Growth in construction jobs comes with surge in new apartment building in Madison

In this week's Cap Times cover story, Mike Ivey reported on the number of new apartment units Madison is adding and concerns about the impacts on the price of housing and density.

In 2013, nearly two-thirds of the money spent on new development projects in Madison went toward apartments.

And in the "core downtown" that includes the area between Park and Blair streets, 396 new apartment units went on line in 2013, with another 1,440 approved or under construction, according to city figures.

The surge in apartment building serves as one way of explaining the growth in the number of construction jobs in the Madison area.

We reported last month that the Madison metropolitan statistical area (Dane, Columbia and Iowa counties) saw 15.8 percent growth in construction jobs between June 2012 and June 2013, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nearly two in five construction jobs added in Wisconsin in that time were in the Madison area.

The Cap Times' Changing Face of Madison page keeps track of the development projects that are altering the look of the city. When we rolled that out, we looked at how much the new construction spending on apartments has grown in recent years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the number of jobs in industries at the metropolitan statistical area level, areas that include at least one city with a population of 50,000 or more and the counties with which it has an interconnected economy.

These figures are from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which surveys around 95 percent of Wisconsin employers.

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Growth in construction jobs comes with surge in new apartment building in Madison