During the 2024-25 academic year, Madison Commons worked with a team of undergraduate and graduate students at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication to develop a repository of information on housing insecurity in Madison.
Madison’s housing, both for renting and buying, is considered fairly expensive compared to other U.S. cities. Average renting costs are about $1,469 a month for 712 square feet, putting the city at position 31 out of 100 most expensive places to rent in the United States, according to a Zumper National Rent Report. This is compared to $1,623/month as the national average for renting apartments the same size.
Buying a house is out of a lot of people’s reach in Madison, with the median home price hovering around $407,621 and increasing dramatically – about 5.1 percent in 2024 – each year, according to Zillow statistics. As one example, the average house cost about $250,000 in 2017.
For people living paycheck to paycheck, these numbers become stark realities each month as they are forced to make choices: broccoli or meat? Eating three meals a day or two? Pay the water bill or the rent? We wanted to dive deep into these dilemmas and find the programs and opportunities to ameliorate these choices.
How might we journalists advance the conversations and point toward solutions for housing insecurity in Madison? We saw our role as connecting people with resources and creating a network of experts and policymakers and organizations at the forefront of this issue.
The SJMC seniors Maeghan Chase, who served as our managing editorial intern, and Noah Maze, who served as our legal studies intern, led this effort. They came up with the topic and worked throughout the year, not only on developing resource lists and helping to find funding, but also helping to form a reporting team for the Spring 2025 semester and hosting two events.
When I sent out the application form seeking students interested in doing a one-credit course based on collaborative storytelling with community partners in the realm of housing insecurity, I had hoped for five interested students. Instead, we got 20 applications, indicating a real demand for this kind of community-based reporting on this urgent topic. We invited six in addition to Maeghan and Noah: Lily Spanbauer, Maneeya Leung, Alyssa Lutker, Sreejita Patra, Kiesen Williams and Maggie Cleary
Whatever their motivations, the students went above and beyond earning just one course credit, producing a rich trove of written and multimedia stories and resource lists. We collaborated with five organizations that are all working toward possible solutions to the vexing issue of housing insecurity: the UW Odyssey Project, OWN IT: Building Black Wealth, FLYY, the disbanded podcast with WORT host Matvei Mozhaev and the City of Madison’s Community Development Authority Housing Operations Division.
I would like to take a minute to explain what we mean by storytelling collaborations here. This is a more involved, less “objective” kind of journalism that embeds students into organizations to work on communication projects from within these change agencies. In this new approach, journalists operate from within the community, building trust from the ground-up, prioritizing lived experiences as evidence and focusing on programs and movements that work to solve our big community problems.
We co-hosted two community-wide events with our major partner on this topic, the UW Odyssey Project. (Special shoutout to Odyssey’s Success Coach Brian Benford, who educated my students on the issue, facilitated the work and co-hosted the events with us!!). The first event, Let’s Explore the Family Scholar House for Madison, on April 3 brought together about 30 people, either Odyssey students in need of more stable housing or policymakers and housing organization representatives eager to find more solutions. The Family Scholar House is a model program in Kentucky and a few other places that provides heavily subsidized housing to nontraditional adults seeking secondary degrees. Part of our work included sending two of our reporters to Kentucky with Benford and other Odyssey folks to film a documentary there on the program.
On April 21, we had about 20 people gather for Know Your Rights, a free clinic with two UW–Madison Law School lawyers to educate us on what property owners can and cannot do and what rights renters have for getting their spaces fixed or in the event of wrongful eviction. You can find all of this content on our main Housing Solutions project page.
Although we received permission from our partners to publish some of our content — including profiles of people who had gone through their program, some of whom reviewed versions of the stories before publication for accuracy — we retained an independent editorial process at Madison Commons that included reporters performing fact checking and having a professional editor review the pieces for accuracy, quality and bias. We thank Managing Editor Lousia Kamps and Madison Commons Editor (and SJMC faculty member) Stacy Forster for participating in this important work and helping guide our student reporters.
Now about the money: All the students involved with this project received one academic credit for their work; a few who did extra work were given small scholarships. We were able to pay some of the partners (who were not UW–Madison employees) for the labor of educating us on the issues. We paid for the two events as well. This money came from the Madison Commons budget, built from a hodgepodge of funds we scramble for each year. Only about a third of the budget is paid for by the School, and we do fundraising and write grant applications to cover the rest. You can find out more specifics about our funding here. The project we implemented this spring was supported by the Morgridge Center for Public Service as part of a course development pilot project.
In this collection you will find a list of resources for people struggling with housing costs or tenant rights, wrongful eviction and other concerns, stories and photos of our two April 2025 events, profiles of people working on the frontlines in various organizations, vignettes of people struggling with housing and finding solutions, podcasts of unhoused people and other content.
This pilot project was not perfect by any means; we had a lot of hiccups and tricky navigating of journalistic conventions. At what point do we develop conflicts of interests? At what point do we cross “the line” and become activists? But we tried something new, something we hope can point us toward a means to stay relevant and rebuild trust to tell our communities’ stories. It is essential for us to be transparent about all of our relationships within each piece of content.
We invite you to learn about the problem of affordable housing in Madison along with some solutions that local programs and entities are working hard to achieve. We will be continuing this work throughout the 2025-26 academic year. Please let us know what you think, or, if you have a story to tell about housing affordability in Madison, please contact me at srobinson4@wisc.edu.
Signed,
Sue Robinson, Publisher, Madison Commons
