-occupied options in areas where people want to live.

If Fanlund and people outside of the “uniparty” (which I firmly don’t believe exists in the sense it’s been imagined) want to regain some aspect of control, I would offer the following compromises5 for consideration:

1. Restructure the Common Council to be a body elected in November general elections, every two years, with 10 at-large seats rather than the existing 20 location-based seats. Make the positions closer to full-time jobs and set clear expectations for committee and community engagement.

2. Move Madison Metropolitan School District leadership under the mayor to provide accountability for a currently low-salience elected position.

3. Implement some kind of PAYGO system for budgeting purposes that would require cutting consulting contracts if there is a request to hire consultants for a different project. Increase City Staff capacity instead at lower costs.

Common Council Reforms

We have done the Common Council reform dance before: we are now electing half of Common Council every year in non-general elections and we are bound to see less turnout and growing domination from higher propensity voters. I think Fanlund believes more conservative voices would likely flow to his side of thinking for local issues. I personally think it’s better for people to vote and if making it “we vote once every two years in November” rather than every year in April is better for everyone’s schedule, let’s do it.

I would like to see us move away from “area-centric” leadership. We are a city that has city-wide goals. If we force people to represent their specific area, they will likely oppose specific policies or projects in their area, even if they benefit everyone as a whole (see Sequoya Commons, I’m a big fan of Chocolate Shoppe). It would also remove some of the alder-bias on housing projects and make things that should be built easier to build because a group of very loud neighbors disagree with the impact. If the Comprehensive Plan allows for this building type as an appropriate use, we should be able to build it. This is something that Chuck Marohn discussed with Stephanie Nakhleh when trying to balance community input with action and building systems that work.

When I talk about re-localizing decision-making… I mean restoring local systems that are capable of acting on community values, not just responding to noise… Right now, our local governments are overbuilt for input and underbuilt for action. Everyone has a chance to speak, but nobody feels heard.

…

I’d say: work to shift the default. If you have a comp plan that says “more housing,” then the next step is to reform your code so that small-scale, by-right development that aligns with that plan doesn’t need a permission slip every time. You’re not ignoring the neighbors, you’re respecting their voice in the plan, not privileging it at the podium.

There’s nothing stopping a “West Side” party that focuses on electing a West Side alder to one of these seats. They can beat the drum for specific West Side neighborhood issues. There could even be a “Neighborhood Voices” party that changes the Comprehensive Plan to defer to immediate vicinity property owner feedback. But moving the default to be focused on City issues and not alder district issues is a net positive change.

This is risky to propose in the current pro-housing political climate. We will see what happens in the April elections, but we are a few checkboxes away from being a housing-ready city and momentum is on the pro-housing side. Moving from 16ish pro-housing alders6 out of 20 to potentially 5 or 6 out of 10 in an at-large contest (based on the mayoral results) is a gamble7. But I think it’s better for our discourse to focus around general policies and goals (that we legalize in the Comprehensive Plan) than having proxy-fights over specific projects.

There’s a lot of turnover in Common Council and I think that stems from it being a part-time, thankless, and exhausting job. It demands the most passionate people (either in support of ideas or in opposition to ideas) rather than the best alders. I think some can be both, but at the very least we shouldn’t have alders campaigning on “I will show up to every meeting because the incumbent did not” and have that be part of a winning message. That’s a flawed system. This spring seven alders (out of 10 seats) will run unopposed. People either really love their alders or no one really wants this job.

But I’ve heard arguments for and against this and I’m the least committed to better pay/being full-time in these reforms.

MMSD needs accountable leadership

Superintendent Gothard was selected in February of 2024 by the MMSD board. Following a search committee (from a consulting group) narrowing it down to three finalists and interviews by a student panel, a parent panel, and the board, Gothard received unanimous approval for his contract starting before July of 2024.

Here are the most recent and most competitive election vote totals for the seven MMSD Board Members:

In their most recent election, five members ran unopposed. Seats 6 and 7 are up for grabs and will have contenders (per filed papers) this spring but I have not vetted the quality of candidates. The positions are for 3-year terms and are at-large seats (you have to reside within MMSD limits and be 18 years of age), so with enough name recognition you can lose one election and run again the following year (potentially unopposed) for a different seat.

Following a string of controversies (1, 2, 3, 4) and the revelation that taxes are going to go up a lot because of those 2024 referendums, now is the time to consider moving MMSD accountability to the mayor and executive authority. Right now the buck stops with seven board members who see the same 40,000 to 100,000 voters, in different years, and most of the time without opposition. Are these voters any different than the 113,000 voters from the 2023 mayoral election? Probably8?

But I think it’s easier to campaign for school reform when it’s the mayor’s authority to pick members who will make decisions that align with the mayor. If budgets are a pressing issue, the mayor won’t appoint budget-agnostic board members. And in a world where everything is housing it might make sense to have MMSD leadership and City leadership align to make schools and surrounding environments friendly for families or to work to help city finances. But for the reverse argument, see Chicago’s recent switch to an elected school board that (I’ve been told) received a major push from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s overreach on school closures.

Build City Staff capacity and spend less on consultants

In an “Abundance”-like argument, I would like Madison to spend less on consultants and more on staff to build institutional capacity. Consulting costs deserve an entire investigation and not a few paragraph blurbs and I’ll acknowledge this is mostly a gut feeling. But having watched us move from at least $100,000 in consulting fees and a two year timeline to $24,000 of staff time and completed in two months for the Willy Street Lane Closure, I would like to have a mechanism to hire staff for longer-term positions than to constantly cycle through firm after firm that charges probably more than double. I don’t know if moving from consultants to City Staff would be a 1:1 replacement or cost savings measure. It feels like it would, but then again, health care. But in the era of welfare fraud becoming more common (1, 2, 3), it’s critical that services rendered are real and that we also don’t spend significant resources ensuring it’s real. Hire from within instead and make sure your staff performs well.

Let’s Dance?

I am not a card-carrying member of the “uniparty” and I do not represent the majority of Madisonians. But I propose these reforms as a way to try and meet in the middle. I think a lot of these reforms force elected officials to make sure they are doing a good job. It does centralize control, but it makes it easier to oust those who aren’t doing it well enough to keep a majority. Compromise requires giving something up. I’m interested to see if the non-“uniparty” members want to play ball or instead hope that the ball randomly rolls back to their side.

More from Counting Cranes

A running joke among urbanist communities is the need for stories, movies, or shows that portray the benefits of building more homes. Far too often, the Hallmark movie features a “greedy, out-of-touch developer” as the villain that learns the folly of their ways and decides not to build the large multifamily building as they fall in love with the person leading the opposition.

While I wouldn’t say we need a YIMBY or Strong Towns blockbuster film, it is nice to have some cultural icon to point to and say “yes, we can have that!”

“That” is a place where communities are connected by physical buildings and infrastructure that serve them and their interests. Not cars, not large corporations or franchises, but the people who make the community.

This cultural icon does exist; it was made in 2000 and it’s a story about a mom, her daughter, and their lives in a small northeastern town called Stars Hollow.

Stars Hollow is a Strong Town

I’m not the first person to make this argument, but I found it uncanny when characters in the show would do or say things that I’ve said we should be doing at Madison common council meetings. The town itself is situated as a great example of what an incremental build, pro-walking, local business supporting town can look and function like.

For those who haven’t seen it (I’ve watched less than a full season), the show follows Lorelai and her daughter Rory Gilmore as they work to achieve their life goals in the small town (10,000) Stars Hollow, CT. Lorelai, a wise-cracking coffee addict, runs a local inn and hopes to own one in the future; Rory, an intelligent, book-loving teenager, studies hard in hopes of attending Harvard. The first season is full of moments that demonstrate how forgiving, functional, and fun the town is because of how it’s designed and how the residents make the most of it.

Forgiving: Dean is the new kid who connects with Rory on his first day and shows interest in getting to know her. Rory is transferring from the public school to a private school in Hartford. The new school is 30-40 minutes away by bus. In one of the first scenes post-initial meeting, Dean hops on the bus and chats with Rory. Rory is concerned Dean is going to stay on the bus all the way to Hartford (he has school to attend back in Stars Hollow!), but he informs her that there’s a stop coming up and he’s getting off. This demonstrates:

• The bus system is simple enough that a new person can easily understand where it’s going

• Stars Hollow is dense enough that bus service to the bigger city is viable

Both are important elements for people-focused communities! Somewhere between 30-40% of the population can’t drive (children, disabled people, seniors) and making sure they can use transit and that it’s easy to use is important.

In another scene, Rory embarrasses herself in front of Dean after saying “thank you” in response to their first kiss. She runs out of the grocery store, into the street, flustered and wanting out of the situation as soon as possible. Thankfully she doesn’t throw herself into a car because the store, while in the downtown, is on a street (and not a stroad). Vehicles are going slow enough that they can react to her and stop. That’s forgiving infrastructure!1

Functional: Stars Hollow allows for Lorelai and Rory to be a single-car family. Rory has ways to get to school if Lorelai is using the car. Lorelai is close enough to her friends and coworkers to get convenient carpooling when needed. The grocery store is downtown, making errands easier. Even in a family where most meals are purchased instead of prepared, it’s not like they are in drive-thru after drive-thru. They go out or pick it up.

One of Lorelai’s favorite things is the first snow of winter. The calm atmosphere and and serene beauty are a must and she (and Rory) always walk around the town, get donuts and coffee, and stand out at midnight to listen to the snowstorm. When snow starts to fall she’s in the downtown area (it’s really close!) and IT IS calm. What’s missing for most Americans is the constant crunching of snow under car tires. When people crave quiet, it’s not the homes or people that are the root of the problem. It’s the never ending noise from the cars. The snow also remains beautiful because it’s not covered in black exhaust and tire particles on the side of the road.

Fun: Stars Hollow is full of chance encounters. The center plaza serves as a third place and community meeting area. We see pet adoption events, rummage sales, Christmas tree lightings, and Revolutionary War reenactments. In one instance Rory, often lost in books, forgets that she’s supposed to meet with her friend Lane. Lane finds her, apologizing that she thought they were meeting at Luke’s and misremembering. But she didn’t! Rory’s just lucky enough that she enjoys being in the plaza and she’s probably going to run into her friends by being at the center of the town.

Our cities and towns aren’t as forgiving, functional, or fun as Stars Hollow. Some get one of these aspects if they are lucky. At the heart of our infrastructure is an overreliance and deference to the convenience of cars. But it hurts our communities when we self-select into more harmful, inconvenient, and isolating areas.

A lot of people tune into Gilmore girls in the fall, based on the autumn and cozy aesthetic the show displays. When people crave this piece of Americana from the past, I hope they will see that we could have this ourselves. It doesn’t need to be nostalgia. We just need to be real about what it would take. You might not get a parking space within a minute of arriving at your destination, you may have to deal with some traffic, and won’t have every store or item at your fingertips at the lowest price. But you will have a strong community and reasons to be a part of that community. You should try listening to the main characters of the show!

Characters advocate for the pro-people vision

The moment I realized Gilmore girls thematically aligned with the “pro-people” groups was in this scene with Lorelai. A local business owner is bringing up creating more free parking spaces in front of his business at a Town Hall. This immediately makes me smirk, thinking about the wasted opportunity of non-metered parking spots. And Lorelai makes the same face I did with the explicit argument!

Opens on a Star Hollow Town Hall meeting. Lorelai walks in with snacks and drinks

Lorelai: “What did I miss?”

Rory: “Taylor Doose wants the no-parking zone in front of his store removed. He says his customers are being unfairly ticketed.”

Lorelai: “No, it’s just because he wants to park there all day.”

She’s exactly right! After making this connection, I stopped passively making observations and paid attention. How many times had Lorelai or Rory advocated for better communities? Here are some examples:

• Lorelai: “It’s a sad highway”; Rory: “as compared to all the happy highways?”

• Luke has a no-cell phone policy

• Lorelai gets a street occupancy permit for a rummage sale in less than a month?2

• Lorelai helps Luke repaint his diner, with avid support from the local business committee

And while I’m only halfway through Season 1, there seems to be something in every episode that I agree with or admire. Not only is the town a gem because of its infrastructure, but the characters recognize how it’s special and they contribute to and help maintain the magic that we observe.

It’s not an in-your-face advocacy. It’s the kind of small quips that I think speak to emotional arguments often used against making cities and towns more people-focused. Lorelai doesn’t need an urban planning degree or to be coordinating a petition to persuade the audience this is a town you want to live in. It’s the nudges, comments, and aesthetics that speak towards the value Stars Hollow has that make it memorable.

Gilmore girls has staying power and cultural resonance

And we should make it an example of the best people-oriented cities and towns have to offer. The most important aspect of the show as a lodestar for positive media portrayals of people-centric communities is its impressive run on Netflix. It seems to go back into the Top 10 each fall and it’s been that way for at least a decade. Many people desire to live like the Gilmores. And we can! We just need to point out how Stars Hollow becomes the desirable town. It’s people living near the downtown core and being able to support its local businesses without owning multiple cars. It’s providing options like walking or taking the bus that are convenient for everyone. Streets are calm. There are places where people meet consistently without scheduling it in advance.

If you give Gilmore girls a watch, keep an eye out for these elements. And if you ever go to a meeting or talk to someone where they challenge an improvement and say “why would we want this change?” you can point to Stars Hollow as an example of what we could have.

More from Counting Cranes

A couple months ago I got to write about a push by Willy Street residents to end peak-hour driving lanes. Peak-hour lanes are an expansion to four lanes (from two) during “rush hour” to try and allow for more vehicles through the Isthmus. Businesses didn’t like it because it took away parking and shoppers received towing fines. Residents didn’t like it because the cars traveled faster in the expanded lanes, making it unsafe. People showed up at Transportation Commission, persuaded City Staff and commission members that a test was needed (critically, at low costs), and they agreed. This was recently featured on Strong Towns and you can read about it below to catch-up. The test ended in October and I owe everyone an update.

We did the test. It’s complete. And it’s here to stay.

Streets are for community building

There’s a lot of data to digest, but non-drivers felt that Willy Street was more safe or the same after removing the lanes. Based on anecdotal and free response data, City Staff shared that most non-drivers were enthusiastic about improved safety1. 88% of pedestrians felt safety has improved or is the same and 80% support removal of the lanes. Bicyclists were at 92% and 91%. Transit users were at 71% and 59%. For removal, residents on Willy Street supported at 76% and residents within two blocks were at 54% (38% wanted to keep the lanes). Businesses were slightly less enthusiastic (31% remove, 64% keep), but 65% cited no effect on business. These are all huge wins.

To the people claiming Madison is becoming “anti-car”, I’m sorry but I’m going to value safety and comfort on an important local business corridor over the convenience of gaining maybe a minute or two. There will be more discussion below, but Staff noted that travel times didn’t change by much. It was certainly a different feel, as platoons were longer2. Businesses liked that parking was more consistent and Staff compromised on parking spaces near intersections. The Streets Division found it easier to handle trash collection and towing resources were no longer strained as parking restrictions moved to a single block of four hours on Thursdays. Everything described is a win. Some drivers felt “less safe” (probably because they were driving too fast) and I hope they will feel more safe as they adapt to the new conditions. When we make areas safer for residents and shoppers, we see more investment into the community.

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Trials uncover misconceptions and bad conventional wisdom

I think it’s important to highlight every time City Staff were surprised by the results of the study. They found:

• Capacity was not reduced (expected 14% reduction)

• Traffic backups were manageable (expected lines down John Nolen Drive)

• Backups occurred mostly Eastbound (expected both East and Westbound)

• Weekends didn’t change, overall there were not big differences

City Staff was right about the platoons and they made important adjustments for signal timing to keep traffic flowing. But discovering that the Hairball Intersection was a limiting factor helped encourage at least a “we don’t think this is a bad idea” recommendation. In fact, Staff offered up ideas like bump outs (at non-bus route intersections) and extending the removal of lanes down to Thornton. This approval helped lead Transportation Commission to maintain the removal of the peak-hour lanes (TC 11/5/25).

These discoveries are why we need more tests. If we hold onto assumptions like they are permanent, we will never learn or experience positive outcomes without extensive resources3. We started this study in less than 4 months after the initial crash into the building instead of the initial recommendation of waiting 2 years. We did it for $24,000 instead of hiring a consultant for $100,000-$200,000. We made recommendations despite a failed speed test because the survey results showed overwhelming support from non-drivers for increased safety and comfort. Will this save lives as result? I think so. Even if no one would have been hurt in the next two years on Willy Street, there’s at least $100,000 more available to making another street safer in Madison.

My challenge for Staff and commission members is: what other trials can we perform to potentially make Madison a better place?

Regent Street retains peak-hour lanes

Another local business and residential hub, Regent Street is up for reconstruction. There will be a lot of lobbying and jockeying but Madisonians are already letting the City know that people are more important than cars.

Surveys from initial community meetings show that safety and pedestrians are the top concerns. Parking is not important. They want to make this place meaningful for the students, families, and businesses in the area that make it special. Don’t prioritize the drivers looking for a cut-through or the Badger fans from Janesville that are trying to leave Camp Randall.

I’m sure there will be more to say about Regent Street, but right now we can continue the experiment and remove the peak-hour lanes with construction. If we saw benefits in one area, can we confirm these streets are better off without random expansions?

Parking as an investment vehicle

One of my favorite concepts for a test in Madison revolves around a parking benefit district. Free parking is expensive and these districts turn an asset (popular local businesses or district) into an investment. By charging market rate prices for parking by metering the surrounding area and sending profits right back into district investment, we see:

• Faster turnover to allow for more visitors getting convenient parking (increasing visitor satisfaction)

• Investment into the area to make the place more attractive to visitors

The investment cycle begins and suddenly you have a fly wheel for public service improvements. Austin invested $1,000,000 into better sidewalks. Pittsburgh got a night patrol.

You might say, “who benefits from increasing parking prices? Aren’t visitors going to riot?” Let me flip the question back to you, who benefits from lower than market pricing? The answer is a couple lucky drivers who found open spots. They are incentivized to stay as long as desired, because it’s a prime location and it’s cheap. It’s worse for everyone else.

If we change this lottery to be supply and demand instead, we see a reduction in employee parking (taking prime spots for businesses), increasing the number of shoppers in the area, increasing revenues for the district, which makes the residents happy. By sending revenues to the district instead of the General Fund, residents buy into the system and accept the unfortunate holiday parking planning for friends and family4.

