New Housing Benefits Residents and Community in Madison's Hawthorne Area

Madison, Wisconsin, has been growing steadily. Between 2010 and 2021, Dane County, the city's home, added more than 38,000 jobs and welcomed nearly 42,000 new households yet permitted only 34,000 new housing units. This shortage of housing contributed to an increase in the median price of a home from $226,000 in 2010 to $369,000 in 2022, exceeding the overall growth rate of home values in Wisconsin, and average rents rose by 28 percent over the same period. In response, Dane County has set a goal of adding 35,300 new workforce housing units for households earning up to 60 percent of the area median income (AMI) by 2040. In 2025, the opening of Rise Madison in the city's Hawthorne neighborhood helped close some of this gap, adding 245 units of income-limited housing as one of the largest government-subsidized housing developments to open in the state's history.

Project Background

Rise Madison is built on the 6-acre site of a former bakery; "Rise" refers both to the goal of uplifting the community and to the rise that yeasted dough undergoes in breadmaking...

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Leo's notes: scale, mixed-income design, and integration with infrastructure and community assets all matter. Projects like this show that when public tools, zoning flexibility, and community alignment come together, housing can do more than fill units — it can actively strengthen neighborhoods.