The median home price in northeast Wisconsin has more than doubled over the last decade while fair market rents in the region’s two largest cities have also climbed sharply.
Local officials, housing advocates and economists say those cost increases — fueled by tight supply and high demand — have made it harder for young families to purchase their first home and for renters to make ends meet.
Northeast Wisconsin is home to Green Bay and the Fox Valley. It’s a mix of medium-sized cities and rural communities. Wisconsin Realtors Association data shows median home prices in the region climbed from $145,000 in July 2016 to $331,000 in July 2026.
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David Clark, an economist for the Wisconsin Realtors Association, said home prices across the state didn’t rise very fast for much of the 2010s, and neither did housing supply.
He said a surge of millennials entered the housing market when mortgage rates fell below 3% in 2020 while many baby boomers remained in their existing homes, contributing to a supply and demand imbalance and rising prices. While homebuilding has picked up in recent years, he said supply remains limited.
“We’ve got tight inventory statewide, and that same statewide picture is pretty similar to the circumstances in the northeast region,” Clark said.
Local officials and advocates say tight inventory in the owner-occupied housing market has led some residents interested in purchasing a home to continue renting, putting upward pressure on those prices as well.
“There are bottlenecks everywhere,” said Mindy Howell, housing services lead case manager for The Salvation Army-Fox Cities. “Housing is more expensive, so more people are renting.”
She said that’s meant people with moderate incomes are competing with lower-income residents for available rental units, saying it’s “very hard to find affordable housing.”
Beyond supply and demand, property managers say rising costs from insurance, property taxes and repairs all factor into rent prices.
“We’ve tracked five years of financial data across more than 5,000 rental units: Operating costs rose 34.2% from 2019 to 2023,” said Rick Van Der Leest, president of the Apartment Association of Northeast Wisconsin and Fox Valley Apartment Association.
Fair market rents in Green Bay and Appleton, the region’s two largest cities, also rose over the same period, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Appleton increased from $718 in 2016 to $810 in 2020 and $1,236 in 2026, federal data shows. Those rents in Green Bay increased from $756 in 2016 to $822 in 2020 and $1,164 in 2026.
Amber Edwards is a community organizer for JOSHUA, a faith-based nonprofit in Green Bay that works on housing and other social issues. She said rising costs and tight supply have been hard on residents of all backgrounds.
“There are people that I know that have really good jobs, stable careers that are struggling to find housing in their 40s because it is so tight and difficult to obtain, and difficult to maintain,” she said.
Green Bay and Appleton each need to build thousands of housing units, a mix of single-family and rentals, in the coming years to keep pace with projected housing demand, according to recent housing reports.
A 2025 housing market study from the city found Green Bay needed to build 2,100 rental units and 2,159 owner-occupied units by 2040 under a conservative growth scenario and 4,575 rental units and 5,072 owner-occupied units under a high-growth scenario.
“We need everything, from low income to high income, small apartments to large,” said Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich. “That’s been our focus is just to do whatever we possibly can to partner with high-quality developers to make this happen for the residents here.”
Genrich said the number of units per year built within the city has increased from an average of 144 units per year from 2015 to 2019 to an average of 368 units from 2023 to 2025.
He said private developments, in which the city played no role, did contribute to that increase. But he also said the city has tried to use a variety of tools from crafting more flexible zoning codes to using tax increment financing to encourage development.
Meanwhile, the city of Appleton needed to build 3,981 single-family, 442 two-family and 158 multi-family units between 2019 and 2040 to accommodate population growth projections, according to a 2024 housing affordability report from the city.
Appleton Mayor Jake Woodford said the city was currently working its way through zoning code revisions aimed at promoting duplex development and other zoning designations. He said the city has also worked to “streamline” the development process itself, but he said there isn’t a silver bullet that will solve the issue.
“I think the underlying issue of the cost of building housing is a huge factor,” he said. “Land availability to some extent, but cost of construction is a big challenge.”
Due to high construction costs, he said, a newly built home that may be considered a “starter home” based on its size and number of bedrooms is likely to cost $400,000 or more, which is “unattainable” for many first-time buyers.
“Housing is becoming less affordable, and that presents a real challenge for our communities,” he said. “Because here in the city of Appleton, if people cannot afford to live in this community, how do we expect to have a thriving local economy?”
To address the issue, local leaders and housing advocates said they would like to see state leaders invest in expanding low-interest loan programs for affordable housing developers and first-time homebuyers and create more tools to help housing developments make financial sense for builders.
This story was produced as part of the NEW (Northeast Wisconsin) News Lab, a consortium of five news outlets.
