Ask any employer, any young family shopping for a first home, or anyone who's searched for an apartment lately: housing in the La Crosse area is tight. That's not a talking point — it shows up in vacancy rates, in rents, in how fast listings move, and in the workers regional employers can't recruit because those workers can't find a place to live.

This post is about why projects like Copper Rocks — 247 homes on a redeveloped site — are a response to a real community need, and why where you build housing matters as much as whether you build it.

The need, plainly stated

Wisconsin, like most of the country, has underbuilt housing for years. When too few homes are available for too many households, three things happen, in order:

1. Prices and rents rise — for everyone, including people who never move, because the whole market tightens (or shrinks).
2. Workers get pushed outward — commuting from farther away, or taking jobs elsewhere entirely. Housing shortages quietly become workforce shortages. This also contributes to parking issues around institutional locations (the universities, hospitals, etc.).
3. The people with the fewest options get squeezed hardest — seniors on fixed incomes, young workers, and anyone in crisis.

The only durable fix is more homes, across the whole spectrum: market-rate apartments, townhomes, smaller footprint starter homes, and supportive housing. Adding housing supply anywhere loosens the market everywhere — new apartments free up older apartments, which free up starter homes, in a chain economists call filtering.

What Copper Rocks adds

Across its four phases, Copper Rocks brings 247 homes in a deliberate mix — studio, one bedroom, two-bedroom apartments and a variety of townhomes at a range of price points. It also includes commercial and community space, so daily needs can sit within walking distance of front doors.

One design point worth knowing: the project applied for funding through a state program whose affordability benchmarks are tied to La Crosse county incomes — meaning its residences and rents are specifically programmed and designed for the La Crosse workforce market, not imported big-city price points.

Why a vacant Kmart is the ideal place for it

Not all housing sites are equal. Redeveloping vacant commercial land — what planners call infill — carries advantages that raw farmland (which La Crosse does not possess) on the edge of town never can:

• The infrastructure already exists. Streets, water, sewer, transit — bought and paid for decades ago. New edge-of-town subdivisions require all of it new, at public expense, forever after maintained.
• No new land is consumed. Every home built on a parking lot is a home not built on farmland or green space.
• It heals a "dead zone". Vacant big-box sites drag down surrounding property values and generate minimal amounts in taxes. Today the Copper Rocks site pays about $80,000 a year; when completed it's projected to pay about $870,000.
• People live near community and neighborhood amenities. Infill residents drive shorter distances, support nearby businesses, and use transit that already runs past the front door.

The state agrees, incidentally: Wisconsin has created grant and loan programs specifically to help convert vacant commercial sites into housing — recognition at the highest level that sites like this one are exactly where new homes should go. (More on that in Post 5, on financing.)

The bottom line

A community's housing supply is infrastructure, the same as its roads and water mains. It determines who can live here, which employers can grow here, and whether the next generation can stay. 247 homes on a site that's been empty for years is one of the rare wins with no real trade-off: need met, land recycled, tax base grown.

Next up: Post 5 — Where Does $60 Million Come From? How Big Projects Get Paid For.

Three Sixty Real Estate Solutions is the developer of Copper Rocks.

The post Why Housing — and Why Here? La Crosse’s Housing Need in Numbers appeared first on Three Sixty Insights.

The curriculum can be integrated into existing classes or offered as a separate class.

John Norlin, a Seattle educator and co-creator of Character Strong, the curriculum on which Character Lives is based, will lead the training.

The training will introduce a model to become the bedrock for educators in western Wisconsin, along with techniques to improve student attitudes and school climates.

Advocates of a character-building curriculum for Coulee Region high schools made superintendents an offer they couldn’t refuse — so they didn’…

Coulee Region Whole Child founders include Festival Foods board chairman Dave Skogen and his wife, Barb; Misty Lown, owner of Misty’s Dance Unlimited in Onalaska; Marvin Wanders, CEO of Three Sixty Real Estate Solutions; and Patrick Clements, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel.

Studies have demonstrated that programs such as Character Lives boost academic performance; lower stress and help prevent mental illness; prevent negative behaviors such as drug use, violence and bullying; and equip students with soft skills, including communication needed for workplace success and self-management.

The post 170 La Crosse area teachers to be trained in Character Strong curriculum appeared first on Three Sixty Insights.