The Avenue Breaks Ground: 39 Affordable Homes Underway in Sturgeon Bay

Officials broke ground on the first phase of The Avenue, bringing 39 affordable apartments to 14th Avenue in Sturgeon Bay after three years of planning.

After three years of planning alongside the City of Sturgeon Bay, WHEDA, and a long list of local partners, shovels finally went into the ground on The Avenue. The first phase of the community will deliver 39 affordable apartments on 14th Avenue, between Georgia Street and Iowa Drive, just steps from the NWTC Sturgeon Bay campus.

Groundbreakings are short ceremonies, but they represent years of quiet work: assembling the site, structuring the financing, and building the trust needed to move a project of this size forward in a small city. For Spoerl Commercial, that patient process is the work.

What Is Being Built

At full build-out, The Avenue will include 59 apartments across three three-story buildings. Phase one accounts for 39 of those homes, with a second phase adding roughly 20 more.

The total cost of the project is approximately 12 million dollars, funded through a mix of local, state, and federal sources, including nearly 2 million dollars in federal affordable housing funding.

Projects like this strengthen neighborhoods, support local employers and help communities remain places where people of all ages and income levels can work and succeed.

That was Lydia Van Thiel of WHEDA, speaking at the ceremony. It is a fair summary of why the financing exists in the first place.

Who The Avenue Serves

Phase one is designed for individuals and families earning between 30 and 60 percent of Door County's median income, with eight units reserved for residents with special needs. Rents will start as low as 479 dollars per month.

Those income limits are not incidental. They are written into the financing, which means the apartments are reserved for people who live and work in the community.

The financing is specifically tied to these income levels, so it's not like you can bring people from outside of Sturgeon Bay and live in these projects as vacation homes.

Brian Spoerl, Founder and Managing Partner of Spoerl Commercial, made that point plainly at the groundbreaking. In a county shaped by seasonal demand, the distinction matters.

Why Door County Needs It

Door County has wrestled with housing costs for years. Tourism drives values upward, and the workers who keep restaurants, clinics, schools, and shops running are the ones squeezed hardest.

Sturgeon Bay Mayor Dave Ward noted that the city already has roughly 500 affordable units and about 120 more in the pipeline, with The Avenue among them. The city is currently completing a housing study that will put a firmer number on the remaining gap.

What happens is that the price of housing gets driven up by all the outside forces, and we need to provide for the workers in the county.

The Work Ahead

Construction on phase one is now underway. As with The Hampton in Whitefish Bay and The Oak Leaf in Shorewood, the standard is the same: durable buildings, real amenities, and homes that feel like homes rather than compromises.

Affordable housing gets built when public and private partners hold a shared goal long enough to see it through. Sturgeon Bay did that, and 39 households will have a place to live because of it.

Source: FOX 11 News (WLUK)