I anticipate that Willy Street will see an explosion in six-day parkers. Residential parking permits are a “license to hunt”, not a guaranteed spot. Anyone who can get a space will want to stay parked until they need their car or Thursday morning rolls around. Instead, we could make those spots more fluid.

Available parking is a top concern for businesses on Willy. Residents like to experience nice things and have higher property values. We can get both of these by metering. This is technically legal in Wisconsin (although no municipality has done it before, La Crosse was close) and it would be useful to understand if this would help local businesses corridors like Willy, Regent, and Monroe.

Land value taxes might solve this

I can’t help myself, but it would be great to try a land value tax in Wisconsin.

The City can’t change this, it would require a state amendment based on my analysis, but we could at least value land appropriately. With the Assessor’s values coming out in January, I am hoping to ask how we get to land values in assessments. Often, I feel as if it’s an afterthought to make the price work out on market assessed values. Here’s an example of two lots on the Isthmus that are just around the corner from each other:

They are less than a minute apart, and yet the land per square foot is more than double for the smaller lot.

Here’s the smaller Few St. lot between 2024 and 2025:

I can’t guarantee that there wasn’t a $50,000 kitchen renovation, but it’s odd to me that an aging home (it was built in 1924) saw that large of an increase in value while the land stayed stagnant. I think it would be a significant step forward for the City to assess the land accurately and use the improvements as the residual calculation. It could inform future policy and potentially spur a movement to allow this across the state.

Tests are good, we should do more of them, there’s more to learn

Despite my ambitious ideas for City policy, Willy Street was a clear winner. Not every test will be that; I can guarantee some of them will be duds. But we will always learn something from them.

There’s also a lot of room for smaller tests and improvements; not everything needs to be a news story. I tried to convince City Staff to reduce Prairie Road down to a single lane after a person was killed from a “right on red”. I asked them if we would consider cones for 4 hours, to see if a longer-term temporary test would be feasible, and I was told it wasn’t worth the effort. It’s great seeing this mentality shift towards trials; it started with the W Washington lane reduction near the Southwest Commuter Path and I hope the results from these tests have proven the strength of adaptability.

As resource strapped as we are (staff time, financials), I think it makes sense to pursue the incremental changes over the highly planned, but ultimately, guesswork. It’s understandable for politicians to want flashy objects or staff to want to commit models to permanent rather than temporary infrastructure. But those cost us a lot of time and money. We need to be scrappy. When there are opportunities to change something that isn’t working, like cars crashing into buildings, we should localize it and fix it. If it works, rinse and repeat to other problem areas. If it doesn’t, revert and use the process to inform a different solution. Cities are organic and constantly changing, maintaining a test friendly mindset is how we can make sure we keep up.

If you liked this, you may enjoy…

Sometimes I write at the inspiration of positive stories. For example, I felt inspired by Progress and Poverty’s Uniformity Does Not Preclude Land Value Taxes to look at what the Wisconsin Constitution has to say about LVTs. You can see that here:

Many times I’m inspired by negative stories. In particular, I don’t like it when people argue ineffectively for the things that are convenient for them, but difficult for everyone else. I came across a new Tom Still column, the Wisconsin Technology Council’s former president who still has enormous sway relating to Madison and Wisconsin. I’ve read many of his columns and I felt like he was an effective voice for pragmatists. He recently argued that Madison is becoming an “anti-car island” (and that’s bad) in an opinion piece that leans heavily on opinion and fails to persuade me that Madison should be doing anything different (in fact, they should probably be doing more).

We live on an Isthmus

He says it, but still maintains that the John Nolen reconstruction project should have provided more “feasible alternative routes” and complains that a City’s official response to WSJ readers' questions hearkens back to Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake”. To be clear, the City said:

Residents are encouraged to make the choices that best fit their situation—whether that means adjusting their route or schedule, changing travel modes or continuing with their current approach ... we do encourage the traveling public to give transit, walking and biking a try to take advantage of those infrastructures, especially when the weather is still good. It won’t work for everyone, but we do know many people who tried it, liked it and sticked with it.

But Tom distilled that into forcing seniors and people with disabilities onto bikes1. Reading between the lines, the readers are frustrated they have to adapt to a changing circumstance like municipal road reconstruction. The problem is 1) roads need to be reconstructed (sometimes at the same time—the same citizens would complain about pot holes if you didn’t fix them) and 2) roads get “scheduled maintenance” in the sense that the City tries to provide ample time for people to understand when maintenance is due, but sometimes you also need to get it done when the Feds tell you to (because grant money).

More importantly, should you be driving a single occupancy vehicle onto the Isthmus and expect no congestion when there are only six streets for those vehicles to travel on? I think Tom and others should be grateful that the Metro system saw a 40% YoY increase in ridership (based on April 2025 data) that can reduce congestion on the main streets. The City saw an opportunity to invest in transit service, significantly increased frequency, and reaped the rewards. The lesson here is that when we invest in alternative transportation, people are more likely to use it. It’s all about making things convenient.

At the same time, Tom and other drivers would like to conveniently go directly from their homes outside of the Capitol to their work/event/restaurant without confronting the externalities of that car-oriented dream. Tom’s problem isn’t with me, a biker/transit user, but instead with everyone other person who wants to drive. To make it so he can drive, whenever is convenient for him, to those areas, without traffic requires extensive expansions of roads and parking. When roads and parking are all your city has, you sprawl and you make it so people don’t want to go there because there are few amenities. That’s what would kill the City. We shouldn’t make sacrifices for thousands of drivers when it would hurt hundreds of thousands of Madisonians.

It doesn’t surprise me that the highest value property per acre is located directly next to the Capitol.

The purple and orange areas indicate higher taxes per acre and that is exactly what the City wants to build. By being close to the City center it is able to build infrastructure at a lower expense and at a larger scale while bringing in more people to help cover those expenses. The community and culture are built here, the places that people want easy access to. It’s the fun districts, the interesting restaurants, the things to do.

A lot of these parcels were developed before car culture (and zoning) were established. It allowed “street-car suburbs” like Jenifer Street to thrive with density that supported transit and business. As the City attempts to bring about more of these housing options, any attempts to slow reform or bring back car-oriented infrastructure precludes these beneficial changes.

I don’t fault him and others for wanting access to it, but they drive from places like the yellow parcels where property taxes are low for the amount of land they consume. By design several decades ago, and by necessity (for the most part) now, the people who live in these areas need to use cars to get places unless they want to brave the elements of the pro-car society2. By simply becoming pro-pedestrian/biker/transit user, and not “anti-car” as he writes, we are trying to make it so everyone can access the City without needing a driver’s license and a steady paycheck. It sounds crazy, but 30-40% of people do not drive in Dane County. He derides the City’s response about alternative commuting, but doesn’t recognize that the “older residents and people with disabilities” may not be able to drive! They might rely on para-transit services or safe intersections to cross to get to the places they need. Don’t even get me started on the freedom for kids to go hangout without needing their parents to drive them. They are a part of the 30-40% too!

We cannot make the City accessible to everyone without frustrating drivers. I think it’s worth the frustration though, because your ten minute longer commute is my more resilient City for hundreds of thousands.

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How do we get to a more resilient City?

Still blames the “safety for all” mantra as the main perpetrator for the “anti-car” stance. He states several initiatives the City has taken to make it a safe place to live.

1. Artificially low speed limits, championed by the “20 is plenty” crowd, don’t work on their own, according to some studies. They especially don’t work with chronic speeders and people intent on breaking the law.

2. Some traffic lights are not well-timed, which means car and truck traffic must stop at a series of red lights on the same street versus one or two. More idling means more carbon dioxide emissions.

3. Bad traffic signal timing means drivers blow through yellow lights they consider to be “orange.” They do so to enhance their chances of not getting stacked up at the next signaled intersection.

4. Speaking of CO2 emissions, how about the flurry of streets with “No Turn on Red” signs, even when there’s plenty of visibility?

5. Flashing yellow lights at pedestrian crossings enhance safety … except when they remain flashing long after pedestrians or bicyclists have passed.

6. Express lanes on the Beltline amount to unused capacity most of the day. Just open them 24/7.

7. Plans to limit access points on Stoughton Road, which is also U.S. Highway 51, might trigger reactions from federal officials who may want to protect a major north-south thoroughfare for truck traffic.

8. The number of cars hitting awkwardly placed street medians may be on the rise, according to one local leader who had an unfortunate encounter. Kaleem Caire, founder of One City Schools, recently broke his wrist when his car struck an overly wide city median designed for — you guessed it — bicycle safety. He was told by the responding police officer that it was becoming more commonplace.

And here are my refutations about the viability of these safety measures:

1. Speed is critically important for reducing severe or fatal injuries. Even a reduction of 10 mph (from 30 to 20) can reduce moderate injuries by a third and serious injuries by over half

   It’s correct that signs don’t work as well as we’d like them to, but what you are seeing is a compromise between safety advocates like me who’d like to see physical infrastructure to slow drivers down and City Staff who don’t want to be yelled at by drivers who recklessly crashed their car into a median3.

2. Traffic signaling in one of the busiest areas of the City is herding cats4. Everyone wants to be the fastest out of the Isthmus and that’s exactly the problem. Someone has to be slower. You choose if you want to wait at two intersections for two minutes or one intersection for four. Or bike instead and pass everyone.

3. Drivers blow through yellow lights and red lights. It’s awful5. It would be great if Madison were included in the Automated Traffic Enforcement bill that might give Milwaukee access to cameras that would incentivize drivers not to run yellow lights. Again, the answer is not “make driving more convenient for single occupant vehicles” at the expense of everyone else’s safety. You set the schedule for your departure and arrival; a yellow light from the City does not entitle you to drive recklessly. Take responsibility and drive safely.

4. If you would like to read more on the importance of “No Turn on Red” signs in Madison, I’d encourage you to read/watch the following I did in 2024:

   The level of emissions from idling cars does not outweigh the value of a life. If you care so much about emissions, bike or take the bus/para-transit.

5. We shouldn’t need Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons to cross streets, but see point 1. This is a political issue because cars keep hitting people but drivers get mad when you slow down cars (see point 1).

6. For highways that are designed to move vehicles at fast speeds with forgiveness, I have no preference. But I will not support expanding the highways for “just one more lane” if congestion increases. The way to reduce congestion is to tax it and we should follow the likes of NYC, Singapore, London, and Stockholm.

7. I would highly encourage trucks to use I-90/I-94, a larger freeway that can help with truck commerce/traffic. In times where structural budget deficits are really only solved by generating more property value, I do not want to lose more of the far East side to freeway expansion when we could make a new East Washington Ave a few decades from now. Reducing truck commute times by 10 minutes would not outweigh the value of making that area a desirable place to live.

8. If you hit a median with your vehicle that is designed for bicycle safety, I fear the time where that median wasn’t in place and you hit a biker instead. Going the speed limit is free (of fines and injury) and anyone who breaks a wrist hitting street infrastructure was likely not going the speed limit or otherwise driving safely.

In Tom’s words, “The city of Madison is growing fast, but so are other Dane County communities. Regional planning will become more important as local officials strive to maintain livability for their taxpayers, businesses and visitors. No city, village or town can afford to be an island.”

I completely agree. We cannot afford to waste creating connections via transit and other modes of transportation. If we continue the status quo, we will only sprawl further and become more reliant on inefficient modes of commuting. We will become an island where the time you wait in your car is the toll you pay.

Congestion and traffic are a function of putting more cars on the road. If we want a Madison and Dane County that doesn’t follow every other car-dependent community to freeway and traffic hell, we must do better. And we are, but not if Tom Still has his way.

Skeptical?

I wrote about a trip to Nijmegen in the Netherlands, a city that closely mirrors our own and yet accomplishes so much more in a “pro-people” oriented environment. Give it a read!

Charlie Berens, of Manitwoc Minute fame, recently took a stand against the planned Vantage Data Centers project in Port Washington. It got enough traction to warrant local news interviews of the comedian and the Mayor of Port Washington, Ted Neitzke. Since those stories ran, Vantage, Oracle, and OpenAI announced that the planned investment of $8,000,000,000 will increase to $15,000,000,000 for four data centers. As part of the Stargate initiative, project “Lighthouse” is planned to bring in over 4,000 construction jobs and about 1,000 permanent jobs related to the data center management. There are serious consequences for this level of investment.

There are a lot of questions that remain unresolved, at least in contractual, binding agreements. Who is going to pay for the infrastructure? How are we going to make the electricity needed to run the data center? How many jobs will this actually create? Do we want this?

As a Wisconsinite of 8 years and someone who plans to be here for decades, I decided to take a deeper dive into what all this means for us and go beyond what headlines, press announcements, and social media want us to know.

Foxconn left deep wounds

The first thing to understand about tech investment in Wisconsin is we’ve been here before. In 2017, Foxconn announced over $10,000,000,000 in investments to build “Generation 10.5” electronics in Wisconsin that paired with 13,000 jobs. Those billions turned into millions and tens of thousands of workers ended up just over a thousand. While most of the $3,000,000,000 in tax credits were performance-based and were unrealized, the state still invested too much into a company that failed to realize its promises.

So when Charlie Berens focuses the discussion on billionaires using our farmland, our water, and our state to make their anticipated trillions:

AI revenues growing to hundreds of billions may seem extreme, but if AI could improve productivity in a significant fraction of work tasks, it could be worth trillions of dollars.

I understand why he’s concerned. The story goes: a couple of executives at these AI companies decided that the areas that are not in their backyard can host the infrastructure needed to generate their massive profits. They’ve distanced themselves by thousands of miles if there are any tradeoffs to these projects and technologies, once again leaving Wisconsinites on the hook. State lawmakers and local politicians have welcomed these projects through tax breaks, even when their constituents oppose the new developments. No one can stay on top of every update, every news release, and every deal made behind closed doors or under (alleged) NDAs. When they do, constituents show up frustrated at city meetings and make their case to not build it. The city “hears” their concerns, but pushes forward anyway and the construction occurs as planned.

Already, I can see that the estimate for permanent jobs is problematic. Even though the AI companies estimate over 1,000 jobs, reporting and city FAQs put this closer to 200-400 jobs (50-100 jobs, 4 buildings)1.

I want to make sure this story is accurate and what we can all learn from this process. This hits close to home as a data center proposed for Vienna (30 minutes north of Madison) could potentially consume 2.5x the energy consumption of Dane county.

Who’s paying for all this electricity?

The most important story for residents likely resolves around payment for these projects. As electricity costs go up in the U.S, many are starting to look at these AI data centers as a potential source for the increase. They are often described to be guzzling water and resources (like this commentary here) to the tune of maybe 6,600,000,000 m³ of water by 20272. That’s equivalent to 1,743,500,000,000 gallons, or about 90% of water used by Wisconsin residents and businesses annually. Not to say it’s not a lot, but if the entire AI industry uses a state’s worth of water and it can cure cancer or generate trillions in revenue, maybe it’s worth the cost (and you just tax it more efficiently)? It’s a big maybe, but I can understand how lawmakers may come to the conclusion that they want that infrastructure being built here so the money flows to Wisconsin.

A separate consideration that I think most lawmakers are debating currently is the stress on electricity prices. It’s not as simple as looking at the Public Service Commission’s (PSC) energy statistics dashboard and grabbing the “electricity consumption totals” from the highlights of end use energy consumption to focus just on electricity:

We have to be careful, because this is 2020 data3, but this would account for about 67,500,000 megawatt hours (MWh). If we steer over to the highlights on energy use for electricity generation, we can see a mix of sources produce the amount consumed above:

21,000,000 MWh of electric generation in Wisconsin (in 2021) came from natural gas4. Many sources of energy contribute to electricity usage and introducing a large demand would likely increases the price for all forms of energy generation. It isn’t as simple as “solar” or EVs, even gas plants could experience price hikes.

The price for that electricity was 14.32 cents per kWh in 2020. I believe it’s around 18-19 cents per kWh today (and MGE puts it at 18.4), which would be valued at $12,500,000,000 for the 67,500,000 MWh of power. The Port Washington project is expected to need 1,300 megawatts of energy. I expect this facility would run 24 hours a day for the entire year, putting an annual load of 11,388,000 MWh or about 17% of the entire state’s electricity usage. That’s a ton of energy that the state (and it’s residents) will need to contend with. Who will pay for it?

The obvious answer is to require the data centers to supply the power themselves. But of course, if it’s going to cost you $1,700,000,000 a year in electricity costs5 to run your data center, you’d love to pass it on to the other consumers. If you can convince the PSC that this infrastructure is worth building, and the utility companies agree because they are able to raise prices when they invest in infrastructure, you’ll reduce your costs and you won’t have to worry about the residents from your compound in Silicon Valley or Lake Tahoe.

Vantage appears to be paying a dedicated electricity rate to We Energies (the utility that would be responsible for providing the electricity). But I personally would like to see that contract in writing. Is this for in perpetuity? What happens if there’s additional investment? Can the utilities go to the PSC and say that the infrastructure costs should allow them to raise rates? These are the numbers that we should be throwing around when we discuss the project’s merit. Any future projects in Wisconsin should go through the same process and ensure that the AI companies are treating electricity as a cost of business for their bottom line and not passing it along to constituents.

What are the cities giving up?

Many constituents fear the light, noise, and construction pollution that comes with developing around 1,900 acres of land. What causes mayors and city councils to seek out this investment?

The common answer is the jobs. Just like Amazon’s HQ2 search, where cities fell over each other trying to lure 25,000 high-income workers to their city. The data centers promise high-income workers to maintain the servers and that income can be a boon for the community. The workers will buy homes, pay taxes, and buy from local businesses to help sustain or grow the economy.

I think this conventional wisdom misses the key reason a city in particular wants large investment that’s not residential: a wealth of property taxes.

We still pay for the sins of Scott Walker: in 2011 the state legislature increased restrictions on levy limit increases, limiting growth to the “net new construction” in a given year. If you want to learn more about levy limits and how municipal finance works in Wisconsin, please give Erik Paulson a read.

