Frederica Freyberg:
You’ve no doubt heard that the housing market is on fire and along with that the cost of housing. It’s because demand out strips supply. That’s especially so for affordable housing. This year the annual Rural Summit put on by the non-profit Wisconsin Rural Partners kicked off its five sessions, talking about housing and what to do about the lack of it, specific to the rural housing landscape. We’re joined by Steve Peterson from Wisconsin Rural Partners and he joins us from Kendall and thanks a lot for being here.
Steve Peterson:
Thanks for having me.
Frederica Freyberg:
So I heard in this week’s session of your summit that since the great recession, just not enough houses were being built to meet demand. So this is a longstanding problem. How big of a problem is this lack of housing and affordable housing in rural areas?
Steve Peterson:
Well, the one thing we’ve seen in the rural areas is it’s multifaceted as far as where all the shortages are coming from. One, as you mentioned, just not enough houses being built but we also see the boomers that probably would go into transitional housing but they don’t have it in their hometowns and they don’t want to leave their hometowns, so they’re actually retro-ing their houses so they have ramps, railings and everything. They’re not moving to open those up for family dwellings. So that’s a problem. And then prices of houses are just going crazy. As you know, you list a house and you’ll have five or six offers and a lot of times more than what you were looking to get for it. And that’s causing an issue too. And building costs are high. There’s just a lot of things all attacking the housing market from different areas.
Frederica Freyberg:
So how would more housing help rural economies?
Steve Peterson:
Well, because of the COVID pandemic we found you can be pretty portable when it comes to working from home. We think a lot of people are leaving the urban areas and wanting to move into those rural areas for quality of life. They want to be closer to their lakes and they want to be out in the great outdoors. We’re seeing small town rural communities, if they can have broadband supply in place, you’re going to see people wanting to move from the big cities out to the rural areas. I think the rural areas have an opportunity to really grow quickly It’s just if they can keep the infrastructure going to keep up to the demand. But right now we just got to get housing started and built. We just don’t have the developers we used to have. That never came back from that 2008 bubble burst.
Frederica Freyberg:
It was also super-interesting to understand the implications of how second homes and the conversion of existing homes to short-term rentals for the tourism industry pulls even more units out of the housing stock in rural areas. You just spoke about people coming back to the lakes and such, but how does out-migration of young people in rural Wisconsin exacerbate this problem of maintaining vibrant communities?
Steve Peterson:
Well, you know, when you’re looking at the younger generation of your workforce, they’re not looking for the big houses. You know, they’d like to have a loft. They’d like to live up above a building, a storefront. So you’ve got that component to work with. But we’re seeing the comeback of some of our younger generation that leave. They want to see what life is really about, but then all of a sudden they want to settle down and they want to go back into their home areas. We’re seeing that boomerang effect where people have left and they’ve maybe gotten a taste of life and now want to go back home where they have all the good memories. If we can get the broadband and we give companies that are comfortable having people live back in the rural areas, I think the rural areas have tremendous potential if we can just get the demand covered by getting some of these homes built. That’s what we’re working hard on that through Wisconsin Rural Partners.
Frederica Freyberg:
What other topics are coming up in your Rural Summit series?
Steve Peterson:
It’s all dovetailing together on how can we make our rural communities stronger? How can they recover from the pandemic and how work together in collaboration because we’re seeing a lot more communities and regions now collaborating together, sharing resources and revenue streams. So we’re pushing that a lot more. We have Deb Brown from Save Your Town that’s going to be talking about how to make your community more idea-friendly. How can you work together as groups instead of little pockets of ideas and quit having meetings to have meetings and how about if we roll our sleeves up and actually make things happen. Our biggest, most popular session will be coming up on May 19 and that’s broadband in your backyard. We anticipate a huge amount of attendees for that and we’re covering all aspects of the broadband issues in that session alone.
Frederica Freyberg:
Great news. We’ll be doing some reporting around broadband as well coming up later this month. Steve Peterson, thank you so much and thanks for your work.
Steve Peterson:
Thank you for the support and helping Rural Partners get the word out. Let’s get our rural communities back on track again and see this state really grow.
Frederica Freyberg:
Let’s. Thank you.
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News Stories from PBS Wisconsin
02/03/25
‘Here & Now’ Highlights: State Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, Jane Graham Jennings, Chairman Tehassi Hill

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