Also on this page: ACLU rips SEWRPC outreach efforts. Lack of financing hurts housing plans, SEWRPC says SEWRPC smart growth planning flawed, ACLU says.

SEWRPC to conduct housing study

June 7, 2005 -- The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission will tackle affordable housing issues once land use and transportation studies now underway are completed, according to SEWRPC Executive Director Philip Evenson.

"We will begin later this year by creating an advisory committee of knowledgeable and interested
individuals," Evenson said in an e-mail. "That committee will be asked to help us address several fundamental questions, including purpose, scope, and schedule."

SEWRPC has been criticized for abandoning the type of thorough housing studies it did in the 1970s.

The Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration, in recertifying SEWRPC this year as the area's Metropolitan Planning Organization, suggested that "affordable housing, access to jobs, and community development are examples of regional issues that could benefit from SEWRPC's planning expertise."

Evenson touched on the housing study plans in a letter to ACLU attorney Karyn Rotker, who contended SEWRPC needed to address housing and other issues important to low-income and minority populations in its land use and transportation studies.

Evenson also told Rotker that SEWRPC had been in contact with 56 groups and organizations that primarily serve central city areas.

"We communicate with these groups and organizations on a periodic basis, and are in the process of contacting each one with a view towards setting up individual meetings," he wrote.

To read Evenson's full letter and the SEWRPC list of 56 organizations, click here.

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ACLU rips SEWRPC outreach efforts
Transportation, land use hearings continue this week

May 23, 2005-- The Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission's outreach efforts continue to fall short of legal requirements, an American Civil Liberties lawyer says.

"At some point, ignoring known Title VI (civil rights) rules, policies and procedures becomes an intentional, not inadvertent, action," ACLU attorney Karyn Rotker wrote to SEWRPC Executive Director Philip Evenson. "I believe SEWRPC is approaching that point."

The Pewaukee-based regional planning agency is holding a series of public meetings to get input on regional transportation and land use plans.

Rotker said in her letter that SERWPC is obligated to develop an outreach method that is "seriously designed to obtain low income and minority community input....While holding a meeting in minority neighborhood may be one step in that process, it is not enough."

Testimony at an earlier public hearing about SEWRPC operations "indicated that such meetings have traditionally been poorly attended," wrote Rotker, who is the ACLU's Poverty, Race & Civil Liberties Project Attorney.

She added: "SEWRPC must seek to involve low income and minority communities in the manner in which the communities prefer to be involved, not in the manner SEWRPC prefers to operate."

Rotker also hit SEWRPC for the way it worded notices of the meetings. The wording "fails to convey to any but the sophisticated reader the content or significance of those meetings.... SEWRPC needs to address such issues of concern to low income and minority communities as affordable housing, access to jobs and community development," she wrote. "These are land use and transportation issues, and processes intended to solicit community input must be explicit that those are the issues on the table."

The webteam has asked SEWRPC for a copy of its response to the ACLU, and will post it upon receipt.

SEWRPC, in its announcement of the meetings, says the new transportation and land use plans "will serve as a guide to land use development and redevelopment and transportation system development to the year 2035."

The meetings the agency is hosting will be in the "open house" format, also known as "wander around and speak to a bureacrat" format.

SEWRPC staff will be available in an 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. to individually answer questions and provide information about the review and update of the regional land use and transportation system plans. Oral comments may be provided to a court reporter at the meetings and written comments may be made during and after the meetings.

Meeting dates and locations:

May 25: Town of Cedarburg Town Hall, Conference Room, 1293 Washington Avenue, Cedarburg

May 25 :Racine Gateway Technical College, Huron Room, 1001 S. Main Street, Racine

May 25: Elkhorn Gateway Technical College, Room 112, 100 Building, 400 County Highway H, Elkhorn

May 26: Zoofari Conference Center, Conference Room, 9715 W. Bluemound Road, Milwaukee

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Lack of financing hurts housing plans, SEWRPC says

Aug. 15, 2004 -- A decision by the federal government in the mid-1980s to end support for metropolitan housing planning prompted the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission to stop updating its regional housing plan, according to SEWRPC Executive Director Phil Evenson.

"The lack of Federal and State resources in this subject area significantly constrains what the Commission is able to accomplish," he wrote to Karyn Rotker, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. "Nevertheless, we will do our best with the available resources to meet the new Wisconsin comprehensive planning requirements as they apply to the commission."

To read Evenson's letter, click here.

Rotker wrote to Evenson last month criticizing SEWRPC's Smart Growth planning efforts. She noted in her letter that the 1975 regional housing plan has never been fully updated.

"The commission does intend, as indicated on the material posted on our website, to prepare an updated regional housing plan element," he wrote. "The timing and scope of that updating effort is constrained by available resources."

Evenson said SEWRPC agrees that housing planning should address affordable housing for low and moderate income people.

SEWRPC's Waukesha County Smart Growth planning flawed, ACLU says
Omits race, affordable housing

"The ACLU and many other organizations have previously criticized SEWRPC for its lack of attention to the needs and concerns of minority and low-income families during transportation planning," ACLU of Wisconsin staff attorney Karyn Rotker said. "It now seems that the lack of attention to these communities is carrying over to housing planning."

SEWRPC Executive Director Philip Evenson said Friday that the Waukesha County planning process is being directed by Waukesha County staff, not SEWRPC.

"We are cooperating with them in any way possible, including providing data and recommendations that will flow
out of our plan updates over the next several years," he said.

ACLU Executive Director Chris Ahmuty said both SEWRPC and Waukesha County should be concerned about affordable housing.

It is critical that they "address, evaluate and incorporate issues involving the regional nature of housing markets, the need for affordable housing, and the income and non-income-related issues of race and housing," Ahmuty said.

SEWRPC is the agency that developed the unfunded $6,250,000,000 freeway reconstruction and expansion plan. The negative effects of the plan would disproportionately affect Milwaukee County, particularly the city of Milwaukee.

The Pewaukee-based SEWRPC realized as long as 30 years ago that planning for housing must be regional in nature, Rotker wrote in her letter to Evenson. The agency said in its 1975 Regional Housing Plan that "[h]ousing demand and needs develop in response to basic social and economic forces over an entire urban region without regard to corporate limit."

Evenson

The draft Waukesha County plan, however, " fails to adequately address the regional need for affordable housing for low and moderate income families," she wrote. "It also fails to even mention race, to acknowledge and address the overlap between race and affordable housing, or to evaluate the extent to which discrimination continues to be a barrier to persons of color seeking housing in suburban communities."

The state's Smart Growth law specifically gives communities the responsibility of providing "a range of housing choices that meet the needs of persons of all income levels," Rotker wrote.

"Yet the Commission’s Summary of Wisconsin Comprehensive Planning Requirements never even uses the phrase 'affordable housing,' and suggests that it is only communities which seek to attract new jobs that should consider providing a broad range of housing choices," Rotker wrote.

The Waukesha County Smart Growth process appears have sought information only how the adequacy of its housing stock for the resident population," she said.

"The critical, broader discussions, on how to provide a broad range of housing choices for residents of the region, and on how to promote the availability of land for affordable housing, are absent," Rotker said.