Erik Paulson's blog

Madison's City Budget, Levy Limits, and Bond Reoffering Premiums: More than you wanted to know

For my next blog post I had planned to write about housing, but the Madison Common Council recently approved the 2024 budget and there was a last minute brouhaha over the debt service and “reoffering premium.” That’s a really technical issue that most folks probably didn’t follow, and normally you wouldn’t need to. However, Paul Soglin has been out bang…

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2 years ago · Erik Paulson

It forces municipalities to constantly build to maintain current services or to go to the voters to get levy limit increases (effectively property tax increases). Cities should be building, but established cities like Madison are not going to be able to build 10% of their existing city in a year in an attempt to keep up with inflation. Inflation hit cities hard; 23 communities went to the voters in 2024 to raise taxes.

When a business approaches you and says that they are ready to build a multi-billion dollar facility and that you can assess the land for $120,000,000 by 2027 before the construction has even begun, it’s hard to say no. Port Washington had a total equalized value of $1,720,339,200 in 2024.

Net new construction can be realized in Tax Increment Districts (TIDs) as they are built. In 2023, the State passed new laws surrounding TIDs that allows for municipalities to realize only 90% of new construction value in their levies (although removing the “net” aspect of it). The city estimates “approximately $650,000 per year in new tax revenue” (about 6.3% of their total revenue) will be introduced beginning in 2027. Presenters at a city meeting discussed balancing increasing levy limits with new gains in value. If this doesn’t make sense, it’s because the new assessed value would allow the city to increase its levy by 6%. Immediately levying that 6%, despite the new taxpayer in Vantage, would likely increase property taxes city-wide. As the property develops, there will be more “levy” opportunities, but the city will not be able to maximize these (without forcing higher taxes). Instead, it sounds like they will use state statutes that allow them to “carryover” up to 5% of the increased levy capacity over five years to help spread the increases out (in addition to whatever they do end up levying). When the TID is complete (we will get to that shortly), the entire value of the project will be realized as a taxable asset, but the City will not have used all the levy capacity it generated (for fear of taxpayer revolt). When the levy is determined, the levy is spread out equally (per the Uniformity Clause) to all taxable property at a mill rate per thousand dollars of value. This huge project, if it realizes the $1,200,000,000 expected property value at completion, will make up potentially a third of taxable property in Port Washington and would take on a third of the property taxes in the city. This is the benefit that city officials try to convey to the constituents; “property taxes keep rising, what if we brought in a big property owner to help shoulder the burden?”

The tax increment financing district also covers the city infrastructure costs of the project. The TID will use a baseline property value that will remain at this value until the TID is paid off or twenty years lapses. Property taxes will still be paid, they just won’t increase as the land is assessed for more value (the levy can still increase though). When the property value increases under the TID, the entity paying for the infrastructure can receive reimbursements out of the forgone taxes. When Vantage says they will front the $175,000,000 in city infrastructure (water treatment, water tower, sanitation, sewers, roads) that the city would typically pay for, they are receiving this money on a deferred loan. The city is taking on debt, in the form of a loan from Vantage.

Is this good for the city? It depends. Do you believe this project would have been viable without the tax incentives? With the money being thrown around for these data centers it sounds like some entities could cover the loan themselves. Typically you want to fund projects that the private market will not invest in (like affordable housing) rather than projects that they will invest in. Cities have limited resources and putting it into something that could have existed without your support is a waste.

It does make Port Washington seem like a good partner, but from a constituent’s perspective I don’t necessarily want the city to sell themselves out for a project that has some risk associated with it. If you listen to the presenters in this work session meeting, you can hear them talk about this project as if Vantage holds all the risk of the investment. Vantage would cover the initial assets, but what if the data center couldn’t find clients? The city would pass on 20 years of property taxes and would be left with maintaining a hundreds of millions in serious infrastructure investment. Vantage does not “hold the entire bag” for this project; the city is a part of that bet and residents are right to question it.

What about the noise?

I think the most serious complaint that residents have is the pollution these facilities generate. The buildings are lit 24 hours a day and they are loud, ranging from 75-95 decibels. Madison is familiar with noise pollution, as fights drag on for funding to reduce F-35 noise pollution near Truax Field drag on. The “incompatible” average noise level threshold for residential areas is 65 decibels.

Port Washington uses one of my least favorite residential tools to handle an appropriate use for industrial cases: zoning. As part of the rezoning process for the land, there are lighting and sound requirements for the area:

If I were a resident I would be pushing for and compromising on stricter restrictions. Taking the city at their word that the investment is sound/a risk worth taking, we should focus on reducing externalities that residents will have to face that the investors and owners of the data center will not experience. Taxes work great and the city can “tax” them into stricter zoning compliance that forces them to invest into better pollution-mitigating infrastructure. And in our highly litigious society, you betcha I’d post up on that “exterior property line” and measure every day to try and find moments where 70 decibels were exceeded. Zoning is a highly effective tool to reduce the construction of “annoying” buildings. In this case, if the building is polluting too much noise and light, that is a perfectly valid reason to revoke permits or cease operations until the pollution is limited. Make it clear from the beginning and strictly enforce it.

Who do we blame if this all goes wrong?

The obvious answer for blame resides with the state legislators who passed a law incentivizing data centers to be built in Wisconsin. We’ve discussed infrastructure and land, but that covers less than 25% of the expected property value for Port Washington. A lot of it is going to be servers and equipment. Per 2023 Wisconsin Act 19, projects meeting investment and population center criteria are exempt from the sales taxes for the storage, use, and consumption of tangible personal property used exclusively for data center operations. The Wisconsin Department of Revenue estimates that the exemption of a “typical” data center project will see a sales tax decrease of $8,500,000 for the initial construction and about an ongoing $1,000,000 decrease in revenue. That and cheap resources is what is incentivizing companies to build here.

The state legislators who introduced Assembly Bill 302, “An Act to create 77.54 (70) and 238.40 of the statutes; Relating to: a sales and use tax exemption for data center equipment or software”, are Representatives Zimmerman, Wittke, Allen, Armstrong, Binsfeld, Green, Krug, Murphy, Nedweski, O’Connor, Petryk, Pronschinske and Rettinger; cosponsored by Senators Quinn, Bradley, Cowles, Feyen, Nass and Wanggaard. To save you clicks, these are all Republicans and they include leadership positions. When this legislation was pulled into the overall budget package, only two Democrats voted for it (Madison and Clancy, both from Milwaukee) and no Republicans objected to it. Governor Evers (D) signed the law, with some partial vetos, but would have faced a Republican supermajority in the Senate and near supermajority in the Assembly.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this became a campaign trail issue as we approach 2026. Republicans will likely come out in support of their previous legislation, but I don’t know where the Democratic candidates will land as the primary commences. Some will clearly see this as an environmental issue (even if it’s overblown), others will look to the jobs angle that Berens hits hard on, but some might see this as a necessary investment to maintain healthy city finances until the legislature can work to increase shared revenue. It will be interesting to see if animated local government meetings spark into any kind of statewide backlash.

What’s next?

We might be in a bubble. We might not. The financing for these data centers is tremendous and I don’t see it going away anytime soon as long as the investment remains steady. Wisconsin will continue to be a place where data centers are built if we keep incentivizing companies to build here. We aren’t even the most popular place to build:

Legislators have the greatest control on the knob of investment. If I were in the Capitol building, I would be asking the following questions:

• Will data centers be responsible for building their own capacity and infrastructure to connect to the grid, such that utilities will not raise electricity prices on residents? How do we codify this into law?

• Will the energy capacity be completed with lower emission facilities6 and what barriers do the State need to remove to get this capacity on line?

• Should the state enact strict pollution laws, such that entities in one location can’t construct a data center on a border and produce externalities for residents of the neighboring entity who had no say in the construction process?

• Are we creating bad incentives for local governments and should we resolve underlying issues so governments don’t take risky bets like Foxconn?

In my mind, there are too many unknowns to definitively come out for or against these data centers. I think the best thing we can do is to hedge: don’t over invest, don’t rely heavily on debt, don’t build without ways to mitigate the externalities. Hopefully we don’t get a Foxconn 2, and if we do you’d hope the third time’s the charm and never again.

Go Donate Blood

First, as someone who lists being a blood donor on my LinkedIn page, I need to highlight the "We Give Blood" blood drive. This is the second annual competition featuring Big 101 schools where donating blood can save lives and win your school research dollars. Abbot is the main sponsor for this event and the winner-take-all research prize is $1,000,000. Considering the cuts in funding for science across the board, if you can do something this impactful as an individual and also contribute towards winning this grant, I view it as your duty as a Madisonian to participate or spread the word. Not everyone can donate, but everyone can talk about the competition.

UW-Madison currently holds an 1,000 donor lead over Nebraska. We came in second last year to the Cornhuskers and I would like beat them this time. What’s incredible is that in less than a month we’ve already eclipsed Nebraska’s winning donor total of 4,000 in 2024. Go Badgers!

Shout out to the UW-Madison lead ambassador who showed up to the Epic Systems monthly blood drive to sign up donors; there are a lot of "do gooders” on campus and it was an easy way to rack up points for the leaderboard2.

If you haven't donated before or it's been a while, consider making this a routine. It's beneficial for society and needed. I've been a (mostly) consistent, every two months donor3 and I'm approaching the 3 gallon mark4. What started as a journey to determine what my blood type was morphed into a sense of civic duty. Each donation can affect three lives. Different components are used in different ways, but you are helping trauma victims, cancer patients, and surgery patients. Beyond the carrot of doing good and saving lives, if we get into a blood shortage, your relative or friend may have to delay their elective surgery. That isn't fun.

Many of us do not donate blood. The Red Cross estimates 3% of the population donates for an annual count of 13,000,000 units. Blood donation rates are decreasing. If you are looking around and thinking everything sucks and there's nothing you can do, you can always do something good and donate blood.

And you can now get a T-shirt for your favorite Big 10 school! Donate now so you can donate in November before the challenge ends on December 6th.

Bubbl’r - drink of the gods?

I didn't drink caffeine growing up; my parents limited soda intake and Coke/Pepsi were not allowed. I didn't drink coffee in college (sleep is my caffeine), and only now have I started to get the craving for a jump start in the afternoon.

Enter Bubbl'r, the Wisconsin based "antioxidant sparkling water" with natural caffeine. I typically hate sparkling water (it's too carbonated, to the point that I "chew" the bubbles in a LaCroix or intentionally swirl a Klarbrunn to make it still), but this drink hits the sweet spot. It's not ridiculously carbonated, it's got erythritol5 so I'm not drinking 30 grams of sugar and yet it satiates my sweet tooth, and the flavors are so interesting.

I first came across these in college in Liz Waters dorm. They were less than $1 with my residence discount and there were student ambassadors giving them out for free pretty consistently on campus. However, I was bullied into not liking them because the "diet soda of choice" was Pepsi.

Flash forward 6 years and they are being handed out at a work conference. I try it and it's perfect. Then I start to see them in stores! 6 for $6, why not try it? And what started with a single case has morphed into at least a dozen.

And guess what? There's a bakers dozen of flav’rs to choose from. Here are my top five:

1. Watermelon Lime Smash'r

2. Twisted Elix'r (Raspberry, Lime, Citrus)

3. Cranberry Grapefruit Sparkl’r

4. Triple Berry Breez’r

5. Orange Dream Freez’r

Am I trying to pull a Kwik Trip Coffee guy? Maybe.

Will I purchase these for more than $1 per can? Probably not. But if they maintain the below $6 per case price I see every month at different stores, I'm going to continue to stock up. I'm curious to see if these break containment and start to appear in other markets outside of Wisconsin6. I can find them in neighboring states and most people who haven't heard of them do enjoy them when the try them. But the beverage market is extremely competitive and is highly shaped by trends. I hope Bubbl'r becomes a mainstay.

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Justifying Camp Randall Walkouts aka student tickets suck

Last weekend was a rough time for Badgers football fans. "Fire Fickell" chants broke out and a plethora of fans left at halftime7. Crowd sizes have always been contentious, and in particular this year the discourse has featured ticket price contention. When the athletic department postures that this team/entertainment product are worth $245 for student season tickets, another annual increase and 3rd in the B1G behind Ohio St. and Penn St., what quality can fans demand before leaving at halftime is warranted?

I can't answer that question (it's an individual's choice), and UW Athletics will receive no love from me as a former student if they complain. I know NIL and the transfer portal have massively altered the game, but if they really wanted to, they could sell out Camp Randall every time. Just sell more tickets to students. The problem is it would bring in more fans who aren't necessarily spending dollars at the stadium. UW Athletics wants to sell an experience at a premium without having a premium product and it's causing the whole experience to deteriorate. And the student tickets suck in particular.

If you aren't familiar with the convoluted student ticket program at UW-Madison, every July at 7am students can enter a lottery system to gain the ability to buy tickets. As a freshman from California, I didn't "know the game" in which you get every single electronic device in your household and enter at the same time. This gives you more chances at getting in the queue that can eventually buy tickets.

Season tickets can be had for $245, which is about $35 per game. This is a decent deal for competitive football where you stand on bleachers packed in like sardines in the sun or frigid cold. There are seven sections for students for a total of 14,000 tickets.

If you aren't one of the lucky 14,000, you're options are to 1) buy individual student tickets or 2) buy normal tickets. Normal tickets aren't fun as a student. You don't get any of the traditions because Wisconsin fans like to sit and clap instead of stand and cheer. At times it feels like you are watching golf8.

How do you buy a student ticket? Well, you need a student who has decided they aren't attending the game. This could be someone who went home for the weekend and has a valid reason to not go, or it could be a speculator who "scammed" students into $2,000 prices for the Alabama/Oregon package last year or actually scams students on the Facebook marketplace by selling multiples of the same tickets to different students.

Facebook Marketplace works like this: sellers put a post stating "Wisconsin - Michigan, $1. DM me". Every buyer is expected to then DM multiple sellers to work out a price. Because the price of tickets is unknown except by individual sellers, the asymmetrical information contributes to bad faith sales and poor etiquette. Sellers can fake demand ("someone's offering me $150, can you give me $160" even if that offer doesn't exist) or revoke deals (you agreed to a price and went to meet them at Union South, 30 minutes later, they are late, you text them and they respond "hey someone offered $20 more, sorry the ticket isn't available"), or the serious fraud case where you "sell" a ticket, get the student to Venmo cash, and then just never exchange it. It's an awful system. There looks to be a third party trying to support validating ownership, but that’s going to further increase the price.

Could the Athletic Department fix this? Yes. Almost immediately. This demand requires more supply and I think the inflated prices correlate directly with how willing people are to leave a poor game. If the ticket costs $150, people are frustrated and mad when the team plays poorly. They want an entertaining game. They walk out in a sign of protest. If the ticket costs $30, eh, it's a social experience that's worth the price. Stick around for Jump Around and maybe the 5th Quarter.

If the Athletic Department can't sell enough normal tickets, they should be selling more student tickets and lowering the price.

Additionally, they could change their lottery system. They could be more like basketball, where there's a reward system for attending games (helping reduce speculators that sell whole season packages immediately after buying them). But I'll take it a step further. Link the student tickets to a WisCard transaction. Make the game about showing up (on time) and leaving it at a fair price for everyone. This could help with alcohol incidents (where underage students wait as long as they can before going into the game so they are tipsy at Jump Around) and also our reputation as not filling the stadium until the end of the first quarter. If the source of demand is "how long do you want to wait in line" rather than "did you get randomly selected or want to pay extremely inflated prices", you'd have a happier student fan base.

Will this happen? Probably not. I emailed the Athletic Department several years ago and got stonewalled. But it’s worth bringing up again if we are considering revamping the team.

*Update: Madison TC approved “permanent testing conditions” in November that will keep the removal of peak-hour lanes. Read more about it here.

Cars have crashed into Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse multiple times, most recently in May 2025. There have been at least six major crashes on Williamson Street in the 21st century and a more serious injury or fatality is waiting to happen. This raises the question: what can we do to prevent something like this from happening again?

You go to Transportation Commission and you talk about it.

On August 13th, City Staff, the Transportation Commission, and a few members of the public (including local neighborhood association members) discussed safety concerns on Willy St. and Jenifer St. The discussion centered around removing the peak-hour lanes that currently exist and looking towards implementing safety features like bollards. The staff presentation is full of data and information relating to the crashes, street infrastructure, and costs associated with potential plans. It can be broken into three parts:

1. What kinds of crashes exist on Willy St. and how do they compare to other streets in Madison?

2. What safety features could we implement?

3. How do we study making Willy St. safer?

Is Willy St. an anomaly?

There are two slides that provide context for important points about Willy St.

There isn’t necessarily a common cause for these crashes. While there is a peak of crashes during the afternoon peak-hour lane, the trend isn’t necessarily consistent with the morning peak. We also don’t have great traffic data that’s up to date (the last set of data comes from 2017-2018) so we couldn’t compare volume to the number of crashes. There are different types of crashes, including the ones that go into buildings, and the severity ranges.

Willy St. also tends to be slower than most streets. The one-to-one comparison staff made that most closely resembles Willy is Monroe St. near campus. Monroe sees a higher percentage of drivers over 30 and 40 mph. This is likely due to differences in infrastructure; Monroe is closer to a straightaway for most parts and Willy has many intersections.

A fair question for staff to ask the Transportation Commission (TC) is “with our limited resources (funding, staff time), should we be focusing on making Willy St. safer at the expense of other, potentially more dangerous streets in Madison?” And I think what public comment and TC members got at during the discussion was “yes, because Willy St. should be a street and not a commuter road. Even the resemblance of dangerous intersections and infrastructure poses harm to businesses and residents of a growing, dynamic mixed-use neighborhood that we are trying to build more of in Madison.” This is Strong Townsian at it’s core; Willy St. is acting like a stroad and instead we want to slow it down so we can build a more “complex ecosystem” for development that provides businesses and residents more reasons to invest in the area. You can only get investments if people feel like the area is safe to invest in (whether through homes or business).

From a staff perspective, this might be a hard sell because there are more dangerous streets/stroads/roads in the City that could use attention. But the area is such a valuable generator of revenue, particularly in it’s ability to use land efficiently, that any low cost intervention like covering signs to remove a travel lane could pay for itself immediately in greater revenue opportunities.

If the area can attract more residents based on it’s perceived walkability and comfort for non-car users, we could see more low to medium-sized apartments and businesses supported by those residents that contribute more tax dollars to the City. And because this area already has street infrastructure, this will cost the City less than creating a new development on the outskirts of the City which requires higher capital expenditures and operating costs over time. The tax revenue added based on these new projects is more likely to expand revenues rather than be eaten away by the costs of supporting additional residents. Infill development is incredible!

