La Crosse County Housing Needs Assessment
Photo: Wikideas1, CC0 (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
Spencer served as Lead Analyst and Project Manager on this county-wide engagement for Stantec, layering a housing-and-transportation affordability index alongside the standard economic, demographic, market, and inventory analysis across every jurisdiction in the county.
The study identified household formation, not population growth, as the primary driver of housing demand, and traced a widening affordability gap between entry-level home prices and what most of the county's workforce earns. It translated those findings into concrete ten-year production targets: 4,900 total units, including 1,000 entry-level homes and 2,100 workforce apartment units.