MILWAUKEE — An affordable housing apartment building in Milwaukee reopened Thursday after being shut down for more than two years.

What You Need To Know

  • The Community Within the Corridor East building on the city's former Briggs & Stratton campus was forced to closed in March 2023 due to high levels of TCE, a toxic chemical

  • The Milwaukee Health Department ordered the tenants to evacuate and find other housing. Some of them filed a lawsuit against the developers, alleging they ignored warnings from the state

  • After more than a year of remediation, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Milwaukee Health Department signed off on the re-occupancy of the building

  • Developers said they're now accepting rental applications and tenants will be moving in the coming weeks

The East building of the Community Within the Corridor on the city’s former Briggs & Stratton campus was forced to close in March 2023. That’s because high levels of the toxic chemical, trichloroethylene — commonly referred to as TCE — were detected in the air.

Investigators with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) said the chemical seeped into the air through contaminated soil.

Residents were evacuated and had to scramble to find new places to live. Some of them filed a lawsuit against the developers. The lawsuit alleged that developers ignored warnings from the state when they allowed people to move in.

“That day of moving people out was my worst day professionally,” said Que El-Amin, a codeveloper of the Community Within the Corridor.

A Milwaukee County judge approved a settlement in January in which developers gave each those former tenants in the lawsuit $25,000 for the inconvenience of being displaced.

Now, after more than a year of remediation, the Wisconsin DNR and the Milwaukee Health Department signed off on the re-occupancy of the building.

El-Amin said he and his team worked closely with both the DNR and health department, and spent millions of dollars removing contaminated soil and upgrading the vapor mitigation system within the building.

“We added additional blowers to the remediation system,” he said. “We also removed soil. Really, what took the two years was a lot of soil, water and air testing.”

El-Amin said people will start moving into the building in a matter of weeks.

He acknowledged that he and his team lost the trust of many of the tenants who were forced to move out suddenly two years ago. But he said some of the former tenants have put in rental applications to return.

“We will have some returning tenants who have reapplied, and we welcome them back and hope to see them soon,” said El-Amin.

Safety testing of the building will also continue.

Trevor Nobile, the remediation and redevelopment supervisor with the DNR, said, “there is a continuing obligation to monitor and conduct sampling quarterly and report those results to the DNR.”

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