Photo: The view from the site where the City of Madison has approved a low income housing development, with substantial city funding.
Click here for a brief taste of what people at this housing will see and hear from their apartments.
Waste trucks visit the Madison-Kipp Fair Oaks factory almost daily to suck up thousands of gallons of toxic wastes from aluminum melting and die casting processes and haul them away. Many of the same toxic chemicals, their combusted byproducts, metals and small particulates are emitted—unfiltered—from the factory stacks and open bay doors.
Would you want to see this out your living room window every day? To hear this noise every day? To smell and breathe the air emitted from these stacks, vents and trucks every day? Would you want your children to breathe this air?
We doubt that many Madison alders, public health officials, and other city decision makers could honestly answer YES to these questions. So why do they think it’s OK for low income and homeless Madisonians to live there?
The Madison Common Council has already approved $1.3 million in city funding for this housing project. On Tuesday, Feb. 28, alders will vote on whether to further support the project with $343,000 of Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) funds. See our comments–along with many Kipp neighborhood residents as co-signers–to the Madison Common Council here.
Please email Madison alders (allalders@cityofmadison.com) and Mayor Paul Soglin (PSoglin@cityofmadison.com) and ask them not to approve TIF funding for this project. Ask them where they live. Ask them to consider, honestly, if they would live in these apartments. As them to consider whether they assume different quality of life standards for less privileged people than for themselves.
Everyone deserves a safe and healthy home.
