City programs helped boost home construction in 2024

BELOIT — Home building in the city and town of Beloit picked up significantly in 2024, but it still has a ways to go before it meets demand.

Through November, home builders in the city and town had taken out permits on 78 new single-family homes, six manufactured homes and 10 duplexes. That’s a total of 104 new living units compared with 52 added in 2023.

“It’s encouraging, but we certainly need to ramp it up even more,” said Drew Pennington, economic development director for the city of Beloit.

In 2021, the city commissioned a housing study that determined that the Beloit-area needs to add about 250 new units a year to keep up with demand.

Beloit, like much of the United States, has seen home prices and rents soar because of a lack of new housing units. The median sale price of homes in Rock County has jumped from $185,000 at the end of 2020 to $271,000 at the end of October, according to the Realtors Association of South Central Wisconsin. The median rent in the city of Beloit has increased from $825 in 2020 to $985 by July 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The city of Beloit created a variety of incentive programs in 2024 to ramp up building out of a $11.6 million pool of money from expiring Tax-Increment Financing districts. Some of those helped juice home construction in 2024, including selling 23 lots acquired through the tax foreclosure process on Christilla Drive and Trevino Court to Acadia Homes to build home aimed at middle-income families, and giving out $363,010 to downtown building owners to create apartment units on the upper floors of their buildings.

The biggest investments should break ground in 2025. In May, the Beloit City Council voted to give $3 million each to two Madison developers to build apartment complexes with a significant number of units set aside for “affordable housing.”

The Alternative Continuum of Care of Dakota Dunes plans to build a four-story building at 1865 Riverside Drive. That would have 55 units, 46 of which would be set aside for families that make less than 60% of the Rock County median income. The Alexander Co. plans to build seven multi-family buildings off Gateway Boulevard, east of Interstate 90. That project would add 94 units with 84 set aside for lower rents.

The city has two more arrows to fire from its quiver of TIF-funded programs. In January, Pennington said the city is likely to announce a $1 million new subdivision incentive. Similar to the $6 million in grants given to two developers, it will hopefully be distributed to several builders to launch new subdivisions in the city.

The city also has $1.5 million set aside to spur “infill” building. That is meant to help offset the costs for builders to put up new houses on empty lots. That program will be run by the city’s community development department.

“The goal has been to get more housing going in the city and then hopefully the private sector will take over and continue the momentum,” Pennington said.