Regina Vidaver wears many hats. She has a doctorate in molecular biology and works for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. She also serves on the Madison Common Council, representing District 5. In 2021, she was elected to the Common Council as an alder, and in 2025, the council elected her president. Although juggling responsibilities in city government and in chronic disease prevention keeps her busy, Vidaver remains deeply engaged in civic issues.
What do you think is the biggest challenge our community faces?
I think a year ago I would have said housing, and to a degree, I still think it’s housing. We are getting a lot better—our rental vacancy rate is now at a healthy level and rents are coming down as a result. In my district, we have a lot of older rental stock. And for years, never was there a sign out saying anything was available, and now there are signs in multiple places Still, with single family homes we still have a real issue. We have less than 1% turnover or something close to that—it’s very, very low. We are building some single-family homes, but it’s harder to build those — in general, developers areonly going to build single-family homes on a fairly large tract of land, and in our area, those developments typically occur on former farms, right? And once we lose that agricultural land, it’s lost forever. So we want to make sure that we prioritize development in the city center so that we’re not doing sprawl, and we’re not taking up farmland We have a fairly high homeless population, and that’s really difficult, and part of the issue is due to lack of affordable housing in the community. There are other reasons, but that’s a major driver. So, housing is still number one, but it’s starting to get better because we are improving the rental market.
Once we can deal with that priority, then I would say the other top priority is really traffic safety. Somebody hit a kid on their way to school this morning. What the heck is going on? Supposedly [reckless driving] is a post-COVID phenomenon. People don’t have any patience and want to get everywhere as fast as they can.
What do you wish people in our community understood better?
Complex problems take complex solutions. There are people who seem to think that it’s like, “Well, just fix this, just do this, just do this simple thing,” and if it were that simple, don’t you think we would have done it by now? So that can get a little frustrating. From a city perspective, our city staff are phenomenal, truly. I don’t feel like people understand what experts we have in-house. I’m not saying they’re infallible—they’re not. But they’re incredible, and they know what they’re doing. So, it’s very difficult for me when people criticize things and have no recognition that we actually have really competent staff that are giving us good recommendations.
What is one change you would make if you could that would make life better for people in our community?
I think what’s hard is that the city can’t say, “We want this thing here, and we want it to do this end purpose.” So, what I really want is for our entire city to be walkable and for people to be able to feel like they have community where they live. And that involves walkability, having services nearby to them that are useful to them, whether it’s a grocery store or library or whatever. For the most part, we just don’t have that level of control, so, sort of this pie in the sky would be the business community will seek out spaces to provide needed services and find out how to make it profitable.
What in our community gives you hope?
Madison is a very loving and kind community, and I think that’s come out in a lot of ways, whether we’re talking about the outpouring of support for the family of the young man who was just killed on Park Street, whether we’re talking about investments in our nonprofits. That is really going to be what we are going to need to rely on. Especially if this federal government continues its authoritarian bent. It’s going to be us and our communities that are going to hold us together and stand up against that.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