Would this be worth jumping the line if we needed $500,000 for the study? Definitely not. But we don’t need that much to try this experiment. In my opinion, the costs of performing this test are so low compared to the potential benefits of a more dynamic Willy St. that it is worthwhile to perform this experiment.

Why isn’t Willy St. safe today?

The Marquette Neighborhood Association published a letter in support of removing these travel lanes, siting a speed study a neighbor performed on two separate days in May. She observed nearly 400 vehicles, of which 84% of them were above the speed limit of 25 mph and at least one vehicle reached 38 mph. This doesn’t surprise me, it’s also not the worst I’ve seen (see below), but how many people are comfortable crossing Willy St. during the dinner hour to go to any one of the highly-touted restaurants or shops in the area when cars could be driving recklessly?

Another neighbor performed a study and observed cars were more likely to travel at faster speeds in the peak-hour lane. We should be designing streets so cars travel at the speed limit by design and we should not be encouraging cars to travel faster by removing elements that slow them down. When the peak-hour removes parking, drivers feel more comfortable to travel faster. That’s a serious problem and something I hope we can resolve.

At the same time, what prompted this test was cars crashing into buildings. City Staff indicate that bollards could be installed on the corners of intersections at the cost of $5,000 per bollard, $15,000 per corner (3 bollards), $60,000 per intersection, and $600,000 for every intersection on Willy St.

This is “expensive” for an initial cost, but we have to consider downstream effects of protecting businesses. Mother Fool’s pays about $6,000 in property taxes to the City. It also employees people who pay incomes taxes to the State, that will come back in a roundabout way to City funding. Building crashes aren’t common, but it’s enough to at least think of it in terms for the cost of doing business on Willy St. per Cailey Jamison on the commission. Willy St. generates $2,600,000 (based on 2024 data) in property tax revenue alone, not even considering the properties that are just off of it and benefit from living in the area. That revenue is dispersed for different needs and initiatives in the City and it would be too simplistic to say the money generated in the area should only be used for the area. But it might be something for the City to consider addressing for future infrastructure requirements. In areas where we expect drivers to slow down, like the Regent St. reconstruction, can we allocate funds to provide bollard protection from the outset and protect our building investments so we don’t lose businesses and their tax dollars?

If bollards are too expensive to implement now, the next best thing we can do is keep parked cars in the way of buildings and pedestrians. Even though I’m not a fan of excessive parking, in this instance I will allow that parked vehicles are great bollards. They also decrease the width of the available driving space, which tends to slow people down. Staff was correct to identify removing parking spots close to intersections, to allow for cars to move past cars trying to turn left from the single lane. I think there’s some potential hazards with cars turning right that aren’t looking for pedestrians, but I’ll take the compromise in moving vehicle traffic if, in general, these cars will be moving slower. Some might say that removing these parking spots makes it more likely that buildings on corner intersections are more likely to be hit. Why change anything if that’s the case? For me, it’s because the goal isn’t to reduce cars crashing into buildings specifically, it’s to make the area safer as a whole.

What’s the purpose of this study?

I expect that many commuters will be frustrated by this change. If Willy St. was a shortcut to avoid E Washington Ave and it saves 2 minutes on the ride to and from work, this change is net negative for them individually. However, for everyone in the area that wants to make the place livable, and not just a cut through road, this study can help with perceptions of comfort and safety on Willy St.

It’s going to be hard to measure outcomes for this because we don’t plan car crashes1. We can’t say that these changes definitively increased or decreased crashes over the two month time period. We should be hesitant to declare victory or defeat if the area sees more or less crashes or injuries. From my point of view, there are a few tangible and intangible wins that could come from this study:

1. Decreased traffic speeds (without increased speeds on Jennifer St.)

2. Increased perceived comfort for people not in vehicles

3. Increased capacity to perform more experiments like these

If we do see vehicles adhering to slower speeds, I think that’s enough to claim maintaining the lane closures. Slower speeds save lives. City Staff expressed concerns with traffic backing up all the way out to John Nolen Drive and causing knock-on effects to other commuters2. I think this is a positive outcome if it can convince more commuters to move to E Washington Ave or the Beltline. Staff included this graphic showing hypothetical commutes from the far East side and how with John Nolen moving to one lane, we could see a considerable amount of traffic move to Willy St.:

But we should be encouraging drivers to take the all-highways route (John Nolen or E Washington)! These roads are designed to move vehicles efficiently. If the difference is a minute, but we can ensure better safety and business for those on Willy St., that’s a worthy tradeoff. Especially when E Washington is under capacity and could use more traffic.

I don’t know if we will be able to determine the perceptions of safety beyond surveying people hanging out or working in the area. If you live/work/frequent the area, please take the Williamson Street Survey to provide feedback! Additionally, Strong Towns Madison is celebrating Park(ing) Day on 9/19 by hanging out in two spots in front of the Madison Greenhouse Store. Come say hi and fill out the survey with us!

My most important takeaway from this whole experiment will be staff’s ability to replicate this experiment across the rest of the City. Even if removing these peak-hour lanes doesn’t contribute to lower speeds and more comfort for people, we should be as agile and cost effective as this experiment is for every other street test we perform. Here’s what the initial cost estimate looked like from staff:

The actual costs from staff at the next TC meeting:

This is a reduced test. It’s going to last two months, there isn’t the same baseline data to compare against, left lane turning might be more difficult, there’s no public outreach before the study, and there will be less infrastructure on the ground.

But, this is happening now (rather than in 3 years) at 75% of the projected cost. That is a serious win for making productive changes in the City. Permanent infrastructure is great, but adaptability to the needs of a growing population is critical. We could get survey data, hire consultants to draft lofty designs, and get state-of-the-art data collection tools to make sure we don’t miss any potentially important data points3 at the cost of lots of money and tons of time.

OR we can just try something that’s cost-effective and see if it makes the situation better. We can use City Staff to build capacity to perform more of these experiments instead of hiring costly consultants. We can see how residents react to the changes in the moment rather than pre-register opinions about change that’s almost guaranteed to be negative even if it’s beneficial (think congestion pricing in NYC). We can make changes immediately when fatalities occur to prevent them from happening again instead of putting it on a list and waiting for another death.

If it ends up not working, great, we tried and we can put the signs back. We spent $24,000 instead of over $100,000. We can learn more about how our traffic network behaves and what other solutions can contribute to the problem. If it does work, even better, we know what can work and we can apply it else where. Importantly, we can increment and adjust, slowly making the City a safer place to live in and creating a more prosperous place for everyone.

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As someone who takes most modes of transportation1, I’ve gotten to experience all kinds of traffic infrastructure in Madison. There is no better feeling than exploring your City outside of a vehicle. Everything scales to your level and you can spend time looking at things that would otherwise pass at 35+ mph. Earlier this summer I biked to the grocery store on the East side and I got to watch the Fool’s Flotilla, associate in my memory where the new Public Market is physically located, and explore housing types in a North Street neighborhood on a relatively low stress bike path and bike boulevard route.

Everything was great until I arrived at Aberg Avenue, a Highway 30 four-lane offshoot that severs the North Street neighborhood from a Pick ‘n Save.

When I arrived, the traffic system had failed. The traffic lights were broken and cars decided that the lack of a red light meant it was now a highway. I moved back several feet, called the Madison non-emergency line, and I was informed the engineers would be arriving soon if they weren't already there; they had been dispatched about an hour earlier.

I waited for a large gap. This road has a speed limit of 45 mph but most cars drive faster than that. Technically, there's an “island” where cars turn left onto Shopko Drive. But it's very thin and not really designed for an e-bike. I saw my gap, I quickly jetted across the street, and dreaded having to do it again after picking up groceries (I did end up doing this 15 minutes later).

I know my traffic tolerance is higher than most, but this was terrifying. I nearly turned back after seeing a bouquet of flowers on the traffic pole. For those who don't know, white bikes or bouquets of flowers attached to traffic infrastructure or near streets are memorials for people who died from car crashes. Within a few minutes of searching, I found the crash that killed a woman back in 2023. This is a dangerous street for people trying to cross it. How long will we wait until another person dies a needless death?

Back in 2023, a high school classmate of mine tragically died standing on the sidewalk as a drunk driver drove off the road. The driver was supposed to have an ignition interlock system that would prevent him from driving under the influence. I read articles from the local neighbors who had been complaining about this section of road for over a decade. It was too fast, there were countless incidents including two crashes with pedestrians in the previous eight days, and a crossing guard was hit in 2021. Despite using two systems (the interlock and public feedback), tragedy was not prevented. These systems failed and fail Americans on a daily basis. Having been a Strong Towns member for around a year at that point, I reached out about helping with a Crash Analysis Studio (CAS). The neighbors were terrified and something needed to be done.

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Unfortunately, the analysis requires a lot of on the ground data collecting. I was here in Madison and it was unrealistic for me to help. But I was told to reach out again if there was something in Madison that would make for an informative studio. I knew that East Washington had its spree of fatalities in 2021 (six deaths, 2,600 traffic citations) and I landed on the Wisconsin Bike Fed Pedestrian Crash Map. This map shows every crash involving a pedestrian since 2014 and measures them by severity:

That blue arrow points to a fatality that occurred two blocks from my apartment just two months prior. I did not hear about this fatality; there was no media coverage because it did not make the Madison Police Incident Report. However, when I walked to the intersection of Raymond and Prairie I saw the bouquet:

I contacted Strong Towns again and I gave them the context. Raymond Road, an underdeveloped four lane road with some hills and nearly a mile of straightaway, has had multiple fatalities. As a truck route and a bus route, the lanes are wider and parking lanes run all along the street. There are three signalized intersections in this area, one being Prairie Road. This specific intersection is located near two elementary schools, a library, and many homes. I biked along this route frequently and was “buzzed” like a fighter jet several times by speeding vehicles. When I obtained a redacted police report, the crash was a “right on red” where the van turning right onto Raymond (from Prairie) failed to see the pedestrian crossing the path in front of them from the right. Strong Towns sent me a starter pack for analysis and I got to work on the data collection.

On a cloudy day in April, I sat in my parked car for two hours, recording the speeds of all the cars that passed. Raymond Road has a posted speed limit of 30 mph. My question to you:

I will reveal the answer in a bit; please make an honest guess. I lived on this street. It was not surprising to me because I could hear the cars at night. A few days before the Crash Analysis aired, I happened to see some police officers conducting their own speed enforcement down the road from the intersection. I pulled over and chatted with them for about 15 minutes, talking about the CAS and asking them about speeding in general. They said they routinely caught vehicles traveling within 5 mph of my recorded speed. My data point was not an anomaly in the grand scheme of things. It would definitely be the maximum for the day, but it was par for the course to catch at least one driver nearing that speed on a daily basis.

…

The answer is below this line.

…

73 mph.

This only made me more determined. I measured street widths, performed another speed study on Prairie Road, this time catching speed and also the number of vehicles making proper right turns onto Raymond2. Of the 96 drivers that turned right onto Raymond in the two-hour period, only five made an appropriate turn. Four of the drivers had a green light, leaving a single driver who stopped correctly at the red light. They also happened to be a Strong Towns Madison member dropping off the radar gun.

91 drivers made an inappropriate right turn. They either stopped beyond the line or just didn’t stop at all. Every car nudged into the crosswalk. If this doesn’t make sense to you, here’s the intersection from the vantage point of a vehicle.

Cars could not see vehicles flying down Raymond to their left. There’s a large signal box to the right that can block the view of a pedestrian (we witnessed this our selves!). Every car focuses on the sedan/truck/delivery truck going 40+ mph to ensure they aren’t in danger, putting pedestrians with the right of way and following the law in jeopardy.

The Crash Analysis Studio was eye opening to me. Edward Erfurt happened to be in Madison for a housing conference, so we were able to meet and walk the scene. He provided valuable insight that a civilian like me doesn’t even consider: the steep incline up to the intersection, the signal box, and the tree to the left—all reducing visibility. We had an hour long discussion (you can watch it here!) with technical experts and the local neighborhood association president. I got to meet with City Staff to discuss it in detail and walk the site with them. It was picked up by Transportation Commission where we had further discussion (presentation located here). I didn’t get everything that I wanted, but the City did daylight the left side by cutting down an inappropriately planted tree, removed foliage from a different tree covering the traffic lights, and added a (sadly unenforceable) “No Turn on Red” sign.

Ideally, the City would experiment with reducing Prairie to a single lane. The right turn lane acts as a slip lane (as we witnessed) and the amount of traffic doesn’t warrant needing an additional lane. They can reduce the light cycles on Raymond, allowing for Prairie traffic to move through. I don’t know if this is the right permanent change, but I wish there was more appetite for testing ideas. If it was a colossal failure after four hours of observation, mark that down and don’t do it again. If it seems to be working, extend the test. Credit where it’s due, the City did just that by reducing West Washington at the Southwest Commuter Path to a single lane each way. There was a interim test, the feedback was mostly positive, so they made it permanent. We should maintain that attitude for experimenting as we continue to reduce these crashes and fatalities. If the City wants to take the next step, there are more recommendations in the report on the first 18 Crash Analysis Studios.

Who’s to blame?

In these scenarios, the focus should not be on blaming anyone in particular. These analyses do not exist to put someone in jail or create cause for reviewing the license of a traffic engineer. The important part is to walk away with actionable improvements we can make to the design of the street.

Education doesn’t work. There are “Drive Slow” signs all over Madison and yet cars ignore them all the time. Further down on Raymond Road, there’s a radar speed sign that displays to all drivers that they are going beyond the speed limit (next to a school, too).

Enforcement doesn’t work. The officers I talked to were going out repeatedly and yet people continued to speed. Additionally, Madison police have stated that in increased enforcement areas where speeding does decrease, it lasts only as long as the resources exist to enforce it. When the officers move to a new intersection, drivers revert back to illegal speeds.

I’m a believer in physics. There are things we can do to make the driving environment more hostile to recklessness. Thinner streets, bollards, curves, bumps, you name it. Make it so people need to focus to drive. People feel comfortable driving above the speed limit because the road feels like it can handle higher speeds. If you take that feeling away, people will drive the correct speed.

Raymond Road saw another fatality earlier this year. It’s too late to say “no person should be the second person to die on a dangerous street”, but it’s not too late to say another person shouldn’t have to die.

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I previously wrote about my desire to implement a land value tax (LVT) in Madison. I discussed several vacant or underused lots near Downtown that I think would see rapid development if they were appropriately assessed and taxed.

LVTs are exciting for people like me who believe in growth; it’s a great tool to stop speculation and ensure everyone is providing more tangible value than the level the land is valued and taxed at. If you have a use case that isn’t productive (like a surface level parking lot two blocks away from the Capitol), you either pay for the privilege to maintain that use case or you sell your land to someone else who can make something better (like apartments or condos at the top of the article!).

The problem with exciting policies and government is that it often can’t be easily implemented. You will run into ordinances, constitutions, neighborhood associations, and numerous other veto points that prevent you from using your cool new system. Madison would immediately hit these veto points if Mayor Satya or Common Council were interested in a LVT.

The Constitution, Uniformity Clause, and other laws

Did you know Wisconsin has a constitution? And there’s an eighth article dedicated entirely to finance? The first sentence of this article defines the “uniformity clause”:

Rule of taxation uniform; income, privilege and occupation taxes. Section 1. [As amended Nov. 1908, April 1927, April 1941, April 1961 and April 1974] The rule of taxation shall be uniform but the legislature may empower cities, villages or towns to collect and return taxes on real estate located therein by optional methods.

There are a few more interesting clauses later on that we will come back to, but the constitution says that cities, villages, and towns can collect taxes as long as they are uniformly calculated and they are based on real estate. This is fairly opaque and requires ordinances to further define how these governmental bodies can tax. For cities, it is defined in the Common Council statute §62.11(5):

Powers. Except as elsewhere in the statutes specifically provided, the council shall have the management and control of the city property, finances, highways, navigable waters, and the public service, and shall have power to act for the government and good order of the city, for its commercial benefit, and for the health, safety, and welfare of the public, and may carry out its powers by license, regulation, suppression, borrowing of money, tax levy, appropriation, fine, imprisonment, confiscation, and other necessary or convenient means.

Statute §70.05(1) defines that cities, villages, and towns must assess property and specifically §70.32 defines how real property will be assessed. What is real property? Statute §70.03(1)’s got you covered1:

(1) In chs. 70 to 76, 78, and 79, “real property,” “real estate,” and “land” include not only the land itself but all buildings and improvements thereon, and all fixtures and rights and privileges appertaining thereto

Which is Madison’s predicament. You could run a scenario like Allright Properties, Inc. v. City of Milwaukee where, due to a lack of recent “arms-length sales of the property” (tier 1) and no sales of “reasonably comparable” properties (tier 2), the Milwaukee Assessor used a cost and an income analysis (tier 3) to determine the value of a surface parking lot to be $10,115,000. This was much larger than the $3,300,000 value the owner of the property believed it to be worth (even though it sold in 2007 for $12,300,000 as the trial was ongoing), prompting the lawsuit. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals reversed a district court decision ruling that Milwaukee violated the Uniformity Clause, allowing the assessment but establishing that “taxes are levied on the value of the real property, not separately on the components of land, or improvements, or other rights or limitations of ownership.”

This allowed Milwaukee’s assessor to use income generated from the parking lot to help value the land and property2. For Madison’s case though, it wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial to incorporate both land and property value into an assessment. Newer buildings would be penalized (because they would be worth more) even if vacant lots were forced into realizing the income potential of entities built on the land. And how do you define potential income? Do you take the most successful entity as your baseline for generating income? The median entity? Income varies dramatically between new apartment complexes, hotels, grocery stores, retail stores, concert venues, and office buildings. Ideally, you’d be agnostic about how entities generate income to pay the LVT and focus on assessing the land it’s on to ensure that’s uniform and fair.

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What can Madison do about this?

With the existing interpretations of the law, Madison (or any entity in Wisconsin) faces an uphill battle for implementing a LVT. There seem to be two paths, and my lack of legal expertise has me concerned about either.

