Ty Ash is walking up North First Street in the Brewer’s Hill neighborhood just north of downtown Milwaukee. The street is lined with trees and the birds are chirping. It's late October.
He stops on the sidewalk in front of the first house he ever bought.
A few years after he graduated from college, he and a friend went in on this duplex together. He was a young adult coming up in an era of skyrocketing housing prices and limited housing options. That has made it hard for many in Milwaukee to buy a home, even if they have steady jobs.
“So it was me, my buddy, and both of our girlfriends in the three bed, two bath," he says of the upstairs unit. "So we had four people living [there]. And then we had two tenants renting out the lower unit.”
As he walks around the house and turns down the back alley, Ash sees the potential for more housing on his property. He and his friends have since moved out, but he still owns the duplex.
“What if I wanted to create a one-bedroom studio setup above my garage in the backyard?" Ash asks. "Maybe it’s a couple or it’s a single person, could live back there and I would be super excited about getting $800 a month potentially for a one bedroom garage unit.”
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Ash is talking about building an ADU, or accessory dwelling unit. It’s one way to add another living unit to a property.
You can build a level on top of a garage, or construct a cottage in a backyard. The living spaces are sometimes called mother-in-law suites or granny flats.
You'll find these in many of Milwaukee's older neighborhoods. But in much of the country, it's illegal to build them. Milwaukee banned detached ADUs in 2002.
That was done by zoning — an invisible force that shapes maps of almost every major city in the United States.
Zoning codes define what kinds of homes, businesses or other structures can be built where. It also determines the density of those areas.
Urban planning scholars say zoning was first created to force lower income families — often people of color — into certain neighborhoods by banning apartments or duplexes in neighborhoods with single-family homes.
M. Nolan Gray, an author and former city planner in New York City, says that “zoning is not a good institution gone bad.”
He writes in his book Arbitrary Lines that, “Zoning is a mechanism of exclusion designed to inflate property values, slow the pace of new development, segregate cities by race and class and enshrine the detached single family house as the exclusive urban ideal.”
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Now, Milwaukee is taking a look at its zoning code in the name of housing affordability.
In July, the Common Council adopted a plan called "The Housing Element." It aims to increase the number of dense housing options in the city, and it allows ADUs to be built in all areas zoned for single-family homes.
Sam Leichtling is the deputy commissioner of Milwaukee’s Department of City Development. He says that the Housing Element is the answer to one, big question about our city's future.
“As we look out into the future, with the goal in mind of wanting to make sure that every Milwaukeean has a safe and affordable house and home, how do we make sure that we do that?" he says. "How do we have policies in place that will do that? How do we have strategies, and what do those housing options look like?”
But the Housing Element plan has lost other, more radical parts as it moved through the approval process.
One proposal would have allowed duplexes and triplexes on lots zoned for single-family homes. That idea was left out of the final plan.
Predominantly Black communities on Milwaukee’s northwest side were concerned that developers would push families out in order to build new, unaffordable units.
Allowing duplexes and triplexes worked, however, for Minneapolis. Five years ago, it abolished all single-family-only zoning and allowed ADUs.
Meg McMahan, the director of planning for the city, says initially, people were really freaked out by the plan.
They thought they’d lose neighborhood character or out-of-state investors would bulldoze their homes to build luxury condos.
McMahan says that didn’t happen.
“When you up-zone an entire city, what you're actually doing is flooding the market with available land," she says. "So you’ve now outpaced demand with your zoning. And what that actually does is it has a downward pressure on market rents. There’s less competition for the land. ”
McMahan says the idea is that more developable land results in more housing — crucial during an affordability crisis.
In the five years after adoption, Minneapolis home prices dropped by between 16% and 34%. Rents dropped by anywhere from 17.5% to 34%. That's according to an independent study published by researchers in Vermont last summer.
“We've seen more affordable housing going into neighborhoods where it previously would not have been allowed that were exclusionary in the way that they were set up," McMahan says.
She adds that other cities have tried to make their zoning codes more flexible to encourage new housing.
In 2024, Tulsa, Oklahoma made changes to its zoning code to encourage the conversion of offices into apartments, allow more apartment construction in commercial areas, and, like Milwaukee, to encourage ADUs.
The city's 2023 Housing Assessment, identified that Tulsa needed 12,900 new housing units in the 10 years following the study. But at the time, 65% of all the city's land only allowed for construction of single-family homes.
McMahan points out that Tulsa didn't abolish single-family zoning like Minneapolis did.
"They went out and proactively surveyed neighborhoods to figure out where it would be more palatable," she says. "And then they selectively eased the restrictions in places where there was going to be less political pushback, in more urbanized neighborhoods where there was maybe already a mix of housing types."
She says that Tulsa is another example of a city trying several different methods to encourage thoughtful development.
Newly allowed in Milwaukee, ADUs can still be expensive to build
Milwaukee isn’t going as far as Tulsa or Minneapolis did in their zoning changes. And creating affordable housing isn’t as easy as plopping down extra units.
Even though Milwaukee now allows ADUs, building one is expensive.
“Just building a new garage is probably $25,000 to $30,000," explains Ash, the owner of the duplex in Brewer's Hill. "It already has electrical, but you’d probably have to upgrade service. You’re probably looking at a $50,000 to $100,000 process, depending on how nice you go.”
ADUs may work on a small scale in Milwaukee to add housing units.
Still, experts say it’s going to take more than that to break down rigid building standards and make Milwaukee affordable.
"We would do ourselves a disservice if we suggested that zoning alone will undo some of that historical legacy," says Sam Leichtling from Milwaukee’s Department of City Development. "That’s why I think the Housing Element recommends a variety of strategies — not just zoning strategies — to help all Milwaukeeans meet their housing needs."
Now that Milwaukee’s housing plan has been adopted, the city is working to put it into practice.
If Minneapolis is any comparison, it may take several years to see it start to work.
Katherine Kokal is a reporter at 89.7 WUWM - Milwaukee's NPR. You can reach her at kokal@uwm.edu
Support for Seeking Solutions: Keys to Homeownership is provided by Educators Credit Union, Greater Milwaukee Association of Realtors and Geis Garage Doors.
