WXOW News 19 La Crosse, WI – News, Weather and Sports |Housing task force presents La Crosse revitalization plans

LA CROSSE, WI (WXOW)—The Joint City-County of La Crosse Housing Task Force, a group of developers, landlords and realtors, presented a list of recommendations on how to improve housing in La Crosse to the Neighborhood Commission on Monday night.

"Some of our housing is so dilapidated," Karl Green, Community Resource Development Educator said, "Or it was built relatively inexpensively to begin with, that it essentially just hasn't aged well."

La Crosse Mayor Matt Harter said the using the term dilapidated is a matter of opinion.

"But there is no doubt," he said, "that we in La Crosse have a very mature housing stock and we can and should work towards taking remedial action and positive action to update our housing stock where it is needed."

Green said 2/3 of homes in La Crosse at valued at $100,000 or less.  He said having a lot of low value housing drives down property values and drives taxes up.

He said another problem with the housing is the lack of code enforcement in the area such as allowing people to live with broken and boarded up windows.

"We've got situations pointed out where there are hundreds of arrests per property," Green said, "and how those conditions are continuing to go on, it just removes the fabric of the neighborhood where people would want to live there when that type of activity is going on."

He said the Joint-City-County of La Crosse Housing Task Force collaborated to find ways to get people to reinvest back into the City of La Crosse.

The targeted areas for revitalization are Powell-Hood-Hamilton area (Green Bay Street to the south, West Avenue to the east, Main Street to the north and the river to the west,) Goosetown/Campus area and the floodplain area on the north side.

Some of their ideas for fixing up La Crosse included creating a student housing district around U-WL, Western Technical College and Viterbo, changing the occupancy limits from three non-related individuals per single family home to two and creating residential parking permits to solve the problem of unregulated off-campus parking ensuring residents living on that block have access to on-street parking.

Other programs they're proposing are a tool exchange program where people would pay a small deposit, check out tools for a home improvement project, use them, return them and get their deposit back and a rental conversion program to provide an incentive to convert homes back into single-family homes from rental.

To read the full 60-page report click here.