1. Ask the legislature to allow them a new “optional method”

2. Pass a constitutional amendment adopting language legalizing a LVT

Option 1 comes directly from the text of the WI Constitution stating “the rule of taxation shall be uniform but the legislature may empower cities, villages or towns to collect and return taxes on real estate located therein by optional methods.” If the Wisconsin state legislature passes a new ordinance that explicitly states the taxation levels of real estate can be different for the “components” (land, property, improvements, and machinery) provided each component is taxed uniformly within its category, I think this would be legal. Critically it “matrixes”3 past the uniformity clause as long as each component is taxed at the same rate across parcels. Land could be taxed at 2% (or whatever mill rate matches the required levy) of its assessed value and property could be taxed at 0%; we maintain uniformity across the property components. It would require a lot of staff resources and time to really ensure that every statute regarding the definition of real estate were covered and that nothing superseded the new law stating “you can’t tax solely based on land”, but it would be the easier path. If you want to read more about this, see Progress and Poverty:

Progress and Poverty

Uniformity Does Not Preclude Land Value Taxes

I have worked across jurisdictions in various capacities to advance land value tax shifts. There are several common roadblocks when starting these conversations, and often, those in the land value tax community are the first to mention state uniformity clauses…

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a year ago · 29 likes · 14 comments · Greg Miller

Option 2 has happened before in Wisconsin. The remaining first clause of Article 8:

Taxes shall be levied upon such property with such classifications as to forests and minerals including or separate or severed from the land, as the legislature shall prescribe. Taxation of agricultural land and undeveloped land, both as defined by law, need not be uniform with the taxation of each other nor with the taxation of other real property. Taxation of merchants' stock-in-trade, manufacturers' materials and finished products, and livestock need not be uniform with the taxation of real property and other personal property, but the taxation of all such merchants' stock-in-trade, manufacturers' materials and finished products and livestock shall be uniform, except that the legislature may provide that the value thereof shall be determined on an average basis. Taxes may also be imposed on incomes, privileges and occupations, which taxes may be graduated and progressive, and reasonable exemptions may be provided.

These are all examples of exemptions made to assessing land or other property that has unique characteristics. We have cows4 and lots of farmland; legislatures back in 1974 made an amendment removing the uniformity clause for agricultural land (presumbably to lower assessed values and help farmers). If you live on a gold mine, the gold can be valued in addition to the land it resides in. The state (but not cities) can impose income taxes. This potentially eliminates option 1 , as the constitution explicitly states that agricultural land and undeveloped land don’t need to be uniform with the taxation of other real property. A judge might argue that other components of real property, like land, do not have the same distinction. A constitutional amendment is not unheard of, but considering how they work the easier path is certainly having the legislature authorize it and only looking at the second route if the courts decide to intervene5.

Posting is policy

My love of land value taxes comes from reading Progress and Poverty. They recently highlighted the “posting-to-policy” pipeline coined by Paul E Williams that helped a German occupied territory in China adopt a land value tax in the late 1800’s:

Progress and Poverty

The curious case of Qingdao, China's land value tax

In the late 1800’s, Germany secured a 99-year lease from China for the territory of Jiaozhou Bay (rendered as Kiautschou in 19th century German), with its administrative capital in the city of Qingdao (alternatively spelled Tsingtao). Germany exercised full sovereignty over this territory and immediately instituted an aggressive tax on the unimproved va…

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9 months ago · 46 likes · 7 comments · Lars Doucet

A periodical highlighting the effectiveness of a LVT wound up in the hands of the Navy Admiral in charge of governing the province. Will this article do the same thing? Almost certainly not6. That shouldn’t stop us from beginning the conversation with our alders, city staff, and state representatives who could work towards implementing this new system. So, for anyone that is looking to help move this towards reality, here are my talking points.

LVTs:

• Encourage development of valuable resources like housing, businesses, schools, and amenities

• Penalize land speculators and land owners who aren’t productively using their land

• Generally provide tax relief for homeowners, renters, and small businesses

• Incentivize people to continue to improve their homes or businesses without facing an additional tax burden

• Reduce sprawl and builds stronger communities

Talk about this with your family and friends, your co-workers, whoever might listen about how we can make Madison an even better place to live. Share examples of how it’s worked in Pennsylvania and places like Minnesota, Colorado, and Baltimore are considering their adoption. As more people hear about the virtues of taxing the land, I think there’s a decent shot we just might do it.

I've lived in Madison for 8 years now, arriving to the City in August of 2017. In that time I've walked, biked, and driven through neighborhoods, observing how people, buildings, and infrastructure interact. I’ve seen things that make me happy: families walking with strollers, bikers passing counters incrementing to the thousands digit, (night/farmer’s) markets filling streets to capacity. I've seen things that make me sad: kids crossing streets on the median as cars rush by, bus stops with portable chairs because they lack a bench, street pole memorials recognizing tragedy. And I've seen vacant lots that make me question how we are simultaneously in a housing shortage yet cannot build on underused land.

Let's talk about 33 W Johnson Street.

Have you walked near the Capitol on West Johnson and wondered “what is an abandoned building doing in the middle of Downtown?” That building near State Street Comedy or the Dayton/Pinckney Parking Garage? It was formerly a high school and it is currently owned by Madison Area Technical College (MATC).

What's surprising to me is after all the nearby development, in particular student housing, this lot remains dilapidated. Not that it hasn't tried to glow-up! There's been multiple development attempts, including one in the last year, but nothing seems to stick.

Why can't we develop a building people will use? And what should we build on the lot? It all comes down to land value, how we (don't) tax it, and the consequences of failing to realize its value.

What makes land valuable?

Over a century ago, Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty1 that hypothesized why people could remain poor even as technology improved and cities grew wealthy. He came to the conclusion that people built value through businesses, services, and education physically located on land in specific areas. As these value-generating entities agglomerated, people valued them more and wanted to locate near them, which allowed the owners of the land beneath the entities to demand higher rent. He postulated that the increases in land rent exceeded the increases in wealth that could be generated by the entities, which caused the people working the businesses to make less income and simultaneously generate business cycles that could quickly turn into depressions.

To get around this issue of land rent and speculation, his solution was to tax the value of the land. Land is the limited resource in cities and it would be efficient to avoid taxing the businesses, buildings, and services that cities need to thrive. Instead, focus on the thing that is nothing but a physical location. Land owners don't provide any value except the idea of what could be built on the land. They shouldn't be rewarded for purchasing preconceptual ideas of what makes a city years before they come to fruition; we should reward those who build the City into a desirable place to be.

This is the basis of a land value tax (LVT). As the entities built on the land generate more value for a City, the City taxes the underlying land at it’s value. That value is generated by being located near those entities, and crucially it allows any excess value on a parcel by parcel basis to be retained by the entities. It doesn't allow the land owners to “freeride” on owning a valuable location that is in limited supply, cannot be generated further, was granted through a process of “finders keepers”, and whose value is entirely determined by the entities built around it. In simpler terms: “use it or lose it, because it wasn't really yours to benefit from anyway.”

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How do we have a vacant lot in the middle of the City?

Madison generates 70% of its revenue through property taxes. Each property on a lot is assessed annually to have a value based on what's built on the lot (known as the “improvements” value). For many older, 100+ year old buildings on the Isthmus (where Madisonians first settled), these physical buildings cannot match the assessed value that is typically dictated by market forces. There are homes selling for close to $1 million that probably do not have a single right angle remaining. I know we have some prolific preservationists, but not every 19th century home on Jenifer St is in incredible shape. The reason why these homes sell for more than what the physical home is worth is because the location (aka land) is valuable.

The Madison Assessor is able to assign land value for lots when property value cannot conceivably match what is physically built. Land and property are then combined into a single value that is taxed equally across the City. This allows Madison to maintain a uniformity clause required by the State and assessed values are audited to ensure fairness.

Because we rely on property values first, and add land when the property value doesn't match what it could fetch on the market, we can get funky numbers. In the case of 33 W Johnson, the building is derelict and requires a tear down; it is worth $0. But the City would be in violation of state law if it said it was worth $0, so the land is currently valued at $1,000,000 (generating over $17,000 in taxes).

But let's be serious. This is an 88,000 sq ft lot a block from the Capitol. The average home in Madison sells for $430,000. If I were legally allowed to buy that land at the City’s assessed value, I would round up a dozen friends and purchase it immediately. And then sell it. For something closer to 8 digits.

I know it's on the Capitol Square, but consider the US Bank Plaza at 1 S Pinckney Street.

This is a similarly sized 87,000 sq ft building with multiple businesses and condos. These entities collectively are assessed at nearly $70,000,000 and generate over $1,200,000 in taxes. When the taxes on this building alone exceed a piece of land that's the same size and less than a 2 minute walk away, we have a problem!

What does this discount mean for the City? Failed project after failed project because the land owner isn’t incentivized to sell unless the deal is really good. After all, this could host over $50,000,000 in property value! Might as well hold on until someone meets a higher price, and if they don't this year, well that's just another $17,000 to pay to hold on to the land. We can wait centuries to sell and still make a profit.

In addition to this, because the land owner is a higher education college in a landscape where all institutions are looking for new revenue paths, they are incentivized to maximize the revenue on this project2. If Madison becomes a bit bigger, and that land becomes worth more than $100,000,000, why not hold on to it? All it has to do is speculatively gain more than $17,000 in value each year, even if it just sits there.

If we taxed this at the value of the land, MATC would be incentivized to either build something useful or sell the land to someone who could3. That would potentially be more campus, more housing, or more business; all services that would help the neighbors and Madisonians across the City. And with the City receiving proper revenue, there would be less of a constraint on the budget.

How many 33 W Johnson's are there?

There is a data set that drives the information available on City of Madison Assesor's Office - Property Look-up that anyone can download. This lists many known characteristics of lots in Madison like lot width, year built, central A/C, etc. For our purposes, I looked at all 82,111 lots and found the number of parcels with over 50,000 sq ft and generate less than $20,000 in annual taxes.

There are 878 parcels that fit these criteria.

It’s entirely possible that most of these parcels are paying a fair amount. Many of these are likely on the outskirts of the City and there isn’t much developed that would make this land valuable.

HOWEVER, in the “PropertyUse” column, there are 3,190 parcels in our dataset that have the description of “vacant”. About 4% of the parcels in Madison are not currently being used. This search doesn’t include 33 W Johnson, which is considered a “school” in the database. How many properties are listed with a use but aren’t currently generating value? Or how many parcels are generating significantly less revenue than what would be generated if there was a clean slate? For example, consider E Washington and the mixed-use apartment buildings Lyric and Arden (1010 and 1050 E Washington Ave):

And compare that to an equally sized lot (within 1,500 sq ft) across the street featuring a car wash, a manufacturing firm, office space, a warehouse, and some apartments:

These lots are eight lanes and a median across from each other and yet there is a $1,400,000 tax difference (over 1,000%). They take up about the same amount of space, and while the neighborhoods aren’t exactly the same (the even numbered block is next to an elementary school, a soccer stadium, and small multifamily housing compared to hotels, the Madison Metro Bus depot, and additional commercial spaces for the odd numbered lot), it doesn’t warrant a $1 million difference.

Will every lot like this immediately be worth $1,000,000 in additional tax revenue if we move to a land value tax? No. “No free lunch” or something like that. If anything, the even lot will likely see a reduction in taxes because so many parcels are undervalued. If we reassessed parcels based on land value and used the existing assessment baseline of $48,989,000,000 in total real estate value, under-performing parcels would see tax hikes and over-performing parcels see tax reductions.

Does performance matter?

I can anticipate skeptics getting very frustrated right now. “Define performance. Are you saying that the mom & pop restaurant that’s been a Madison staple for 80 years has to close because the new taxes are too high? Or we can't allow car washes in the city?That’s rude and I won’t stand for it”. Or something like this.

And the beauty of the tax is that it doesn’t rely on maintaining high performance for all properties. There are really just some parcels that need to start paying their share for the amount of space they take. Some examples of under-performers:

• Surface parking lots on the Isthmus

• Warehouses on the Isthmus

• Lake houses (especially those with large lots)

• Excessively large lot single family homes in desirable neighborhoods

• Malls or box stores

• Drive-thrus

• Vacant buildings

The types of buildings that over-perform and I anticipate would see a tax reduction are:

• Small storefronts that efficiently use space

• Homes on small or medium lots

• Multifamily homes

• Large apartment buildings that are close to the Capitol view limit

I personally want to see us build more of the over-performers and I think most people would agree.4 Anyone that sees a piece of land that can contain these entities and can produce value greater than the tax of the land would be incentivized to build it immediately. By taxing the land, and not the entity, any excess profit is at the discretion of the entity owner and not the land owner.

The list of under-performers is also a list that most people don’t want to be building more of and some people want to reduce our current inventory. At the very least, if you want to have an entity on this list on your land, you are going to pay the luxury of it’s under-performing nature. And that’s fine. If you want to pay extra for a house on Mendota/Monona, by all means please do. But you should pay a premium for that coveted land you are building a private property on (that only you can access).

The cats are alive in Madison

To bring this all back to the top, I hope I at least have you considering why it’s important to properly assess and tax land rather than property. There are vacant and underused buildings on expensive land and the current land owners aren’t incentivized to fix it. Instead, they speculate on future rental profits and pay nothing in comparison to hold on to the land. By taxing the land and allowing people to build entities of value, we will see further expansion of value generating entities and the end of underused parcels. This is a consequential change. We would see assessments change by the millions in some parts of the City that accurately reflect what that land means to all of us. I expect there to be push back, especially by those who currently benefit from undervalued land that allows them to pay less in taxes. That isn’t a reason to not make this change. What I hope for is that you do “see the cat” and can help bring about this change with me.

More from Counting Cranes

Last month I wrote about the Housing Forward proposals put forward by Mayor Rhodes-Conway and many alders.

Counting Cranes

Madison wants to build

Last Wednesday brought a smile to my face for nearly the entire day. Our mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, announced along with 11 alder co-sponsors and pro-housing community groups three ordinance changes to incre…

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a year ago · Josh Olson

In so many words, I talked about how Paul Fanlund vehemently disagrees with housing reform, doesn’t like how a pro-housing faction won the last election, and denies that Madisonians want to be able to build because his friends privately disagree with that sentiment.

The great thing about Common Council is that citizens get the opportunity to register and provide public comment on agenda items. Everyone gets three minutes (if desired) and they can talk about the item that is being proposed. I showed up on the Tuesday night meeting, spoke in support of all three items, and listened to all other speakers convey the same level of support. There wasn’t a single dissent.

Then the proposals went to a vote. And all three were passed unanimously. It’s possible that “the intimidation factor is real” and people don’t want to speak out in public against these proposals1. But you can still register in opposition and not have the reasoning spelled out in the public comment. What did the registrant support/opposition total look like?

That’s a lot of goose eggs! Which is why the framing in this opinion piece is so infuriating:

The building boom is still unable to keep up with Madison's steady growth, a major reason why the city has pushed controversial zoning changes to allow duplexes in all residential areas of Madison and allow homeowners with deep backyards to split that lot in two and build a second housing unit.

In what way was there controversy?! I get that some people at the Cap Times do not agree with these proposals, but you cannot manufacturer controversy out of a collection of yes votes. There wasn’t a single recorded act of contention. Sure, sure, “silent majority” and all but again that’s not what we saw in April!

You know what is controversial? The Madison Lakeway project that was discussed at this same meeting, took at least three times the amount of public comment, and was the story covered by the Cap Times when recapping Common Council events. That was the controversy of the day that made it into the paper. It speaks volumes that the Lakeway project was the centerpiece of the article and the housing reform didn't get a single mention. That being said…

How is the rent in Madison?

Zweifel is right to bring up the RentCafé Best Cities for Renters 2025, which puts Madison down at 80th overall this year. Madison ranked 70th in 2022, 56th in 2023, and 68th in 2024. We are probably never going to rank high on this list without extensive housing reform because of the survey methodology. You can find the 2025 results and methodolgy explanation here, but the short explanation is:

1. Housing & cost of living (50% weight)

2. Local economy (30% weight)

3. Quality of life (20% weight)

Madison has not been lower than 80th on the list for “Housing and Cost of Living” and most of that comes from housing2. We have been building, but we still aren’t building enough. Professor Kurt Paulsen was able to show Madison “underbuilt” over 11,000 units of housing between 2006-2021 because we added that many more households than housing units. The City is aiming to build 15,000 units from now to 2030. That challenging goal will still likely put us behind what we need, because 4,000 units likely doesn’t characterize the demand for housing in Madison between 2021 and 2030 and we still need to resolve the existing 11,000 home shortage.

There is data we can look to to show us what current demand looks like and it comes from my favorite report on Madison housing: the Madison Housing Snapshot. For now, I will be referencing the 2023 report but we should see a 2025 update sometime this year.

Vacancy rate is a metric that helps demonstrate the fluidity of a housing market. It takes the number of unoccupied homes in an area and divides it by the total number of homes in a city. A healthy vacancy rate for renters is between 5-7%. Anything below 5% is likely a market in shortage, anything above 10% is likely a market in excess (and probably population decline). This report highlights renter vacancy and owner-occupancy vacancy.

As you can see, Madison doesn't fair well for either group. Vacancy is hovering close to 4% for renters and 0.5% for owners; there aren't enough available units to help with turnover and fluidity. Rents and prices are pushed higher and everyone but the incumbent owners3 pay the price.

This is the major driver for our poor rating on RentCafé. Even though you can count the cranes near Downtown, the demand to live here exceeds what we are currently building.

What are we building and does it matter?

Zweifel mentions the “high-end” build rate and how Madison year-over-year saw an increase in expensive housing (39% to 43%). This can be seen in places like Baker’s Place or Oliv; big buildings with pools, saunas, and wellness experts. Do we people really need these amenities? Why can't we just build normal apartments?

I can't answer those questions beyond “someone is willing to pay for them” and “someone has to be willing to pay for them”. What I can do is highlight who makes up the renter population in Madison and how that determines what we build. My favorite graph from the Housing Snapshot Report:

Madison has a horseshoe renting population. Low-income and high-income renters both want to live here and middle-incomes make up less of the population despite the majority of the units that can be afforded. We can define two problems the City should try and solve: not enough low-income housing for renters that can only afford lower rents and not enough high-income housing for renters that can afford higher rents. These “high-end” apartments that we've built target all the renters on the right who may be currently “renting down” into inexpensive housing. For a clearer picture of this scenario, see the following:

We can see that the light blue bars (representing AMI and up earners) are renting at substantial levels in the 30-50% and 50-80% AMI units. Because housing is mostly a private market place, for a person with a $1,200/month budget and a person with a $1,600/month budget, the rent going for $1,300/month always goes to the higher income renter because they can afford it in the first place even though it's a $300/month discount. If we move more of these renters *out* of inexpensive housing into housing that matches their budget, the more opportunities there are to make inexpensive housing available to others. This is called filtering, and in my own personal experience it works. Given an option between $1,200/month and $1,800/month on a $1,600 budget, I picked $1,200/month. These were the two options I had considering timing, the low vacancy, and the area of Madison I needed to live. Two years later, I found a $1,600/month option and I moved out making that room available for someone else.

Additionally, these high-end apartments Downtown are worth their weight in gold for property taxes. Some of the condos and apartments generate over $1 million/acre in taxes for the City. These are funds that can be directed towards true “affordable housing” initiatives with the right budget goals at Common Council.

What is “affordable housing”?

I've attended many public meetings for proposed apartments. Often there's a refrain from neighbors that “we don't need more cookie-cutter, cube-shaped apartment buildings for all the yuppies. What we really need is affordable housing, and that's all I'm going to support.” Affordability is defined by their own life experience and is bracketed by how annoying any new neighbors are going to be. It's too subjective and doesn't really help a city when attempting to create more of it. Most housing is privately funded and therefore is priced at market rates. Market rates aren't going to be “affordable” for people making significantly low incomes. In fact, we can see that in the home ownership data from the snapshot report:

We can try and slow the rapid increase in mean/median housing price or rents in Madison, but ultimately someone is going to have to step in and subsidize the cost of housing directly for those who can't afford it. You can subsidize with vouchers, tax credits, favorable loans, rent control, and other mechanisms. I prefer to use Darrell Owen’s definition of “affordable housing” compared to the subjective idea that people conjure up at neighborhood meetings.

One of those mechanisms is building the housing itself. This is “affordable housing” in its truest sense as the government has constructed a home and rents or sells it at a rate below market value. The difference is paid/subsidized by the tax base. I think this is a good idea. We've built our neighborhoods through income and housing-form exclusivity that stratifies everything from schools to infrastructure. By building affordable housing within existing neighborhoods, we make it so people in different income brackets can form strong communities. Without affordable housing, the low-income homes would not be built.

At the same time, housing is expensive and is in demand here. The City should be doing everything it can to lower costs for projects it designs while delivering more of them. What can the City do better?

Is Theresa Terrace a success?

On July 28th the Mayor, Alder Harrington-McKinney, and several stakeholders in the Theresa Terrace Affordable Housing project performed a ribbon cutting ceremony to celebrate construction completion. The City helped design and finance the demolition of two obsolete duplexes into six attached townhomes that will be made permanently affordable to Madisonians making 60% or less of the area median income. This infill housing excites me and I think this should be legal in all residential areas (it isn't currently). It was particularly exciting because the previous duplexes were owned by the Community Development Authority, a branch of Madison city government, implying the potential for a repeatable process with other vacant, City-owned properties.

How reproducible is it? We should understand the costs and timeline for the Theresa Terrace project (from the Madison is for People August 2025 Newsletter):4

Timeline

• Existing duplexes owned by the Community Development Authority (CDA) are vacant for several years, consisting of significant mold damage that prevent reuse, and deemed functionally obsolete (likely 2017 and on)

• CDA proposes transferring ownership to the Madison Revitalization and Community Development Corporation (MRCDC, a subsidiary of the CDA) to redevelop the lots and expand the number of units on site. The financing will use a Section 8 platform and rent-to-own Section 8 Homeownership program to house Madisonians making no more than 60% AMI. The first pre-application meeting takes place on 2/1/2022 with follow-up community meetings on 11/7/2022 and 11/21/2022

• The CDA applies and receives a demo permit on 1/23/2023 to demolish the existing duplexes

• The CDA applies and receives a zoning ordinance change on 2/7/2023 to rezone the properties at 1309-1311 and 1401-1403 Theresa Terrace from SR-C3 (which does not permit single-family attached dwellings of 3-4 units) to SR-V1 (which does allow by right)

• Common Council authorizes up to $2 million to MRCDC for the demolition and reconstruction of the property to six new affordable units on 12/5/2023

• MRCDC receives no responses for the construction bid by 10/23/2023 and moves forward with an all-inclusive bid of $2.73 million with KPH Construction on 5/9/2024

• Common Council authorizes an additional $1 million in General Fund-supported GO Borrowing to finance the construction and cover the funding gap on 5/21/2024. This is a loan to MRCDC that will be repaid

• KPH breaks ground on the project on 9/17/2024

• CDA approves the additional $1 million GO financing to ensure the project is complete in 2025 on 4/14/2025 (a procedural step to disburse the financing)

• A ribbon-cutting ceremony takes place on 7/28/2025

• Residents move in to the home: TBD

Without looking into other projects the CDA has or is developing, I am now establishing Theresa Terrace as the new affordable housing baseline.

*The baseline is $455,000/unit in 3.5 years*

We need to do better than this. The average home in Madison is $430,000. Design and construction shouldn’t take 3.5 years. Those are the two variables we should be looking to decrease.

Borrowing again from myself, here are some questions I hope we as a City as answer:

1. How many buildings are currently under CDA ownership and could be redeveloped into more homes? How many of these are vacant and could be redeveloped within 5 years?

2. How long does it take to design new homes in a neighborhood? Are these plans reproducible in other areas of Madison? How many adjustments would be needed? Should we have template designs that the CDA can pull from to ease the design burden?

3. How long does it take to move from design to demo and zoning permits? For this project, it took approximately 1 year (2/1/2022 initial pre-application meeting, 2/7/2023 for rezoning) to complete that process. Is there anything that can make this process go faster?

4. How do we increase funds that the CDA can use to build housing? How do we ensure those funds can be used in a timely manner? For this project, it took a little less than 1.5 years to get all funding (2/7/2023 likely starts process for bid, 10/23/2023 goes by with no bid, 12/5/2023 is first allotment and 5/9/2024 is full allotment)

5. What would it take to get more bids for homes in Madison? Is this something that should be bid to a vendor? Should the City be in the business of competing with bids if no vendor can meet initial bid viability?

6. The funding gap is filled on 5/21/24, but groundbreaking doesn’t take place until 9/17/2024. Can we reduce the amount of time it takes to move from approved permits and funding to construction?

7. Construction was complete in 10 months, is this typical for construction projects and is there anything that can speed this process?

8. What risk is associated with building affordable homes and is there something the City can do to reduce risks to encourage more developers?

9. Tax Increment Financing is a mechanism typically used for large-scale development projects. Could we use small TIF to help boost production of affordable homes?

I’ll quote myself one last time:

Ultimately, I want to see the City take on more of these projects; we need to establish Missing Middle homes and sometimes it takes the government to step in when the private market isn’t willing (yet). But we really should examine closely what worked well, what caused pains or created barriers, and look to remove them so we can build more homes for more people. There are improvements that can be made. The CDA, MRCDC, and other City Staff that helped with this project should be proud of their work and also tenacious about making this more feasible, reproducible, and expandable in other neighborhoods in Madison.

It’s fair to note that Madison’s not an affordable city. I don’t think it’s fair to point to recent zoning changes and say “as more renters are priced out of the market despite the proliferation of new complexes” without having real time to let it play out. I know a lot of our attention spans are kaput nowadays, but this stuff takes time. We can (mostly) control the number of apartment buildings that are built. We can control the rules that affordable housing projects have to follow. We should work the system to make it favorable to make both more likely.

Feasible, reproducible, expandable. Across Madison. That’s the goal and let’s make it a standard.

Madison is a prime, lower tier suspect for Abundance, a book about our 21st century ability to expertly identify problems in society without the ability to implement solutions. Tailored towards progressives and liberals (who overwhelm the Madison political spectrum), the book challenges the status quo and the government’s ability to take on the challenges of our time: housing, climate, and immigration. It isn’t a question of how to resolve these problems; there are many solutions that exist. Far too often in liberal cities there are old laws designed to protect its citizens and the environment from previous dangers. These laws now prevent governments from helping citizens and the environment in a transformed world. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson say now is the time to transform these institutions, build state capacity, and build an abundance of housing, energy, and economic development.

Charles Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, challenges this assertion in The Trouble with Abundance. While Strong Towns and Abundance both identify the dysfunction of local governments, Abundance only moves the problem further up the chain via state and federal preemption. Strong Towns is a “bottom-up” revolution that relies on community members to observe where in their community someone is struggling, determine what small action they can take to address the issue, take that action, and repeat until you’ve incrementally solved your community’s problems. It’s empowering and helps build networks within communities.

The issue tends to be that individuals or small groups can only get so far before larger institutions (governments, commissions, boards, neighborhood associations) say “No.” and the solution can’t be implemented without a long, tiring fight. Strong Towns is the practice of patience and many feel these issues are too large and urgent to be patient when finding solutions.

I’m in the middle on this. I’ve been a member of Strong Towns since November 2022 and I really love the idea of building prosperous and resilient cities from the ground up. I also have Word document on my college laptop labeled “Growth Party Platform”, written in October 2021, discussing my ideal Ice Cream Party goals.1 It was frustrating to see Chuck express “unease” with Abundance, but in a world of short attention spans, it’s easy to equate “unease” with rejection when that isn’t the case. This is similar to the Escaping the Housing Trap, which explicitly referenced the YIMBY movement, its similarities to Strong Towns, where it diverges, and how it’s good to have these movements as separate entities. I was happy to come across We Can Have Nice Things by Stephanie Nakhleh and her clarifying dialogue with Chuck about a similar story between Abundance and Strong Towns.

Stephanie starts by expressing confusion over Chuck’s “competitiveness” and “conflict” in his criticism that she doesn’t believe needs to exist; both Strong Towns and Abundance’s visions “overlap” in a way that should benefit both groups. She also highlights that Chuck has stated that “most public input is ‘useless’ ” and that seems to be at odds with the Strong Towns ethos of “re-localizing decision making.”

Without knowing what Chuck is thinking, I can understand the goal of trying to define Strong Towns in ways that makes it impossible to co-opt it. He’s defending it from others who might misconstrue or bend support towards their own goals. Based on other interactions I’ve seen, I think he’s aggressively protective. These five campaigns are nonpartisan in ways that draw fire from both sides. If I were him, I would be defensive and I think this is his way of trying to ensure Strong Towns’ path to prosperity isn’t pushed to the side by other movements.

Chuck responds by defining Strong Towns’ core process (re-localizing decision-making and financial accountability) and the similarities and differences between the two movements. He has some great points about what good community involvement looks like, the traps Abundance may fall into, and how he thinks governments should approach enabling prosperity.

On community input:

When I talk about re-localizing decision-making… I mean restoring local systems that are capable of acting on community values, not just responding to noise… Right now, our local governments are overbuilt for input and underbuilt for action. Everyone has a chance to speak, but nobody feels heard.

On the trap of centralized power:

When Klein and Thompson talk about breaking local veto points… I get nervous when that critique turns into: “We need state-level mandates to bulldoze through the mess.” Because then you’ve just centralized the power again, only now it’s more brittle, less accountable, and often even further removed from the nuance of place.

On building systems:

I’d say: work to shift the default. If you have a comp plan that says “more housing,” then the next step is to reform your code so that small-scale, by-right development that aligns with that plan doesn’t need a permission slip every time. You’re not ignoring the neighbors, you’re respecting their voice in the plan, not privileging it at the podium.

This all leads me to the first (of probably many) screeds against the practice of law.

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Should a city be able to build if it says it should build?

Earlier this month Dane County Circuit Court Judge Rhonda Lanford remanded2 a decision over the rezoning of a 144 unit apartment building back to the City of Madison.

Old Sauk Road Rezoning Decision And Order

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The case was brought up by neighbors of the new development, who sought standing by anticipating future direct injury to their home by flooding caused by the new development. The standing was granted on the grounds that 1) the party would potentially be injured as a result of permits granted to build this apartment (not the rezoning that’s being argued) and 2) the permits are chained back to this initial rezoning legislation. At the same time, the plaintiffs’ attempts to reverse the rezoning decision were rejected because the City effectively did not consider the law when making this decision.

Specifically, § 66.1001(3)(k) and MGO § 28.003 required the City to make zoning decisions consistent with its plan but the record shows the City made this particular zoning decision based on other, immaterial factors. Essentially, this Court had no record to review that showed the city considered its plan.

If you did not follow the saga last year, many hours over many meetings were spent discussing stormwater management. There were underlying connotations around density, income, and multifamily housing, but not explicit comment as the decision got closer to Common Council. The focus was on the stormwater.

Plan Commission and City Staff provided technical analyses showing why the rezoning was appropriate based on the existing Comprehensive Plan. They also spent a lot of time discussing stormwater management systems to try and mediate concerns over flooding. Because the Plan Commission registrants for public comment heavily focused on the flooding, and because this decision is inherently political (Madison has elections over taxes and housing for the most part), the alders focused on appeasing the stormwater folks at Common Council. They did not explicitly acknowledge the analysis provided by City Staff and Plan Commission for why this rezoning was appropriate. As a result:

First, the City points to comments made during the plan commission and/or by the plan commission’s staff. Id. at 12-13 (citing Comm’r Solheim’s analysis at R. 490 and a “Staff Report at R. 579-90). The City’s citations to these comments is not helpful, however, because the City empowers its common council to make decisions about zoning amendments. MGO § 28.182(1).

Whether or not some other person analyzed the requirements of the plan, the City does not explain why that analysis might substitute for the council’s analysis, or lack thereof. In any event, the record does not support the proposition that the council was aware of the plan commission’s analysis, let alone that the council relied on that analysis to satisfy the requirements of its plan.

And:

Those remarks do not show the council applied the correct legal standard to its zoning decision because neither “the price of land” nor “the opportunity of residents to be heard” are relevant factors under the City’s plan. Once again, the City chose to create a plan that focused only on these factors:

[C]onsider the relationships between proposed buildings and their surroundings, natural features, lot and block characteristics, and access to urban services, transit, arterial streets, parks and amenities to determine if the context is appropriate for increased residential density. City Resp. Br., dkt. 13:11. (citing R. 571).

In sum, Western meets his burden to show the City proceeded on an incorrect theory of law by showing the city council never considered the factors it was supposed to consider according to its plan. The City’s attempt to show otherwise by focusing on selected comments by non- members of the council, or by Alders Rummel and Guiequerre, does not help its cause. If anything, those comments show the council preferred to base its decision on the cost of the land and/or the community’s opportunity to speak. The Court expresses no opinion about the wisdom of the City’s decision—what matters for purposes of this certiorari review is that § 66.1001(3)(k) and MGO § 28.003 required the City to make its decision “consistent with” a specific set of factors outlined in the city’s plan. The record shows the City did not do so.

I do not like lawyers or process. I understand why both are needed, but in many ways it’s just layer after layer of procedure that does not match the intents and purposes of what it constrains. Here are the questions I have as a result of this decision:

1. What is the purpose of Plan Commission or City Staff providing analyses if the alders seemingly need to do their own analyses or explicit acknowledgement of the analyses to make a decision?

2. What is the purpose of Plan Commission if Common Council ultimately has the final say on zoning matters?

3. What happens if it’s discovered that an alder intentionally did not make a decision based on the required factors? If an alder does not want a development to occur, can they throw out the entire decision or force constant remanding (further delaying the development) if they continually state on the record “I did not consider these factors when making my decision”?

4. How does one consider factors? Is it just a statement? Will we see alders go through the motions, reading a statement every time there’s a rezoning that establishes they reviewed and considered all factors? How does one establish intent?

This decision just adds more process to the process. At the end of the day, a developer obtained land and wanted to build a multifamily apartment complex. To build said apartment, the developer needed a rezoning and went through the process to legally obtain one. Plan Commission stated that this met Comp Plan requirements, alders probably reviewed those comments (at least the thoughtful ones!), and alders made the political decision to proceed with the rezoning despite small, local opposition. Stormwater management was heavily discussed, the developer brought forward plans to mitigate flood concerns voluntarily, and we all thought this was over.

This looks like a process that’s working. The Comp Plan allows for medium density buildings on arterial roads where there’s access to things like transit, schools, and grocery stores even if the zone is low-medium residential. This place meets all those conditions. These are the decisions Chuck talks about when he says we should (emphasis mine) “restor[e] local systems that are capable of acting on community values, not just responding to noise”. The community values, per the Comp Plan, are to build medium density in areas that make sense. But because of some procedural nonsense we had to redo the vote a year later and delay construction considerably. Abundance is right to identify these barriers as hurdles that we should get rid of, but is wrong in trying to remove them via a higher power. Instead, we should look to make those systems have less barriers. In this case, it means updating the Comp Plan.

How should we update Madison’s Comprehensive Plan?

Wisconsin state law requires an update to the Comprehensive Plan at least once every decade. Madison breaks it down into five year cycles, where either the Comprehensive Plan or the Generalized Future Land Use (GFLU) map are amended. Because the Comprehensive Plan was last updated in 2018, the GFLU was updated in 2023 and the Comp Plan will be updated in 2028.

The Comp Plan is made up of nine elements. Cities must develop the plan by addressing each one. If a city does not address these nine elements, they will lose the ability to regulate their land. When cities attempt to amend zoning, subdivision, or mapping ordinances they must be “consistent” with the Comprehensive Plan. Consistent means:

[F]urthers or does not contradict the objectives, goals, and policies contained in the comprehensive plan.

Madison’s Comprehensive Plan is 187 pages long. It is not entirely language that can be construed as law; it’s a fairly accessible document. But that length does expose it to potential discrepancies or language that can be interpreted in ways that are against the vision of the community (but for the vision of a few). To understand why this development was delayed, take a look at page 20:

The highlighted section of 42 words is (mostly) what got the City in trouble. How many more of these language tricks do lawyers have up their sleeves? How much exposure does the City have to delays because language that was intended to be helpful is misused and interpreted under the microscope of a judge, who views it from the wrong context?3

The Comprehensive Plan is an agreed upon, living document that the community provides input on and sees their elected alders confirm via vote. I believe now is the time to start drafting ways this document can be reformed to carry out the goals of the community for 2028. If we don’t try and accomplish our stated goals, why do we have a Comp Plan in the first place?

Because I’m not a lawyer, I can only grasp at straws for what the most effective language updates would be. Thankfully, there are lawyers that agree with the goals laid out in the Comprehensive Plan who can probably provide the correct advice. Considering this is less than three years away I think it would be best to get started now.

