[Above: the abandoned Oscar Mayer factory, from the south. On the left side of the photo, you can see the affordable and senior housing (Oscar and Huxley apartments) already built near the site; the proposed housing at Hartmeyer will be even closer to the factory than these apartments. Photo: Maria Powell]
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In a recent Cap Times piece about the Urban Design Commission meeting on the proposed affordable/senior housing at the Hartmeyer site, commissioner and alder Juliana Bennett said: “Frankly, I don’t think that people living here are too concerned about whether the color here or the colors there are going to be matching. They’re going to be thinking this is the only place I can afford to live in this city.”
I personally understand this. I lived for nearly 20 years of my adult life below the poverty level, and during those years I had no choice but to live in many crappy “affordable” apartments in various cities. At times I lived with 5-6 people crammed into cheaply-constructed one bedroom apartments in ugly urban locations. But having experienced homelessness, I was grateful to have a roof over my head that I could barely afford (with a pathetic income from multiple grueling minimum wage jobs). Even after I got married and had a baby, my family lived in the most “affordable” Madison rentals we could find for years, until we could finally buy our first house here (when we were already in our 40s).
So I know where Bennett’s comments are coming from. But putting them into a bigger social, economic and political context turns them upside down–and raises critical policy questions.
If living next to a toxic industrial hellscape, on top of heavily contaminated land, is the only place low income people can afford living in this city, this is the city’s fault. The city’s choice–a policy choice. The city is knowingly creating–in fact it is carefully planning–this situation, dooming low income people and seniors, who have few or no choices, to live in a very unhealthy place.
Can the city really not find healthier places to locate senior and low income housing? It can. But it doesn’t have the political will to do so–for economic, cultural, political reasons. Not to mention classism and racism.
Several community members who wrote in to the Urban Design Commission understand this–and wrote in opposing the Hartmeyer housing. Read their comments here and here.
Not a single word was uttered in the UDC meeting about the public comments they received. Commissioners spent an agonizing amount of time discussing various color schemes for the buildings and other minutia related to aesthetics of the buildings and streetscape.
Contamination was very briefly and vaguely mentioned in passing (the DNR will take care of it!). But stunningly, even while talking at great length about aesthetic concerns regarding building and parking ramp designs, etc., commissioners did not discuss the aesthetics–what people will see–living next to an abandoned industrial factory (that may eventually become an Amtrak station). Instead they pondered artistic images of what the apartments might look like with no factory included–or depicting the factory as perfectly white buildings surrounded by green grass (see above). Talk about ignoring the elephant in the room.
If this housing is built at this location, some day environmental justice activists and scholars will ask (as we do now for the Truax public housing, which the city created decades ago next to a contaminated, loud airport and military base): “Who decided to put this housing here? Why didn’t they think about whether this would be a healthy place to live?
We’re watching it play out in real-time.
The city’s stated concerns about racial equity and social justice are complete BS.
Below, location of the proposed Hartmeyer developments:
