‘Milwaukee’s second downtown’: 2K apartments planned for Wauwatosa

As a kid, 71-year-old Dennis McBride could walk from his house to shop or see the dentist in Wauwatosa’s downtown village.

“Mayfair wiped that out,” McBride said. When the Mayfair Mall opened in 1958, shoppers in the growing suburb headed to its department stores instead.

McBride is now Wauwatosa’s mayor. And he believes Mayfair is evolving back into what the 150-year-old village once was.

At the center of that is a project that would put a Scheels sporting goods store and an 850-unit apartment complex on the site of the mall’s shuttered Boston Store. It’s part of a building surge that could bring 2,000 new housing units to Wauwatosa in coming years.

Behind that surge is high demand. How best to meet it has split opinion in the city.

Prices in Wauwatosa rising with demand

As of the 2020 US Census, 48,387 people live in Wauwatosa. But more than 50,000 people commute to there daily to employers like the Medical College of Wisconsin, Froedtert Hospital, Briggs & Stratton and the Mayfair Mall.

“We have an enormous demand for housing because people like to live near where they work,” McBride said.

Data bears that out. Home sale prices in Wauwatosa have grown almost 50 percent since 2019, said Gard Pecor, Wisconsin senior analyst for real estate data firm CoStar. Rents rose 16 percent during that time, he said.

To McBride, that’s a sign his city needs new construction — a lot of it.

A 500-unit luxury apartment complex is planned across the street from the Boston Store redevelopment. On their websites, both developments are promising golf simulators, swimming pools and ground-floor retail.

When higher-income renters move into new buildings, McBride argues, demand for older buildings goes down. Less competition for older units could mean landlords can’t raise rents as much or even have to lower them.

For city alder, it could’ve all gone another way

Back in 2022, Wauwatosa’s strategic plan promised to “expand the availability of inclusionary housing for all.”

Alder Andrew Meindl joined its City Council that same year. He said that plan “embodied” why he moved to the city at all.

At first, Meindl said city leaders were receptive to his ideas, like founding a community land trust with the goal of increasing the availability of affordable housing.

But over time, he said, “those ideas stopped mattering.”

A committee he was on explored ways to create that trust and submitted a final report to City Council in June 2024. It said the Council can move towards creating a trust by naming a board of directors. That hasn’t happened yet.

Meindl disagrees with Wauwatosa’s approach to development.

The city plans to spend almost $60 million on subsidizing the Boston Store redevelopment at the Mayfair Mall. Its apartment buildings have no affordability requirements.

“There needs to be affordable housing components” in cases of city subsidy, Meindl argues.

The city does have an affordable housing fund, currently at around $500,000, according to McBride. He said BarrettLo — the firm behind the Boston Store redevelopment — has pledged a further $1 million to it upon the project’s completion.

He said the city is still deciding how to use the money in the fund.

Meindl also criticized the City Council for something he calls a “bailout.” Last month, it voted to expedite a $2.3 million subsidy to a Chicago developer. The subsidy was initially meant to come after the developer completes a planned project but is being paid early to recoup the developer for a loan it has in default from an earlier Wauwatosa project.

In a report on that $2.3 million payment to the city’s Financial Affairs Committee, the city’s finance director recognized that people might wonder about “why the City should assist a private developer with their private loan,” but argued that the developer’s track record “executing high-quality projects” would assure that removing the incentive would have “no impact on future development occurring.”

Local governments face market forces

Collectively, planned projects — including one replacing St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in Wauwatosa’s downtown village — would bring almost 2,000 rental apartments to the city in the next several years, said Pecor, the real estate analyst.

Facing rising construction prices, Pecor said it’s more cost-effective for developers to build rental apartments than condos or houses for sale. That impacts supply, which impacts prices.

“Historically, the gap between renting and owning was never as wide as it is now,” he said. “But it is just so unaffordable, for so many people, to purchase homes now.”

As it gets harder to afford homeownership in Wauwatosa, “you’re going to have to provide price points at the rental level, too, that accommodate families,” he said.

He said that, at a point, increasing rental housing supply can reduce rents in a market.

“Communities that are building housing, and are allowing for that population growth, and accommodating that demand, are going to be winning out over the next decade,” he said.