The Alexander Lofts at the Mitchell Street Library in Milwaukee, WI.
Photo Credit: The Alexander Lofts
For decades, the American public library has been the ultimate “third space,” a sanctuary for a quiet read, a free internet connection, or a cooling center during a heatwave. However, as the nation’s housing shortage reaches a significant high, urban planners are eyeing the quiet corners of the neighborhood branch for a much larger purpose: building apartments.
This is how Lisa, a lifelong resident of Milwaukee, found herself and her daughter living in the Alexander Lofts at the Mitchell Street Library for over a decade at this point. When looking for a new apartment in the area, Lisa was initially worried that the library would cause an undo amount of traffic due to its central location accessible to many highways and downtown Milwaukee. Instead she found that the library’s location allowed for a new style of living.
“Everyday there’s some new event going on,” she said. “One day it’s a farmers market or a craft fair and I get to pop my head in and look. It’s like a college campus.”
Lisa and her daughter were the first residents of the apartment complex attached to the Mitchell Street Library development, which has grown to become the largest branch in the Milwaukee Public Library system.
Across the country, local governments and housing developers are using an innovative method to build affordable housing in high density and transit oriented neighborhoods by building them above public libraries.
The logic behind the deals is a study in economic pragmatism. The United States is currently short millions of homes, and the cost of the land to build them has become the single greatest barrier to entry for affordable developers. By building housing directly on top of libraries, cities are essentially unlocking public land that they already own. It is an elegant workaround to a math problem that hasn’t added up for years.
In the 2026 economy, the most valuable thing in the library might no longer be the books on the shelves, but the air rights above them.
State of the Housing Economy
The U.S. is currently facing a chronic housing deficit. Cities cannot keep up with the current demand for affordable housing and the housing supply is reflective of that.
The 2026 Rental Report published by Harvard University highlights a staggering reality, over 21 million renter households are burdened by the cost of their rent. Even more alarming, 12 million of those are “severely burdened,” funnelling more than half of their entire paycheck into the hands of landlords. This prevents the very thing needed to escape the cycle, the ability to save.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that, “In no state, metropolitan area, or county in the U.S. can a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage, or the prevailing state or local minimum wage afford a modest two-bedroom rental home at Fair Market Rent.”
The only solution, most economists agree, is to build more housing. However, most cities are in a bind, where they need more housing but are running out of land. Housing needs to be desirable to be effective and meet demand. Finding a way to build housing, especially affordable housing, in efficient and effective ways has been the real challenge.
Mixed-Use is the Solution
In New York, Boston, and Milwaukee the city governments are leveraging public land that the library sits on, to entice developers to hop onto these affordable housing projects. The developers get to move forward on mixed-use housing projects without the liability that comes with a commercial space, nor do they have to pay for the land.
Libraries are often located near schools or public transit in urban areas. Co-locating a library means renovating the existing branch and adding a facility with a separate use in the same building. The additional facility is typically something complementary to the library branch like a childcare center or in this case, affordable housing.
According to the Housing Solutions Lab at the NYU Furman Center, building mixed-use high density housing is one practical solution to make affordable housing as impactful as possible. By building near public transit, residents have access to resources like better quality supermarkets or well-funded schools.
In urban areas like New York, building near these locations is currently difficult due to the land not being available, cities cannot build on what does not exist. However by building above public land on already existing infrastructure like libraries, cities have now expanded their options on where to build.
“Adding housing there creates density and density is a real value of cities,” said Mark Willis, Senior Policy Fellow at the NYU Furman Center. “When it’s a walkable city, building affordable housing in a neighborhood that has all those amenities is an advantage, not just in finding the land but you are adding a community and adding people who can take advantage of that community.”
People want to live in places with access to resources and density, factors that are already considered when determining where best to place a library.
To convince developers to sign on to projects like this, it’s key to find a business to occupy the ground floor. In the case of Milwaukee, the developer was able to sign onto a project where the ground floor unit is already taken up by the public library. The city and the developer share costs associated with maintaining the building.
“Stable uses such as a library is extremely appealing both to the housing developer and to the city because you kind of have a use above which is very compatible with a library down below because people who live up there will use the library,” said Ted Matkom, the Wisconsin Market President at Gorman & Company development.
Matkom led Gorman & Company to develop multiple library housing complexes in Milwaukee, including the Alexander Lofts. When the building opened in 2014, it was the first of its kind in the Milwaukee area and paved the way for Gorman to develop many similar projects. Residents were able to have access to community event spaces, commercial kitchen equipment and all the technological resources of the library like the makerspace. At the time the access to highways
He cites this project as one of the best he’s ever worked on as the Mitchell Street Library has become the largest branch in Milwaukee with the highest number of uses in the Milwaukee Public Library system.
Matkom said that having to find a tenant for the ground floor unit is the most difficult part of producing a mixed-use development and that all he really wants to do is, “just focus on the fun part, building housing.”
Why Libraries?
Libraries hold a lot of importance in cities by making resources accessible to low-income residents. In places with high housing demand like New York City, Boston and Milwaukee new developments can often displace low-income residents from these highly resourced neighborhoods. In the case of The Eliza Apartments at the redeveloped Inwood Library, that project created 174 deeply affordable units for low-income households, including some reserved for formerly homeless individuals.
The resources that a library provides like free computer classes, kids’ storytime and craft workshops are meant to serve the community and intersect well with the group of people who need access to affordable housing. The libraries also need residents to use their resources to maintain the public funding they receive.
Co-location provides a new variety of land to build these affordable housing projects on but also provides public libraries with the opportunity to modernize. The Trump administration has cut federal grants to libraries in every state, funding that would be used to help library branches update current infrastructure. Eli Dworkin, a research fellow at the Center for an Urban Future says that the majority of New York Public Library branches constructed over the course of the last century cannot keep up with the demands of the city’s residents.
“We’ve identified over two dozen library sites where there are existing air rights or the ability to build taller buildings on an existing city owned site and where the library that exists today is just too small and too old to adequately serve the needs of its community,” said Dworkin.
Beyond the number crunching, there is a logistical advantage. For a senior citizen on a fixed income or a family without a car, living above a library means near-instant access to high-speed fiber internet, literacy programs and workforce training. It solves the access problem of social services by putting the services in the basement of the home.