What does that mean for the rest of us?

If we can’t wordsmith, what can we do?

We can continue to show City Staff, who will end up writing this document, that people seek action and not just input. We want housing, safe streets, amenities, good schools, bike paths, bus shelters, awesome parks, snow plows, garbage pickups, and everything else in between. We see these themes come up time and again in Area Plan meetings and surveys. We can also see it with our elected officials, of which a majority helped co-sponsor and announce incremental housing updates with the Housing Forward 2025 proposals. These are the values that people are communicating and voting for, now is the time to make achieving them possible.

I’m reminded of staff comments on my proposed amendments in the 2023 GLFU revision process. In my attempt to try and remove large swathes of “Low Residential” land use and push it into “Low Medium Residential” my suggestions were not recommended. Even though, in my opinion, this amendment would:

• Support development of a wider mix of housing types, sizes, and costs throughout the city

• Increase the amount of available housing

• Integrate lower priced housing, including subsidized housing, into complete neighborhoods

• Support the rehabilitation of existing housing stock, particularly for first‐time home buyers and people living with lower incomes

These are all stated goals of the Comp Plan. It also helps these neighborhoods maintain form because specific parcels were already at higher density land uses. However, Staff said this was a “political decision”, the Area Plan process is a better forum, and the Transit Oriented Development overlay district already allows most of the parcels to go up to three units. There are many problems with this line of thinking!

First, not all alders are as technical as City Staff. Even if they understand what their constituents want, they might not know how to do that. If we dismiss suggestions4 as not in staff’s jurisdiction, without explaining why it would be better recommended at Common Council with an attached vote, it might require a savvy alder to actual get the community desired results. We’ve also seen in the Area Plan process that small groups of residents on the west side can hijack the input mechanism and remove the ability to get outcomes. Lastly, I’m tired of hearing that “something is already possible and that negates the need to change the law” when the same law says, in some interpretations, it is not possible or legal. We should either be consistent or preferably more general so we can’t be bogged down in legalese.

The cherry on top of this all? One of the recommended GFLU amendments from 2023 that did pass was the problematic section about Low-Medium Residential development and considering factors!

We need to prevent these own goals in the future.

I will borrow Chuck’s “slow, messy, and often invisible” but actionable levers that can help break the “paralysis all the way up” and lead to changes to the system:

1. Narrative dominance. Most communities have no alternative story about why the current system fails. Our job is to provide that story, clearly, repeatedly, and with examples that show what’s possible. When councilmembers start hearing the same questions from multiple directions—“Why are we blocking gentle density that aligns with our values?”—they start to feel the pressure shift.

2. Create visible wins. If the system won’t legalize ADUs by right across the board, help one homeowner do it as a pilot. Or find one that is grandfathered in and working well. Document everything. Turn the story into a column, a workshop, a visual. Sometimes the clearest path is to de-risk the unfamiliar by showing that it’s already working, quietly. The housing toolkit I shared with you is full or boringly normal people doing these things we want to ultimately seem boringly normal.

3. Strategic allyship inside the bureaucracy. You don’t need your entire staff to champion reform, just one or two mid-level staffers willing to help shape internal proposals, provide cost estimates, or identify the least risky way to get started. Celebrate their efforts publicly to protect them institutionally.

4. Feedback loops that don’t require council. Consider embedding reforms inside budget decisions, infrastructure maintenance plans, or administrative manuals. If you can’t change zoning directly, can you change how capital improvements prioritize walkable areas? Can you bake small wins into how staff scopes repairs?

5. Pressure from organized outsiders. Not state preemption, but organized citizen campaigns. If your commissioners and staff are stuck, outside groups (like a Strong Towns Local Conversation) can bring energy and legitimacy to the push. Don’t make it a demand for radical change; make it a call to implement the next smallest step.

We need to start pulling these levers, even if it’s exhausting, demoralizing, and painful5, to see the system change. I hope you’ll join me in helping make Madison a more prosperous and resilient place.

Metro Transit is celebrating a major milestone: more than 1.3 million rides were taken in April, marking the highest April ridership in nearly ten years and signaling a powerful comeback for public transit in the region. It was also the highest month of ridership since 2019.

It’s possible you missed it though, someone isn’t the biggest fan of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and related changes. We are several weeks after the announcement and the Cap Times still has not articulated the records that were broken. The latest on BRT is an update on the North-South BRT route.

I think it’s important to recognize when you’re wrong about something and to learn from it. It’s entirely possible I’ll be eating my words in a few years and this success we’ve seen from Madison’s Bus Rapid Transit is only transitory. So to offer an olive branch, here are some things I’ve gotten wrong since paying attention to Madison’s local politics:

1. Being an alder is a thankless job and most alders do care what their constituents think. Being willing to meet with strangers to listen to them patiently as they complain (I complained about Landmarks) is admirable

2. Bike projects can be expensive (still less expensive than car infrastructure, but even I won’t support spending $42 million on an underpass for John Nolen)

I would like to see BRT opponents to reflect on this ridership data from April:

Specifically the year over year increases showing a minimum 15.49% jump in February and a whopping 38.11% jump in April. Did this exceed opponents expectations? What were they anticipating ridership would look like 6 months after BRT went live?

Why it works for me

In 2023 the network redesign provided my small apartment complex an every 30 minute bus to the Capitol. It was great for getting Downtown, but there are several recorded moments of me stepping away from public comment, rushing to get to the bus so I didn’t have to wait half an hour. For non-transit riders it probably looked like I was crazy, but there really is nothing worse than watching a bus pull away and you start to wonder if the walk will be faster.

I was antsy for 2024. The arrival of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) meant 15 minute or less headways, dedicated bus lanes in some parts of the City, and faster ways to board and pay. I moved from my Southwest apartment to the Isthmus so I could ditch my car (saving money and letting me read while commuting). The couple of months I had to wait were tolerable, but seeing the stations go up near my apartment had me optimistic. The “bendibois” (the BRT buses are accordion buses) arrived and the system exceeded my expectations.

The process is so smooth. I step on and scan in seconds. It’s at grade, so I can roll on my e-bike. My fare is capped daily to $5 even though I take 4 buses (one transfer each way)1. The real-time map and the Transit App let me track the buses to minimize the amount of time I spend waiting, but I also know that if I miss the bus there’s another one at most 15 minutes away on my commute days.

Most days I see full buses. Even on Saturdays all the way at Hilldale mid-day the A bus has dozens of passengers. My favorite complaint from non-transit users is “the bus is always empty” way out in the suburbs (where density is the lowest and riding the bus is most difficult). If they would take the bus once through the Capitol stops, they would see why it’s so vital to so many2 (or maybe they see it when the bus zooms by on Johnson St.). Being able to move past traffic is a game changer.

There have been hiccups. Just a few weeks ago one of my buses just stopped running. We transferred to a separate bus, and I saw it running 1 minute after we departed, but I’ve also had to deal with “ghost” buses and confused transit boards. I’ve been told by a trusted source a third party that has control over the transit boards. But ghost buses, or buses that appear to be on the map but aren’t actually driving towards you, often lead to being late to my destination.

Can we do better than this?

Yes. Even though I’ve been pleased with the service so far there’s room to improve. There are larger issues and smaller nitpick ones.

Larger Issues

1. Safety and comfort

2. Payment ease

3. Better headways

Smaller Issues

1. Buses skipping stops

2. Boarding gaps

3. Acceleration and grip

Safety and comfort are the clearest issues that Madison Metro will have to contend with to see continued expansion of ridership. Although many apartments are going up in the Transit Oriented Development overlay district, there are still “marginal” bus riders who are not taking BRT. Marginal bus riders are the people who currently commute via private vehicle, but in the right circumstances could be persuaded to take the bus. They can be persuaded to take the bus by driving getting worse (worse traffic, a congestion pricing zone, Madison drivers getting more and more reckless) or by bus improvements. We’ve seen major strides in frequency (the most important factor for riders) and reliability is improving from my own experience.

So far this year multiple bus drivers have been assaulted, including one incident that caused the bus to drive into a building. Being harassed at your job is not something I ever want to experience and it breaks my heart that people do this. I’ve personally witnessed passengers harass drivers because the passenger would not pay their fare. I’ve seen passengers get into physical altercations, leaving me to call out to the bus driver as if they are the authority figure on the vehicle and they should somehow handle the situation (they shouldn’t have to!). I’ve taken the bus a couple hundred times, but this still should happen less often (preferably never!).

Madison Metro is working on solutions that range from reviews to citations for non-fare payment to increased penalties for disorderly conduct towards drivers. The new buses have safety barriers and there’s discussion of retrofitting the older fleet as well. I want our drivers to be protected, but I also want passengers to feel safe as well.

Several of the incidents stemmed from the passenger not paying their fare. I would think fare enforcement would be the best solution. I enjoy reading Darrell Owens and The Discourse Lounge (a blog focusing on housing and transit). He shares the same priority of increasing safety and comfort for public transit, but says that instead of wasting resources on fare enforcement, make transit frequent and reliable (more riders) and have more staff riding transit.

The most important thing American transit systems can do is have visible personnel. If you are in a station alone or with very few people in the middle of nowhere or deep underground, it can be unnerving… This is where transit staff and ambassadors comes in. Special transit staff should roam stations, giving people assistance and resolving conflicts and health crisis issues.

I witnessed this the other day; an instructor for Metro saw a passenger get on board without paying their fare. They talked to them, said they needed to pay, and the passenger complied. The bus didn’t have to stop, the driver wasn’t distracted, and the instructor was able to take a moment to enforce the rules. This was a working system and I think having someone who can watch without having to operate the vehicle is a benefit. I know our Mayor takes the bus3 and I appreciate that she is using the same transportation that we all use. But it’s nice to see other uniformed City Staff, especially those who know the ins and outs of the vehicle being driven, able to act passively as a sense of authority.

I will say, with the Automated Passenger Counting system that’s in place on BRT, I think a worthy metric would be to compare APC counts to fare counts. If we are seeing a large discrepancy between the two, we should either calibrate the APC or work to have everyone contribute payment towards the ride. We have half-price fares ($28/month cap) for low-income residents and I would rather we sign up everyone who is eligible than make the bus free.

For payments, we should make it possible to pay by credit card. This looks like it’s underway. If demand accounts for it, I hope we can reduce headways so frequency is less than 15 minutes (the true BRT standard). My guess is it will take a while to get to enough ridership for more buses, but we could invest in more dedicated bus lanes and signal priority that keeps buses on time and out of traffic.

The smaller issues:

• Buses will sometimes skip non-time stations (stations where they have to stop if they are ahead of schedule) if the person isn’t waiting on one of the boarding platforms. In the winter it’s cold, I’m going to be planted under the heat lamp and I still want drivers to stop. We could fix this with “stop indicators” that exist in other countries (see below)

• Bus drivers are getting better at determining how close they can drive up to the BRT stations. The closer they are, the easier it is to board passengers with wheels. I hope Madison Metro continues to emphasize close boardings

• On rainy and snowy days, the new buses sometimes lose grip. They are also electric, which means acceleration is quick and you can get thrown around pretty aggressively if you are standing and not paying attention. I think this will get better with more experience, but it’s worth noting

I think if we see improvements on these issues, Madison could become a serious transit city. The bus does it’s job well and traffic volumes are down on E Washington since 2023. Drivers benefit from the marginal rider hopping on the bus. I hope they will come around to supporting efforts to make transit better so they don’t have to deal with as much traffic.

I had the pleasure of visiting the city of Nijmegen in the southeast Netherlands for a week in November 2023. As someone who was motivated by Not Just Bikes to start thinking about urban spaces and how people interact with cities, the Netherlands is the mecca for people looking for cultures that aren’t dominated by cars. It was a great trip that met several criteria: visiting the Netherlands was on my bucket list, the majority of my visit was in a city other than Amsterdam or Utrecht (although I was able to visit both), and it was a work trip so I got to experience more normal life than touristy scenarios.

What makes up Nijmegen?

First, let me say that I did not “pick” this city. I didn’t know much about it, I still don’t know much about the history and what I’m describing is just my lived experience for a single week. That being said, I loved being there.

Nijmegen borders the Waal River in southeast of the Netherlands near Germany. It has a population just under 200,000 and is part of the Arnhem–Nijmegen metropolitan area that has over 700,000 in population. Radboud University anchors the city with the largest employment opportunities being at the university, in one of several local hospitals (including the research hospital at Radboud), and the semiconductor industry. The city is left wing, currently run by the GroenLinks (Green Party), and has been nicknamed Havana on the Waal because of it’s preferred political parties.

I know we have sister cities in Madison but this one sounds like an identical twin on paper.

However, the last row significantly contributes to the different feels in the cities; Nijmegen was built during the Roman Empire, was surrounded by walls, and has the “built before the automobile” advantage that many European cities have. American cities point to this and say “we can’t go back in time, we have to live with what we have now” and I agree. Every city modernizes, and although Nijmegen has the advantage of not building around the car, it still adapts to new technologies. I think it has done well in adapating such that people flying across the world to reside their for a week feel comfortable stepping off the train platform.

Speaking of, the main station (Station Nijmegen) is less than a 15 minute walk to the center of its core downtown. The downtown is car-limited (there are parking lots on the outskirts) and encourages people to walk and bike after arriving to the area in their personal vehicle or public transit. The station itself includes immense bike parking and is a local bus hub. When I took the bus to Radboud, I had several options and would have to wait no more than 4 minutes before I found a route that would get me there.

The city center is so pleasant to walk through because there is rarely car traffic. This was the first difference I noticed between Nijmegen and Madison: there’s not a single “State Street” but several that all lead to the center. Bikers and walkers are able to go through and there are automated pylons that prevent typical car traffic from entering (emergency and permitted vehicles can get through). The plazas are wide, well lit, quiet (no cars), and full of things to do like shopping, dining, and entertainment.

The level of infrastructure that caters to people is immense: the aforementioned pylons and wide walking areas, at-grade crossings for pedestrians and bikers, bus networks with helpful stations, and even little icons to indicate where people can throw away trash. These all contribute to a place that wants people to be there on their feet and makes it easy for them to do it.

When I would commute to Radboud in the mornings I saw so many bikers I lost count. My bus was at 75% capacity or higher. There are certainly car drivers, but it’s treated as a luxury rather than a right and the driver’s pay for that luxury (parking is not central and you pay for it, streets are streets (narrow, slow) and roads are roads (highways that are away from pedestrian/bike traffic, not cutting through the city), and there’s not a gas station in sight).

The Netherlands is a prolific biking country; approximately 27% of trips are done via bike and there are over 18 million registered bikes making it more than 1 per capita in the country. I couldn’t find exact commute mode share for the province (Gelderland), but I did find some helpful “average trips per day by type” data showing that the average person in this region takes about .8 bike trips per day:

You might ask why this impressive. Gelderland is closer to the idea of a state (although still considerably smaller in physical size than most U.S states). It contains 2 million people and lower population density than other provinces in the Netherlands. Imagine if the state of Wisconsin saw the average person biking to work, a shop, or a different errand five days out of the week. This doesn’t include leisure. Car trips (and car mileage) still dominate but not in the way that it dominates vehicle miles traveled here in the United States. And Gelderland includes lots of rural areas, I’m sure this looks a lot more transit/biker friendly for the average Nijmegen citizen.

The foundation of Nijmegen was built without cars and that certainly helps with it’s non-car transportation options. But it has still adapted other practices which help its citizens find it more convenenient to walk or bike. This is not Amsterdam or Utrecht; it’s a similarly sized city to Madison. This isn’t something you can transition to in a day, but noticing and trying to improve the little aspects of pedestrian, bike, and transit options makes a huge difference in the long run. My biggest pet peeve is the Southwest Commuter Path crossings in the Regent area. Cars should be going slow anyway, we could add speed bumps to ensure they are going slow and letting bikers and pedstrians through. If you have similar comments or feedback, the Greater Madison MPO Active Transportation Plan Comment Map is an awesome tool. Madison should look to build on these smaller opportunities, iterating and building on past successes so the foundation grows stronger.

What about the other, larger Netherlands cities?

On my last day as I headed back to Amsterdam, I stopped in the capital city of biking around the world, Utrecht. Utrecht sees nearly 50% of its population using bike as the preferred mode of transit. One tunnel in the city sees nearly the same level of daily riders as Madison Metro (over 40,000 cyclists) and there’s a bike shed that can park 12,500 bikes. They take biking seriously here and I got to experience what’s it’s all about.

I’ve always heard that you’ve designed a successful bike path when moms feel comfortable biking it with their kids. There’s the “levels of stress” system that tries to quantify it, but seeing all the kids and parents on their way to school was heartwarming. It really makes a difference and you can tell that they are comfortable and secure knowing their children will be safe1.

The craziest feeling was having cars wait patiently for me to bike ahead of them. This is a result of the strict liability that’s enforced on motor vehicles involved in collisions with bicyclists and pedestrians. For the most part, collisions are presumed to be the fault of the driver. Drivers are incentivized to drive slow, careful, and aware of all their surroundings. It meant that cars did not honk at me or try to aggressively pass me on streets. They just waited for me to find a traffic separated path or continued to follow me at a safe distance. This is a different experience than in Madison where I’ve been yelled at on the Southwest Commuter Path for crossing a street on my bike rather than walking it. In the Netherlands, that car would have to slow down because the crossing would be at grade and they wouldn’t dare yell at me. I don’t expect this to change on a dime in Madison, but the driving culture there is so different and it would be a welcome change to move towards it.

Other things that Utrecht does well:

• Physical street infrastructure (speed bumps, separated paths, at-grade crossings for bikes, roundabouts, paths seemingly everywhere)

• Plenty of locations to lock up bikes and do errands (grocery stores, train stations, restaurants)

• Path markings to help with navigation and understanding what you should and shouldn’t do on your bike

I stayed longer in Utrecht than I intended because I enjoyed wandering around on my bike. When I did get to Amsterdam, it wasn’t as convenient, but there were still some notable aspects to the city:

I love the attached housing that they have all across the city. The different colors and forms make for such a beautiful and scenic walks along the rivers. I loved walking on thin streets, in plazas, and to areas where football pitches were within the main city. It felt like I was supposed to be there and cars were foreign. When I walk around Madison, I often wonder where the kids play soccer. My guess is on the outer parts of the City.

We should strive for this

The Netherlands has a focus on people-centered design. It’s incorporated into all aspects of life and the government doesn’t fake its support for it. They clearly put the investment into their cities to make it that way. Madison could do this too; we are trying with Vision Zero, Complete Streets, Transit Oriented Development, and other recent reforms. But many times we overlook or avoid changes out of convenience. Far too often I think about the Complete Green Streets transportation hierarchy and how we still tend to favor the cars on the bottom when we are supposed to favor the people on top.

Even when you show people this chart, traffic engineering will say it’s just not going to work given traffic volumes. We can see this work in cities that are similar to us, it’s time for us to start thinking deeper and more critically about how we might change such that we can be the city other places strive to be, like Nijmegen is for us.

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Last Wednesday brought a smile to my face for nearly the entire day. Our mayor, Satya Rhodes-Conway, announced along with 11 alder co-sponsors and pro-housing community groups three ordinance changes to increase housing options in Madison. These are the first 2025 Housing Forward Proposals; all three Legistar items have at least 12 alders co-sponsoring them. This is exciting! I have been waiting several years to see common sense, incremental housing policies be considered for adoption with serious backing.

Don’t get me wrong, the ADU reforms passed since 2021 are inspiring. Madison rallied behind several zoning changes last June, including the recently rescinded and reapproved Old Sauk Road rezoning that passed 15-4 among alders and 91-64 among public registrants. The Madison landscape has transformed into a pro-housing environment as seen by the election of 10 pro-housing candidates in 13 competitive races this past April and the reelection of a pro-housing mayor in 2023 by over 10 points. Madison wants to build housing and it has the political will to pass the laws that allow it to happen.

Which is why I’m confused about the latest Paul Fanlund “housing density edict” opinion post. Granted, it’s an opinion, but it would have been nice to see him argue against the merits of the policies rather than the process by which the policies were proposed. I promise I’ll provide my own thoughts on the policies (I’m a big fan, it moves us closer to being a Housing-Ready City) but I do want to engage the thesis of his post.

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Are elections community input?

The post focuses on a “uniparty” in Madison that “intimidates” people into silence and attempts to pass laws without debate.

There has been no genuine effort to solicit communitywide opinion on how best to balance the demand for more housing against those concerned about preserving neighborhood character.

I take issue with this stance because we engaged in community debate in our election process. Most candidates took pro-housing stances because they understand Madisonians want lower home prices and lower rent. The status quo is not working, the vacancy rate is too low, and something needs to change to get us out of the housing shortage. Just because residents aren’t shouting at City Staff doesn’t mean people aren’t communicating their preferences to candidates. Most candidates stated something like “expand affordable housing” or “lower the cost of housing”. Some candidates explicitly mentioned zoning (emphasis mine)

From Will Ochowicz:

I will also work to update Madison’s zoning code to make it easier to build dense, walkable neighborhoods

From Mike Verveer:

I will continue to defend renters rights, remove artificial zoning barriers, and advocate for family and student friendly housing to fix Madison’s staggering housing shortage

And people then voted for these candidates and they are now able to pass legislation. We solicited community wide opinion, had a “referendum on the referendum”, and decided that the demand for housing outweighs preserving neighborhood character. It’s unfortunate that your favored candidates didn’t win, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a healthy debate. “Many thousands of traditional left-of-center1 Madisonians [are] on the outside looking in”, but many more thousands of Madisonians across the political spectrum are now in after being outside for decades. And they want housing.

What do preservationists offer Madisonians?

If Fanlund and others who disagree with the Mayor do not want to see these ordinances passed, they could have offered better policies to persuade voters to vote for them. But I don’t believe they have policies that can win elections. As the City grows (because we have an incredible university, great employment prospects, low crime rates, and desirable neighborhoods), you can build out, up, or not build at all. I’m in the contingent who wants to build up, I think it’s fair to say Fanlund is in the out or not at all group. If he disagrees, he’s free to explain.

Setting the City in amber and freezing development benefits existing homeowners by artificially reducing the supply. Home prices go up because the demand doesn’t disappear. New entrants (college students, young workers, families, children of Madisonians who don’t own homes) end up “holding the bag” for the incumbents when they purchase the more expensive real estate. Or they don’t buy in at all because it’s too expensive. This is how you preserve neighborhood character; you just don’t change anything. It’s the easiest policy if your voting base is majority home owners, but Madison is not. The City has been majority renter since 2011 and between 2011-2021 the renter household population grew 27.0% compared to 9.3% for owner household population.

You can move to the sprawl-model, which is what most cities advocate for. This is the default policy and tends to leave existing neighborhoods in their current state while adding homes on the periphery. We love cars in the United States, we can build endless roads for people to drive in for work and play. The roads and infrastructure cost a lot of money, but that’s debt that can be passed onto the next generation. Maintenance isn’t an issue if it’s 30 years down the road, incumbents can pay artificially low property taxes that won’t cover the bill and the City either builds a new subdivision until we run out of money again or just ask new home owners to pay higher taxes in the future. The problem is, that generation can now vote, is aware of the future maintenance, and they don’t want to take on that burden.

Madison preservationists are asking me, a 26 year old renter, to pay a premium for a home that will face serious tax hikes within the existing system. We see it around the country, cities are on the path to bankruptcy because they sprawled and didn’t save. We used to have housing that could support itself. It was typically built before single family zoning. Despite being one of the best generators of revenue per acre of land, we abandoned these kinds of homes for a zoning system of sprawling large lot single family homes outside of the city center. We stopped building on the existing core of small multifamily units and now call it “Missing Middle” housing because you can’t legally build it in most communities. These are the kinds of homes that young families can buy into on the inexpensive side of housing; starter homes like duplexes, triplexes, row houses, and condos. You see these on the Isthmus and the near East and West sides of Madison. I’ll point out that we didn't preserve this type of development as we moved into the 50’s; cities change and that's a part of life. I’m happy we are moving back towards more kinds of homes.

Do single family homeowners have rights?

Fanlund wants to balance single family homeowners’ rights and their ability to reject other people’s desire to build different style homes on their property.

I want multifamily homeowners to have schools, restaurants, gyms, and soccer stadiums nearby2. Not all multifamily buildings get to have these amenities because of local zoning ordinances. Is that wrong? Do we need to balance the rights of multifamily building owners to have local amenities (so they can charge more for rent)?

This isn’t a question about “homeowner rights” beyond what’s on your own property, it’s a discussion of preferences. I don’t decide what color car or model you drive. I don’t decide how you commute to work. I don’t decide what food you eat. You should not be able to dictate what kind of home I build as long as I follow the rules and build it safely. If I want to buy a lot, build a duplex, and sell or rent the other half to a friend I should be able to. If my parents want to build an ADU so they can stay in the neighborhood when they are ready to downsize and give my sibling the family home so it stays in the family, they should be able to. If you and I are going to be neighbors, I should probably at least talk to you and work out any differences we have, but you should not be able to force me to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars below the value of my property for the sake of the kind of home you prefer3.

I understand that hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in the neighborhoods where housing opposition is fiercest, are “on the line” in the minds of these homeowners. They invested into a home and expected to preserve that environments for 30+ years. I think that’s a problematic way to approach life, and because we don’t treat anything else like this I am able to type this post on a large monitor while you read it on your smartphone. Because the investment in the home is so large, owners gain this warped sense of entitlement that the neighborhood is also theirs, despite it containing many people that aren't them. It’s the same process as claiming the public street in front of your home as “your parking spot” or the view of some body of water or building as “your view” that can't be interrupted. “Single family homeowner rights” is the attempt to overreach and manufacture legality out of voluntary, costly preferences associated with large lot detached homes that only help the incumbents and tax the finances and well being of everyone else. A majority of Madisonians have decided those costs aren't worth supporting compared to the benefits of expanding housing.

People, families, communities, and cities change. The best thing we can do is try to promote good change, bottom-up change that makes our neighborhoods better. I will stand for making productive and safe streets where future kids can play without fear of reckless cars and a local business can be supported by their neighbors. I’ll stand for cities that are financially resilient and who can pay their bills without sacrificing the future. I'll stand for incremental development and making every neighborhood a more invigorating place to call home. And I’ll stand tall for parking not being free and for recognizing that it’s something we have to pay for (and I’d rather pay for other things). I know people would like to push me down for that last one, but I’m standing tall!

What are the contentious housing policies?

1. Allow duplexes in all zoning districts that currently allow single family homes

2. Make it possible to split deep lots and add homes in a “flag post” style manner

3. Make it easier for medium density buildings to be approved by right in the Downtown area and other high density zoning districts

The edict that Fanlund is worried about it makes it possible to build a duplex where you can build a single family house. I still think Madison should go for more, we could make it legal to build triplexes and row houses everywhere, but this is the next increment of development on the zoning chart. If Fanlund and opponents can't support this development, and can't support the “cookie-cutter, high-rise apartments” that pop up on the Transit Oriented Development overlay district, what kind of housing policy can they support?

This reform does not mandate homeowners to convert their home into a duplex. It does not mandate demolishing the home when it’s sold to convert it into a duplex. It only gives the homeowner the right to have a duplex if they want. They don’t need to be seek approval from neighbors, Plan Commission, or Common Council. They can build as long as their permits are in order and City Staff signs off. Streamlining this process is great, but even the City is hedging on portraying this as a “silver bullet” to the housing shortage in Madison—because it's not. From the FAQs section of the Housing Forward proposals:

It is a way to facilitate more small-scale, sensible housing options over time… By making 2 attached homes allowed in all residential zones (other than lots in Planned Development zones), approximately 32,000 more properties in the City of Madison would be allowed up to two attached homes. If even just 5% of those eligible property owners took the opportunity to add a second home, that would equate to 1,500 newly available homes.

The third ordinance is specifically catered for high density areas that are not Fanlund’s neighborhood. Even if Fanlund doesn't want to admit it, these are smart policies that target barriers to building and focus on finding solutions for the right contexts. 6 stories is appropriate in dense areas, duplexes are appropriate everywhere, and there’s a distinction that is respected by supporters. Madisonians voted for alders who said they would work to solve housing in the City. The Mayor and over a dozen Alders are up to the task.

What else can Madison be doing?

I'm a huge proponent of the Housing-Ready City model from Strong Towns. Madison is becoming a larger city, it's not the 150,000 college town it once was. And there are many neighborhoods that would benefit from incremental development rather than the large apartments we see Downtown. We should make it possible to build these kinds of homes anywhere in the City and leave large dense developments to transit corridors.

Here are the six tests Madison needs to pass to be considered “housing-ready”. I've bolded the ones that we pass and italicized the ones we’ve made progress towards passing.

1. Allow single-family home conversion to duplex or triplex, by right.

2. Permit backyard cottages in all residential zones.

3. Legalize starter homes in all residential zones.

4. Eliminate minimum lot size requirements in existing neighborhoods.

5. Repeal parking mandates for housing.

6. Streamline the approval process.

I'm most interested in the fourth and fifth policies. We've seen some reform on minimum lot sizes in the past year to help allow home types in zoning districts that were allowed by law but functionally restricted because of physical size requirements. There's also a significant (in the statistical sense) number of homes that are out of compliance with current lot minimums. This means if someone were to demolish the existing home and rebuild it to the exact same specs, it would now be illegal and require a variance/conditional use permit. Rather than trying to make carve outs, we should legalize these homes by removing the lot size requirements. Land is valuable in Madison and many neighborhoods thrive under these technically illegal zoning standards; they probably shouldn't be illegal.

Parking minimums and mandates are misunderstood, costly, and one of the largest invisible barriers to housing. Cities that have undertaken housing reform that includes parking minimum reform (Minneapolis, Seattle, Buffalo) attribute the parking reform as the largest difference maker. If you want to understand why I think Madison should remove parking mandates from all areas of the City and not just specific districts, you can read more here.

Madison has started to talk about parking mandates. Or maybe it’s just our Strong Towns Local Conversation. In any case, this is important to me because these rules do not make sense and they should not be on our books.

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What is a parking mandate?

It’s a rule, traditionally based on poor data, mandating that certain land uses adhere to a minimum number of parking spaces. They’re found in Subchapter 28I: General Regulations in section 28.141 - Parking Loading and Standards. Madison, like many cities across the United States, has adopted reforms to remove parking minimums from the Central District and other zoning ordinances (certain mixed-use districts, the Transit Oriented District (TOD) overlay district). However, for residential and commercial properties not located in these areas there are still parking minimums. Here are some examples:

The two questions1 these make me ask are:

1. How did we determine these were the right parking minimums?

2. Why do we require more parking when places grow?

I don’t think we have good answers for either. If someone wants to help me understand how the government determined that animal daycares require a spot per 15 clients but a normal day care requires that in addition too the spot per 2 employees, I’ll gladly review it. It’s also possible that the animal daycare exists in the commercial space of a Neighborhood Mixed-Use apartment building that has over 10,000 sqft of floor space (kicking in parking minimums). If the residents (and their dogs) decide they really like the place, and the business expands to the next-door vacant space to account for increased demand, do they need to construct additional parking spaces? The residents are in the building, they aren’t parking for the business!

Businesses and homes exist in different locations and contexts and I think it’s impossible for a local government to efficiently determine the right number of parking spaces through a code that looks like this.

The “right” number of minimum parking spaces

These parking minimums were copied and pasted into city ordinances across the U.S based on some studies performed by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). In Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking”, an entire chapter is dedicated to refuting the analysis performed by the ITE. As someone who last took a statistics course nearly 5 years ago, it still doesn’t take much to see how poorly the data was interpreted. I believe I audibly gasped the first time I saw the trend lines.

That is not a fair trend line! Look at the R-squared value: .038 (1 means a perfect linear trend). This graph is showing the number of occupied parking spaces compared to the square footage of a fast food restaurant. It implies that larger area restaurants require more parking spaces to allow people to have available parking.

• It has nothing to do with the quality or location of the restaurant

• There are simultaneously two 2,500 sqft restaurants that have 43 and 16 occupied parking spots

• The largest restaurant is the median parking occupancy but would need to 1.5x their current occupancy to meet the new required minimum standard

This is bad policy because the data is flawed. Parking spots are also expensive; this bad policy has serious ramifications. Shoup used Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB), a consulting company that estimates construction costs, to estimate costs in Seattle back in the late 90’s. Using the RLB Intelligence Construction Cost Indicator, we can find values that are based on 2024 dollars and in a region closer to us, Chicago. The calculator provides low and high values for ground and basement construction. Victoria Transport Policy Institute (VTPI) puts off-street parking spots as requiring between 300 and 400 square feet per car.2

For a hypothetical 100 car garage in Chicago, here are the cheapest3 and most expensive scenarios:

It is in a developer or businesses’ best interest to know how much parking they will need. If you don’t have enough parking, customers or tenants get very frustrated. But if you have too much, you are wasting a lot of money. That money either prevents you from starting the project, expanding the project, or forcing your customers/tenants to pay more to cover the expense. The right number of minimum spots is the one that balances convenience with cost.

How do developers behave when parking minimums are removed? In Buffalo and Seattle, nearly 50% of projects post-parking reform used less parking than was previously required. In the Buffalo study they concluded:

On average, each development introduced 60 fewer parking spaces than previously required at minimum. The considerable range in differences (2–168 fewer parking spaces than previously required) suggests certain projects benefited substantially from the ability to provide less off-street parking following the code reform

Some businesses added additional parking than what was required. Hess and Rehler say it best when they note the benefits of flexibility. This is why Madison should remove parking mandates. We should let the experts (based on their bottom line) determine the minimum amount of parking they need.

Not on my neighborhood street

The strongest (emotional) argument against removing parking mandates is the exploitation of on-street free parking around the City. At several Plan Commission and developer meetings I’ve attended, residents in the neighborhood raised concerns about renters parking cars in nearby on-street parking. The complaints typically center around:

1. Convenience/ownership: this public street in front of my house is my parking spot* (*not legally) and either myself or my family/friends should be able to park there whenever without hassle

2. Congestion: more cars means more traffic and that makes it more difficult for me to drive

3. Change: this wasn’t the way things were before and I don’t like that

All opinions I probably can’t refute, because they tend to be deeply held. I think it’s worth exploring what keeping the parking mandates as is means though:

1. Less housing gets built, either by fewer units (to account for the needed parking) or by not being built at all as the project cannot pencil out

   1. This means less revenue for the City, as Madison relies on 70% of it’s revenue from property taxes. The remaining residents will experience higher taxes or worse service from budget cuts

   2. It also pushes people who work in Madison to commute from homes outside of Madison. These people driving over 30 minutes (and probably closer to an hour) will need parking spots. The same parking spots that are expensive and require lots of land. That will need to be paid for.

2. The housing that does get built has more parking spots than are used

   1. Asphalt is ugly and we should try to reduce this when possible

   2. Parking spots are a sunk cost and the payment for those costs will come from higher rents or goods/services

The efficient answer that these neighbors are looking for is better enforcement of on-street parking. But that will also come with costs, because the land is valuable and the enforcement isn’t cheap. If the spot is free, people will park there. The alternative is to start charging for parking, which gives up the convenience4 of the spot to the homeowners. My recommendation would be to develop a Parking Benefit District where the community receives the majority of the revenue and can spend it on what they desire for their neighborhood. That could be sidewalks, more night patrols, or even well-funded block parties. It’s (mostly) your money, have fun with it! You could also send it back to the General Fund but that’s less fun and I think it’s worthwhile for the City to compromise for the loss of convenience.

Can Madison end parking mandates?

Yes. Unequivocally yes. They’ve been ended in the Central District and other zoning districts already. Some will argue that this where parking mandates matter the most, so why bother removing the rest? As we move into smaller development areas, the costs of parking will become more acute. Small businesses and developers are not going to have the spare capital to handle needing several more spots that won’t be used.

It’s a bad policy for all parts of the City and it should be removed. Mandates restrict housing and raise costs for no benefit (these spaces are not used, in a world without mandates the buildings that do need more parking can still build those parking spots).

We won’t be the first. The Parking Reform Network has a Mandates Map indicating which localities have removed their parking mandates entirely. Cities from Gold Hill, OR (population 1,335) to Austin, TX (population 974,447) have decided the benefits are worth their removal. Even Minnesota as a state is looking to preempt cities and prevent them from imposing parking minimums. We should get on board and start to see the benefits.

…

One last note: if you want to learn more about parking and how important it is in U.S society, but you don’t want to read a textbook, you should check-out “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” by Henry Grabar.