Housing for Early Childhood Professionals

06/07/2023

Housing for Early Childhood Professionals

The greatest happiness is to transform one’s feelings into actions.
Madame de Staël, 1766-1817, Political Theorist

The city of Milwaukee is taking a unique approach to compensating and empowering early childhood professionals through a new partnership between Community Development Alliance and (LISC) which “aims to build 50 affordable, owner-occupied homes for early-childhood educators that will help the future owners build wealth, while chipping away at the minority homeownership gap, improving neighborhoods and encouraging more workers to pursue a career in child care.”

With significant funding coming from American Rescue Plan Act, these 1,000-square-foot homes, each with 3 bedrooms, a bath and a full basement, will be built on vacant lots near five early childhood centers. Each house will be sold for roughly half the cost of construction, resulting in a 30-year mortgage with a monthly payment just under $740, with the down payment covered by the program.

According to Urban Milwaukee, “In the Milwaukee metro area, white residents are twice as likely to own their home as Black residents and 1.4 times more likely than Latino residents. Due to lower incomes and/or living in older properties that can require more spending, more than 55% of renters and 31% of homeowners spend more than 30% of their household income on housing, a level the federal government and other agencies have labeled as ‘cost burdened.’ The early-childhood-educator program is one of several the CDA has underway to attempt to close that gap.”

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