Campaign forges on for a housing trust fund

Last night about 60 people came to St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Waukesha for our second quarterly evening event, Creating Communities: Affordable Housing Now and When. Those attending were members of non-profit and faith organizations, developers, local government officials and staff, and a columnist from the Journal Sentinel. The event focused on how a housing trust fund could help current affordable housing efforts in Waukesha County.

"Land, land, land," said Ted Romberg in response to the question of what the biggest challenge is when working to provide affordable housing in the area. Ted is the president of the Community Land Development Association, a land trust in Waukesha County. Funding organizations typically require the land trust to apply for funds for a specific piece of land. But when the association finds the rarity of an affordable piece of land in the area, that land is usually sold by the time the group obtains funding to purchase it. A housing trust fund could provide funding to the land trust in advance, to help solve that problem.

David Weiss, the CEO for General Capitol Group, explained it's difficult to develop affordable senior housing projects because there is typically not enough federal funding, leaving a funding gap. A county housing trust fund could provide the gap funding needed to make more of these projects happen. And every dollar the county commits to a housing trust fund leverages $10-20 of other funding coming into the county to provide economic development in the county.

Bill Perkins, executive director of the Wisconsin Partnership for Housing Development, and Bernie Juno, executive director of the Hebron House of Hospitalty, Inc., agreed that a housing trust fund could help to increase the affordable housing their programs provide. Bernie said, "It's critical that we have this housing trust fund established, critical."