The Isthmus Squeeze: Madison's Growth Argument, From the Air
Madison is one of America's fastest-growing mid-size cities, building upward on a fixed isthmus. Our investigations desk opens the housing file: the cranes, the zoning fights, and the rents.
The aerial view makes the argument before a word is read: a downtown of new towers rising on a narrow neck of land between two lakes, construction cranes over the isthmus, and beyond them a metropolitan area that keeps adding people faster than almost any mid-size city in the Midwest. Madison's growth — driven by the university, the state government and a technology sector anchored by health-software giant Epic Systems in suburban Verona — has collided with the city's fixed geography, and the collision is the defining civic story of this decade.
The evidence is in the rents and the for-sale signs. Dane County has added tens of thousands of residents in a decade while housing construction, though substantial, has chased demand from behind; the result is a housing market in which students, state workers, hospital staff and service workers compete for the same apartments, and in which the phrase 'housing crisis' appears in the documents of the city, the county and the university alike.
The response has been a building boom and a zoning argument to match it. The city has rewritten its zoning code to allow more density along transit corridors, approved tower after tower downtown and mid-rise districts along East Washington and the west side, and argued — in council chambers and neighborhood meetings — over height, shadows, historic fabric and who the new housing is for. The suburbs, from Middleton and Fitchburg to Sun Prairie and Verona, run their own versions of the same debate, at single-family scale.
The records are public and this desk will keep them open: building permits and their pace, rent and vacancy surveys from the city's and university's own reports, the zoning docket case by case, the property-tax implications of a tax base transformed by new construction. The questions are the standing ones of a boomtown: Is the building keeping up? Who is being priced out, and to where? And what does the city's famous quality of life — the lakes, the isthmus, the scale — look like at 350,000 people?
Madison has argued about growth for fifty years, from the height limits that protect the Capitol's view to this fall's docket. The investigations desk intends to argue with documents. The cranes are up; the file is open.