Soon after Tony Pharo became executive director of OCEDC, he began hearing a nearly identical story from employers across Oneida County. Companies could not fill positions, expand operations or recruit essential workers because candidates could not find a practical place to live.
The shortage was widely understood, but developers wanted something more concrete than anecdotes. A formal study could establish the number, type, size and price of homes the market needed—and give builders and lenders evidence that projects could be absorbed.
OCEDC joined the North Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, Nicolet College and the Oneida County Health Department to collect that evidence. The public survey invited residents, workers, visitors and second-home owners to describe their experience with the local market.
What the numbers leave out
That broad participation mattered because Oneida County does not have one housing market. Rhinelander, Minocqua, Three Lakes and the county’s rural areas face different combinations of employment, tourism, infrastructure and land availability.
Pharo described the study as one piece of a larger puzzle. Local zoning, lot dimensions, permitting expense, infrastructure and public finance would still determine whether the documented demand could become actual construction.
The most important shift was from a general statement—housing is hard—to a development question: which homes, on which sites, at which monthly cost, and supported by what infrastructure?