Combating Madison’s housing crisis has been a top priority of city leaders for many years. But progress in improving the availability and affordability of units hasn’t always been obvious.
An online tool that the city launched this month aims to put that information in the hands of residents, researchers, policymakers and others.
The city’s new Housing Tracker uses charts, maps and graphs to display the city’s progress toward its new goal of adding 15,000 new housing units, including 3,750 affordable units, by 2030.
The first page of the new City of Madison Housing Tracker shows the rate and location of new housing development since Jan. 1, 2025.
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway announced the development target — shaped by the findings of the 2024 Dane County Regional Housing Strategy Report — earlier this month.
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“The need for all types of housing is one of the biggest challenges our city faces,” Rhodes-Conway said in a statement. “Income should not be a barrier to finding a home in Madison, but right now it is for too many people. We must build on the success we’ve had in recent years, while setting an even more ambitious goal for creating new homes.”
City staff were already collecting the data included in the tracker, but it wasn’t organized in a way that could be communicated easily to the public, said Jaymes Langrehr, the spokesperson for Madison’s Department of Planning, Community and Economic Development.
So the city created a three-page data dashboard, which can be found at cityofmadison.com/housingtracker.
The city’s goal, Langrehr said, was to present a lot of information without it becoming overwhelming.
“You don’t need to have a planning degree, or anything like that, to understand this,” he said. “It’s pretty simple and straightforward.”
The tracker’s first page details the progress the city has made toward its 15,000-unit development target since Jan. 1 of this year. It also features Madison’s projected population growth — as estimated by the Planning Division — through 2050.
Madison’s new housing tracker shows where new development is taking place as the city seeks to make housing more accessible.
The second page focuses on the completion of affordable housing, defined as units aimed at renters making no more than 60% of the area median income and at homeowners making no more than 80% of the area median income. (For a single person, 60% of the area median income is $52,920; for a family of four, it is $75,540.)
And the third page compares the number and location of housing units that have been built in recent years with those that have been demolished.
Interactive maps on all three pages let users scroll around and mouse over individual projects for more information. Slider bars on the second and third pages allow for comparison across specific years. Clicking on the maps and charts also reveals more granular data, with the bar graph on the third page able to display quarterly and monthly data for every year since 2015.
The data will be updated monthly, Langrehr said. The city expects to see more housing units completed in the spring and summer than in the fall and winter.
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