By Madison Tenant Power

This spring, Core Spaces (a Chicago-based developer with two “luxury” student housing developments in Madison and controversial proposals for two more) made national news for mass evicting thousands of tenants in Santa Barbara. These “renovictions” happened with little notice, leaving residents scrambling to find housing in their communities. In response, tenants in California founded the nationwide Core Spaces Tenant Association to fight back against the threat of mass displacement. Even as these tenants have worked to secure new legal protections against renovictions, Core Spaces has attempted to mislead tenants about the ordinances that apply to their case.  

Prior to these mass evictions, the affordable housing crisis in Santa Barbara already meant that some students sleep in their cars. Core Spaces has created and exacerbated a significant eviction crisis in Santa Barbara, Pasadena, and other college towns throughout the country.

Core Spaces already has two developments in Madison, The Hub and Oliv (under construction), both of which have been extremely unpopular with both students and community members at every stage of development. Core Spaces knocked down the historic bookstore A Room of One’s Own and Community Pharmacy to build Oliv, and The Hub continues to be one of the most expensive student housing developments in the city. In June, following a community-wide debate focused on a Core Spaces project’s lack of affordable units in the proposed project, the Madison City Council initially rejected the rezoning request for one of two proposed new developments in downtown Madison, and then reversed their decision, greenlighting the controversial, expensive project.

Students in Core Spaces’s existing property in Madison, the Hub, deal with broken appliances, unresponsive maintenance, and 20% rent increases with little notice. At the Hub, tenants pay thousands of dollars per month to sleep three people in a room. (Core Spaces’ Oliv property promises to add “1100 beds” to Madison’s existing housing stock.) 

Madison does not need more bloated megadorms, which will create a short-term uptick in housing supply without addressing long-term issues with housing affordability and access. Lack of municipal accountability creates dangerous conditions for residents because of the city’s willingness to yield contracts to unpopular developers. 

In Madison, UW students are already facing a housing crisis. The eviction crisis in Santa Barbara and other college towns where Core Spaces has built new developments or gutted out existing properties to make “luxury” apartments anticipates what is to come in Madison if Core Spaces and other developers are allowed to continue their development unchecked: long-term housing insecurity and displacement for both UW students and non-university Madison area residents.

Core Spaces seems to be a particularly harmful developer and landlord; however the problem goes beyond a single developer. The City of Madison needs to emphasize creating affordable housing solutions near campus for the safety of low-income students. Across the city, 25% of Madison households who rent are severely cost burdened by rent (meaning they spend more than half of household income on housing), a trend that will only worsen without real oversight or interventions. With the passing of Governor Evers’s 2023 Wisconsin Act 16 and 2023 Wisconsin Act 18, developers can apply for loans that will cover the cost of improving the living conditions of existing workforce rental housing and the cost of converting vacant commercial buildings into affordable housing for workers. The construction of prohibitively expensive apartment units that push rental prices higher across the city does not create viable housing solutions, but merely compounds the existing housing accessibility crisis.

As members of Madison Tenant Power and Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America, we stand in solidarity with the Core Spaces Tenant Association and ask:

• That Core Spaces executives rescind the eviction notices for thousands of tenants in the CBC and the Sweeps apartment complexes in Santa Barbara and work to cooperate with tenants to find an arrangement that keeps people housed.
• That the City of Madison convene an advisory board of current residents of The Hub to help shape the terms of any development agreement between the city and Core Spaces.
• That the City of Madison enforce building code violations at The Hub.
• That the City of Madison only approve new developments in Madison that include affordable units (“affordable” meaning — rent regulated, priced with median income in Dane County) and collective bargaining for all rental contracts. 
• That the City of Madison consider mixed-use development as one strategy for protecting against runaway rent hikes: student residential buildings with long-term residents to protect against developers taking advantage of a young, transient population to artificially inflate rental prices across the city.