This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/for-now-a-tiny-house-in-a-land-of-lakes-and-giant-prices/

First in a series on housing in the Badger State, Out of reach: Wisconsin’s housing crisis and hope for the American Dream.

Soaring prices in Vilas County make moving hard for new EMS chief

Jason Joling was a dream candidate for a dream job in a dream location. Just one problem: He couldn’t afford to live there. 

“They offered me the job and told me, ‘We expect you to be living up here within four months,’” Joling said. “I said, ‘That ain’t gonna happen.’ I had been on Zillow and there wasn’t anything we could afford. I told them I could give them 50 hours a week. I just need a cot and a closet.” 

Joling got the job, and the planners for what has become the Northwoods Emergency Medical Services District got their man. Joling and his board of directors are building the first professional EMS service for the towns of Boulder Junction, Manitowish Waters, Presque Isle and Winchester in the lake-bejeweled northwest corner of Vilas County. 

Six full-time paramedics, six emergency medical technicians, Joling, and Deputy Chief Jessie Mabie staff two round-the-clock ambulances stationed in Boulder Junction and Winchester, more than 20 miles apart.  

They cover 279 square miles and serve roughly 3,000 people, many of them part-time residents, but that population can balloon to five times that number in the summer, county officials say. Northwoods expects to make about 500 calls this year. 

The home, however, took a little doing. Joling is living in a 24-foot-long, eight-foot-wide tiny home next to a permanent home on a lake property rented by a generous part-time resident, who charges $200 for rent plus utilities. 

Every square foot inside is accounted for: a composting toilet and a tiny shower at the rear; a stove with vegetables and venison canned by Joling and his wife, Jen, on shelves above; a sofa and a work area facing each other in front; and a walk-up sleeping cubby in what would be the attic. 

Even in the dead of winter, the view from the tiny home is stunning. 

Just enough for Joling, but not for Jen, director of the First Choice Pregnancy Resource Center in Wisconsin Rapids, who lives in the home they held onto in Wisconsin Rapids. On his days off, Joling makes a 2½ -hour commute home. 

Had the community considered an EMS consolidation prior to COVID, the chief might have been able to find a home from among the older cottages that were part of the first gentle wave of lake development after the Second World War. 

While the replacement of those homes with something bigger and more luxurious increased in the last decade, pent-up demand exploded when driven by people whose disposable incomes were plumped with federal pandemic money they didn’t need, Mabie said over coffee near the fireplace at Dixie’s Coffee House in Manitowish Waters. 

Mabie grew up in Boulder Junction in an EMS family and went away only for classes. When she came back, she lived with and took care of her grandmother. Since 2010, she and her husband have lived in a modest house on a cranberry marsh on Little Trout Lake. 

Houses that might have fetched $100,000 when she was growing up were selling for three or four times that, she said. Many were being knocked down to make way for million-dollar places. 

“After COVID, there were people with capital, holding companies that would just cut checks, gobbling up properties,” Joling said. “I know of one couple from Illinois who put up a big house and I know they’ve never been in it.” 

Vilas County has been particularly affected. The county’s $427,884 median home sales price from Nov. 18 through Feb. 9 was the third highest in the state, behind only Ozaukee and Waukesha counties, with at least 10 listings during the period, according to Redfin. 

Counties, such as Vilas, that rely on tourism are among the worst hit by a housing shortage that is, in varying degrees, statewide. In any period of spiking home prices, professionals in EMS, firefighting, law enforcement and teaching find it hard to live where they work. 

When the Northwoods board, made up of one official from each of the four communities, got approval for its $1.7 million budget for 2025, it included allowances for $25 an hour for paramedics and $18 an hour for emergency medical technicians, with health insurance and a state retirement plan. These are not wages that can pay the mortgage on a $500,000 home. 

Joling is used to it. He started volunteering 30 years ago. The pay was secondary. “From my first ambulance call,” he says, illustrating with a crooked index finger on the inside of his cheek, “I was hooked.” 

He and Jen bought their first home in Wisconsin Rapids for $150,000 in 2007, just before the nationwide financial implosion. The median home prices and home-to-income ratios in Wood County are among the lowest in the state. 

His home is worth much more than that now, but it hasn’t kept pace with Vilas County. Still, when he calculated being five years out from retirement, Joling, 48, started looking at places where he might like to combine EMS work with retirement. 

There was a “dream job” in Montana, where multi-million homes are being built every day for celebrity expatriates from California. The offer for 60 hours a week was $45,000 a year, Joling said. 

Then he heard about the Northwoods project. Joling liked the appeal of building and shaping something from scratch, said Joel Fetterer, who succeeded Joling as EMS division chief in Wisconsin Rapids. The two talk a couple of times a week. 

“Both of us share attributes of problem solving, the fun of figuring out a problem,” Fetterer said. “He’s the kind of guy to take the world on his shoulders and likes to attack a problem.” 

Steve Herzberg, operations liaison for the Northwoods board, said they cast a wide net in searching for an EMS chief and Joling fit the bill in all the important categories, but he had a little something extra. 

“He is a great paramedic, a strong administrator, an educator, and a selfless hard worker,” Herzberg said. “We also needed someone who would come into our area and respect the people. He is humble — an important quality in a leader who has to bring together a new workforce and the towns and people he serves.” 

Although only a month from launch, Herzberg pronounced Northwoods “an unqualified success.”  

“Honestly, Jason has exceeded our expectations,” he said. 

There is still one problem for Joling to attack. Joling made it clear he wants no government handout, although the variance for the tiny home was creative, if temporary. 

“We are all working to help them find their new home up here,” Herzberg said. “Hey, if anyone out there has a lead, call Jason.” 

“It works for now,” Joling said. “I’m on a five-year plan, maybe six. I think we really want to be here.”

Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.

Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute President Mike Nichols at mike@badgerinstitute.org or 262-389-8239.

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