Behind the Build is a seven-part educational series from Three Sixty Real Estate Solutions that explains, in plain English, how redevelopment projects move from concept to construction.
If you've driven down State Road lately, you've seen it: the old Kmart site, a big empty box on a big empty parking lot. For nearly ten years it has sat there doing what vacant retail does — collecting weeds, generating almost no tax revenue, and waiting.
Our company, Three Sixty Real Estate Solutions, LLC has been working to change that. The project is called Copper Rocks: a four-phase redevelopment that will turn that site into 247 new homes, new commercial space, and structured parking — roughly $60 million of investment on land that's already served by streets, sewer, water, parks, services, and transit.
But this series isn't about our project. It's about a question we get all the time, and one every resident deserves a real answer to:
"When is Copper Rocks going to happen? Or why does it take so long to build it?"
It's a fair question. From the outside, development looks simple: buy land, draw plans, build. In reality, a project this size passes through dozens of hands and hundreds of decisions before a single shovel touches dirt. Over the next several posts, we'll walk through that journey step by step, in plain English:
- What "Entitlement" Means — the legal process of earning the right to build (Post 2)
- How Zoning Works — the invisible map that shapes every block in the city (Post 3)
- Why Housing, And Why Here — what La Crosse actually needs, in numbers (Post 4)
- Where $60 Million Comes From — banks, investors, state programs, and grants (Post 5)
- How TIF Works — the public-private partnership tool people love to argue about (Post 6)
- Why Timelines Matter — what delay actually costs, and what makes cities great development partners (Post 7)
Why should a regular resident care?
Because in Wisconsin, this is your money too — in a very direct way.
State law tightly limits how much a city can raise property taxes each year. In practical terms, one of the primary ways a Wisconsin city's property tax base grows is through new construction. New buildings on the tax rolls are how a Wisconsin city pays for parks, pools, libraries, snowplows, police, and fire without pushing more of the burden onto existing homeowners.
Here's the scale of what that means locally. In 2025, all the new construction in the entire City of La Crosse — every home, addition, and commercial building combined — totaled roughly $43.9 million in value. Copper Rocks, by itself, represents about $45 million in new construction value. One project, on one long-vacant site, roughly equal to everything else the city built in a year.
Today, that site pays about $80,000 a year in property taxes. Fully built, it's projected to generate approximately $870,000 annually. While we'll explain Tax Increment Financing (TIF) in detail later in this series, it's important to know that TIF does not mean a development pays no property taxes. The project continues paying property taxes throughout the life of the TIF district, and we'll explain where those dollars go in Part 6.
That's the theme you'll see throughout this series: development isn't something that happens to a community. Done right, it's something that happens for one. Every step in the process — zoning, hearings, agreements, financing — exists to make sure that's true.