Council panel pushes for SEWRPC housing study

June 12 -- A Common Council committee on Monday endorsed a resolution urging the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission to conduct the regionwide housing study that it has been promising since 2004.

Ald. Michael Murphy, the main sponsor of the measure, said the planning agency last studied housing in 1975.

“This is an important issue,” he said during a meeting of the council’s Judiciary and Legislation Committee. “It shouldn’t be left for 35 years.”

SEWRPC Executive Director Philip Evenson agreed.

“We would welcome the city’s push on this,” he said.

SEWRPC said in 2004 that it would begin work on the study in 2005, but hasn’t done so for various reasons, Evenson said.. “I won’t bore you with the details,” he said.

Murphy said the lack of affordable housing in suburban counties is a “structural problem” for the future of the region. Communities are not as blatant as they once were in fencing out low-income people, but “we have now very difficult zoning laws that make it extremely difficult for communities to build affordable housing,” he said.

Evenson said he did not know how much the study would cost, and that SEWRPC is just beginning to draft a scope of services for the study.

Housing “is not forgotten,” he said. “It’s not not an issue.”

Evenson said, though, that any plan or study “will not be terribly effective without some imposition of major policy direction.”

The study is needed to convince legislators that policy changes are needed, Murphy said. “It gets to a place where it’s too late,” he said. “The system’s in place and it’s going to stay that way for another hundred years.”

Representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council and the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee also supported the resolution.

“We know, in the faith community... that there are people throughout the region who care about this issue, who feel the reality of the lack of affordable housing,” said Marcus White, executive director of the Interfaith Conference.