Green Bay alders pump brakes on veterans small homes village
GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) – A lengthy Green Bay city council meeting on Tuesday night ended without a definitive answer about what would become of a controversial veterans housing project on the city’s east side.
Alders chose to refer the project back to city staff to work out some legal issues and address concerns from community members. Alderman Brian Johnson emphasized the council’s support for veterans and their desire to try to work with Veterans 1st of Northeast Wisconsin (the organization doing the project) to try to make this happen somewhere in the city. He said a project site change might be in order, but it’s up to staff to determine the best course of action.
The project would build 21 tiny homes for veterans in need of housing on St. Anthony Drive. Proponents of the project said this will be life-changing for veterans in need and that it’s the least that they can do to support the veterans who gave so much to this country.
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Project officials said they’d call the new tiny homes community ‘Veteran’s 1st Cottage Court Village.’ It will also include a community center with mental health, job placement, and other services and will be built in three phases.
There are people who aren’t fans of the project. Many from the Schmitt Park Neighborhood Association (the neighborhood where the project site is located) have been very vocally opposed to the project throughout its approval process.
They said they have concerns about the project site’s proximity to a burial ground, worry about the safety of having a village like this, and also question the professional credentials of those leading the project.
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There’s another veterans housing building, a juvenile detention center, and the county’s coroner office in or near their neighborhood so some people feel like city and county officials just dump all their projects in their neighborhood.
There was also some discrepancy with how the land used as the project site got designated (as land exclusively used for veterans to live or preferred as veterans living). Alders said part of the reason they wanted to send the project back to city staff was so that attorneys representing the city and the county could iron out some of those discrepancies.
Also at the meeting on Tuesday night, alders unanimously approved a project that will bring an eight-story, 268-unit apartment building to the heart of downtown.
The project site for the new apartment building is on Cherry Street on the current public parking lot space. Several people spoke out against the project saying it would eliminate parking downtown which would hurt their business. Others expressed concerns about having construction on this project going on when the NFL draft is in town.
Alders said the project is a great opportunity to address the need for housing in the community.
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