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Lake Park City Council Talks Housing

March 11, 2025 Steve Schwaller

(Lake Park)– There was more discussion at Monday evening’s Lake Park City Council meeting over a lack of housing in the community. Mayor Matt Carstensen says a conversation he had recently with Harris-Lake Park Superintendent Gary Richardson is putting a renewed emphasis on the need for something to be done sooner rather than later. But he says there’s one challenge in particular to addressing the issue…

“It was best said by one of the members of the council tonight: what’s affordable housing any more? When you’re at 300 or $350,000 for a home on a slab, and you look at your budget and how much you have to spend on a house, how does that work out? How does that fit in your budget?”

Carstensen says they continue to look at what is currently a playground near the present elementary school as a potential site for a project…

“As explained in the past the school district and the city are going to trade some properties and that will allow us some open areas right in the center of town on the west side that we plan on trying to develop as quickly as possible and we’re exploring ways to make that work.”

The council Monday evening gave the nod to Carstensen to visit further with the school to get the needed legal documents put together that would allow the property swap to move forward…

“You know we have a verbal agreement and a handshake at this point that the property is going to exchange, we probably need to get something in writing committing both of us to that transaction and that before we commit any funding toward any type of mapping or planning, before we do any of that, we obviously need a commitment from both parties to make sure the property is going to exchange.”

Carstensen says his goal is to bring a formal agreement to the council at their meeting next month. Once that’s in place, the city’s housing task force would get involved in a study of the site and how it would be plotted.

Carstensen says he personally would prefer to see something such as apartments. He feels that would be the best option in the short term to help encourage young families with school age children to move to Lake Park.

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