From Joseph
DiZoglio, MD
OB/GYN at Monroe Clinic
To the Editor:
As a new doctor serving Monroe Clinic, I reviewed Green County’s 2024 Community Health Assessment (CHA) with great interest. Housing costs affect many families who come to my office. I have met patients struggling to afford to live on their own and needing to move back into more cramped quarters with other family members or struggling to find rental properties without excessive mold. My clinical observations match the CHA’s survey data. A town where more than a quarter of renters spend over 30% of their income on rent and twelve percent of renters spend over 50% of their income on rent is unsustainable for the community. High rents prevent many key service workers like new teachers, childcare workers, and therapists from establishing their careers in Green County. Such rent burden threatens to ultimately erode the social fabric that gives Monroe its culture and charm.
In my experience as a housing advocate at my previous job in Connecticut, there is no single solution that solves this problem. Multiple strategies must be promoted simultaneously. The town council must upzone more plots of land in Monroe to permit multi-family zoning and remove minimum parking requirements to open up more development opportunities for residential living space. The many surface level parking lots around the town square are also a lost opportunity for higher density apartments in the pleasant and walkable urban center. Incentives must be developed to build a municipal parking garage and allow more housing on valuable real estate.
Along with market-based solutions, Monroe residents can employ democratic power to improve housing security for all. Consider, for example, the rise in tenant unions across the country. Similar to labor unions where workers collectively bargain for contracts, tenant unions allow renters to collectively bargain for repairs, maintenance, and reduced rent increases when negotiating a collective lease with a landlord. When neighbors work together, they can get more of their rental money reinvested back into the housing stock. Town Council members who want to help promote this kind of democratic action should pass protections for tenants who organize into a union and require landlords to acknowledge and bargain with tenant unions in good faith without retaliatory evictions.
When I walk around Monroe during my call shifts, I see evidence of strong community bonds that have lasted generations. The opportunities discussed above represent ways for the town to secure an equally strong future by ensuring housing for all.
