Do school referendums raise home values? A Wisconsin study says yes, with a catch

Does a school referendum change what your house is worth? Here's what we found

Every fall somebody asks whether a school referendum does anything for their home value. We decided to go looking for real numbers.

What the research says

Two economists, Austin Feng and Francesco Ruggieri, went through more than 3,500 Wisconsin school referendums going back to 1990. They zeroed in on the close votes, since a district that barely passed and one that barely failed are pretty similar otherwise. Then they looked at housing prices afterward.

Near the tipping point, home prices moved about one-for-one with school spending. Spending went up 1%, prices went up roughly 1%. The estimate is fuzzy, and it's an average across hundreds of districts, so it tells you nothing about your specific house.

It gets more interesting when you move away from the close votes. Their model shows bigger price gains when a measure wins by a wide margin. Measures with very weak support can actually hurt housing demand. The authors think part of the reason is which households choose to stay in or leave a community.

One caution. This is a working paper and hasn't been peer reviewed yet. It also covers school spending in general. An older study from California, by Cellini, Ferreira and Rothstein (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2010), looked at school facility bonds and found a similar effect. Neither one can tell us what this referendum will do to a home in Brookfield.

What our own sales say

Research gives you averages. We wanted to see what buyers actually pay around here, so we pulled ten years of MetroMLS closed single-family sales, October 2016 through October 2026.

We matched Elmbrook homes with similar homes right across the district line. We adjusted for square footage, age, bedrooms, bathrooms, lot size and the quarter the home sold. Some of the matching happened inside the City and Town of Brookfield and inside New Berlin, where both sides of the line share a municipality. We then ran a second check on homes within about a mile of the line in Waukesha, New Berlin and Menomonee Falls.

Elmbrook homes sold for about 7.1% more over the full ten years, and about 8.8% more over the last two. The second check landed in the same neighborhood. On a $560,000 home, which is the typical Elmbrook sale price over the last two years, that comes to roughly $37,000 to $45,000.

Schools are one factor among several. Neighborhood, street and the condition of the house all matter too, and we can't fully strip those out. This also measures the Elmbrook premium overall, so it doesn't prove any single referendum caused it. It does tell us buyers are paying a real premium for these schools right now.

This isn’t the first time Elmbrook voters have invested in their schools. In 2008, voters approved a $62.2 million referendum for major improvements at Brookfield Central and Brookfield East. That debt retires in 2028, and the new plan is built around it, which is why the increase is $0.11 per $1,000 of home value to the tax bill, compared to the 2025 bill. The ten years of home sales we studied all came after that vote.

What it costs

The district says the referendum adds $0.11 per $1,000 of home value to the tax bill, compared to the 2025 bill. On a $560,000 home, that's about $62 a year.

For context, the Elmbrook mill rate is $6.26 per $1,000 today, the lowest in district history. It was $13.60 in 1992-93.

A premium that already exists isn't a guaranteed return on this vote, and we won't pretend it is. What the research and the sales data both say is that people pay more to live in a community that backs its schools.

If you plan to vote yes, tell your neighbors. Polls are open 7am to 8pm on Tuesday, Nov 3. Early voting starts Oct 20.

Sources: Feng and Ruggieri, Structural Extrapolation in Regression Discontinuity Designs with an Application to School Expenditure Referenda (working paper). Cellini, Ferreira and Rothstein, The Value of School Facility Investments (2010). Elmbrook Schools referendum tax estimate and mill rate history. MetroMLS closed single-family sales, October 2016 through October 2026.