Green Bay residents air affordable housing, homelessness concerns at public hearing
Will Peters, the city's neighborhood development specialist, explained how the federal grants Green Bay will receive in 2025 from the Department of Housing and Urban Development are intended to be used.
Over $938,000 in Community Development Block Grant money will go toward developing low-to-moderate income neighborhoods, under which nearly three-quarters of Green Bay's neighborhoods are classified, according to a map Peters presented.
He said nearly $468,000 from the HOME investment program "may not seem like a lot of money because it isn't in the grand scheme of things, but these dollars have helped hundreds and thousands of households and families obtain housing or keep their housing over the 30-some years that the city has received this grant from HUD."
City staff are drafting an action plan for 2025 and one for 2025-2029, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development asks from local governments that get federal housing grants.
A Zoom raid prevented those watching the hearing online from giving their views. On the screen projected at the front of the room, a person using the screen name "Cole N." for the second time played pornography overlaid with hate speech and a recording of someone repeatedly using a racial slur, forcing city staff to shut down the video conferencing option for the remainder of the hourlong public input session.
Here's what residents at the meeting had to say.
Kristie Kayser was glad she lived in a multi-generational home in Green Bay where the extended family helps raise her three young kids, but she was looking for her own place, she said. However, apartments bigger than a two-bedroom were unaffordable for her without a second job or overtime. Kayser had lived in California and saw the city's rents creeping up.
"I worked three jobs in California, and I just don't think that's where we should go toward as Green Bay," she said.
She wanted some of the federal funds to be geared toward affordable housing for families.
"Maybe not as fancy, but just like the bare necessities, as like 'housing as a human right.' We don't need like, an AI-assistant or anything, just like the bare bones: a safe, clean place to live," Kayser said.
Kayser's comments echoed what resident David Badillo had said before her ― that a city priority for these limited federal dollars should be put toward reopening homeless shelters for families ― and the concerns of food affordability that resident Crystal Brown shared later.
A family of four making $85,600 was still the upper threshold of what the federal government considered a low-to-moderate income household in Green Bay, meaning teachers, nurses, and a wide swath of Green Bay's population could benefit from the allocated federal grant dollars, according to Peters.
McKenna York, a landlord relationship facilitator at Newcap, helps the homeless to get a home. There was a woman who couldn't because of an eviction on her record, York said, part of a larger trend she saw of those with "harder backgrounds" being rejected from all of the affordable housing being built.
She suggested money be allocated toward the parts of getting a home that go beyond just getting a physical roof over one's head: facilitating the screening process, mental health resources, and programs to help people keep the home they worked for.
It reflected what several others said about the need for a holistic focus on housing for the homeless, like her colleague Stephanie Watson who said that people needed a home before addressing mental health issues or employment. She wanted to see money toward those services for the homeless, especially.
Watson's husband, Jeffrey Watson, said he didn't "want people to be lost" in the conversation that's been mostly centered around constructing physical buildings. There were resources that the homeless couldn't even access due to documentation lost when homeless shelters closed, he said. Perhaps some money could be allocated toward a city email address through which the homeless could reliably receive paperwork, he said.
Gale Nohr, who spoke during the city's first public input meeting in November, returned for the second. She represented the nonprofit Veterans 1st, which is working to build 21 tiny homes for veterans in the Schmitt Park neighborhood and most recently completed a land survey that has not assuaged neighbors' concerns about the development.
More: Veterans 1st of NEW completes GPR survey, but nearby residents say more work needs to be done
"The only problem we're having right now is communication with the city, and that's holding us up," she said. "I don't know how to combat that. Our engineers are trying to contact people to get this moving. If it takes any much longer, we're gonna have to wait another year. And we have over 30 veterans on our waitlist that are looking for help right now."
Nohr called for some of the money to go to smaller nonprofits, saying that it was all well and good that Habitat for Humanity and NeighborWorks Green Bay gets some of these funds, but that smaller organizations like hers provide more localized services that larger ones can't.
Resident Frank Torres said vocal opposition appears to shows up when a new development in a neighborhood is presented to the City Council, .
"I think we're fighting a messaging battle, so I believe we should use a portion of those funds for education to let them know that there's first responders living in those buildings. There's teachers living in those buildings. There's nurses living in those buildings," he said.
Jesse Lin is a reporter covering the community of Green Bay and its surroundings, as well as politics in northeastern Wisconsin. Contact him at 920-834-4250 or jlin@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Affordable housing homelessness priorities in Green Bay public meeting
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