Neighborhood expands near high school

The neighborhood near Superior High School could be expanding.

The Superior City Council on Tuesday set a public hearing to consider a zoning change that would allow the development of 32 new building sites south of North 28th Street near Catlin Avenue. The council will consider changing the zoning to allow for development of single-family and duplex homes.

“This project is about 35 years in the making, literally,” Port and Planning Director Jason Serck told the Plan Commission last month.

The sites to be developed are immediately south of the duplexes that line North 28th Street from Catlin westward toward Weeks Avenue.

“It’s a fairly significant area he’s looking to rezone,” Serck said of Ron Gustafson of Ideal Homes in Superior, who had a role in constructing most of the duplexes in the area.

“We would have liked to get started three months ago so we could have worked through the winter,” Gustafson said. With plans complete, money sitting in the bank and approvals from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Army Corp. of Engineers, Gustafson said he plans to get started this spring.

Gustafson said he plans to build about six additional duplexes in addition to high-end single-family homes in the neighborhood, which would add about $10 million in valuation to the city’s tax roll.

“There just aren’t any places around here to build homes,” said Gustafson, who estimates he’s built about 500 homes in the area during his 42 years as a homebuilder.

Serck said there is a need for this type of housing in Superior.

“We have the notoriety of having one of the oldest housing stock in Wisconsin,” said Mayor Bruce Hagen. Coupled with Superior’s wetlands, which prohibit development, Hagen said that means a number of people who work in Superior live in neighboring communities across the bridge.

Hagen said this kind of housing is needed to accommodate anticipated growth with the expectation of hundreds of new jobs in the city.

“I welcome the investment that Mr. Gustafson and his company are undertaking,” Hagen said. “He is no stranger to this community, investing many millions of dollars here.”

The public hearing is set for 6:30 p.m. April 3 in Room 201 of the Government Center.

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