APPLETON - Brad Cebulski is upbeat about the future of downtown Appleton.

Cebulski, 29, who owns the downtown social media management company BConnected, said the city needs to bring in more young professionals, and downtown housing developments have the ability to attract them.

With more downtown residential projects and developments happening, he expects the city's demographic to expand and its cultural center to grow.

"I'm excited to see what this place looks like in three years," Cebulski said. "The skyline is going to look different. The amenities that we all have will be added to. Everything will be solidified and they'll just be more options and more rehabilitation projects and more development of new things."

Nancy Graham, 72, has a different view when it comes to residential development. She believes projects are catering too much to the young and too little to the elderly. She also thinks too much development in one area will congest parking, hurting older and disabled residents' ability to enjoy downtown.

"The plan altogether I think is too much, too many apartments," Graham said. "Are they considering the disabled and the elderly and parents with little kids and all that? I don't think they are. I think they just are kind of focusing on the millennials ... If they're just building for people who are 20 and 30 years old, what about the rest of us?"

The city recently agreed to provide a developer $900,000 to assist in a $5.4 million project to convert Gabriel Furniture properties into apartments and office space by 2022.

The proposed new downtown library, to be located on the site of the Soldiers Square parking ramp, would also include about 96 apartments or condos built on top. A 100-stall underground parking ramp would be reserved for tenants and double as the building's foundation.

Another 208 apartments or condos and a city-owned parking ramp would be built on a nearby bluff site.

In 2017, the city approved a similar development agreement to redevelop the historic Irving Zuelke Building to convert the top floors into apartments with office and retail space below, but no work has begun yet.

Adding housing is an essential part of the city's comprehensive plan for downtown.

"Increasing the residential base in downtown Appleton will provide an increased and potentially entirely new customer base which retailers, restaurants and service-related businesses will be able to tap," the plan states. "Downtown employers will also see it as a benefit to have more people living downtown as it will be easier to draw employees from a very local base."

Karen Harkness, Appleton's community and economic development director, said the plans for increasing downtown housing comes from demand shown through community surveys and housing studies.

The city wants to attract and retain a broad demographic, she said.

"Retention and attraction go hand in hand," Harkness said. "We want to continue to be welcoming and inclusive so that we can attract a diverse population ... (we) want to keep our younger demographic as well as attract (them), but we also want to make sure that we're meeting the needs of those of us that are aging as well."

Cebulski is confident in the projects' ability to attract young professionals and thinks it's a necessity for the area.

"The millennial market is the future, and it's the biggest generation to come through in decades," he said. "To ignore that and to think that change is bad is being naive and you're going to end up losing that demographic to other places."

Gabriel Lofts, which operates under FORE Development and Investment Group owned by Paul Klister and his three sons Dan, Tom and Jack, is behind the redevelopment of the Gabriel Furniture properties.

Paul Klister is also the co-owner of Commercial Horizons, the developer behind the proposed mixed-use downtown library project. Jack Klister said the housing on the proposed library site can cater to a variety of residents.

"We believe our biggest draw to this type of housing will be both young professionals as well as empty-nesters that are looking to move to a spot where they will be able to easily access all that downtown Appleton currently (and in the future) has to offer," he wrote in an email to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

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Nathan Litt, 33, founder of the social networking group Young Appleton Professionals, thinks public-private partnerships, like the proposed library project, will be key to bringing in generational diversity.

"When it's paired with the mixed use, the city has a role in attracting young professionals, but the private development of the library project in terms of mixed-use ... that's what's going to be more instrumental (to) attracting and (retaining) young professionals to move to Appleton," he said.

Litt doesn't think concerns over congested parking should be a deal-breaker for developing downtown.

"In reality, there's not going to ever be enough parking spots for cars and what's needed," he said. "People who say they don't come downtown for parking ... they don't come downtown anyway for a host of other reasons. People that like to come downtown, they come downtown and figure it out."

But, that's not so easy for 66-year-old Joanne Dietz, who suffers from osteoarthritis and had two knee replacements that impair her mobility.

Dietz said while she supports the idea of bringing in young talent to the Fox Cities, she believes developers often don't think about the impact a project might have on older people with an overcrowded downtown.

"It's wonderful that they're building and they want to remodel things and make the town better, but at the same time are you hurting individuals who live in the town?" Dietz said.

"If they want to bring young people downtown, that's fine but ... don't dump on older people. Usually the elderly and the disabled are forgotten when you start these projects."

Despite the concerns raised by some older residents, Nancy Brown-Koeller, 67, doesn't think the developments have to be a generational zero-sum game if project leaders can cater to people of all ages.

"If developers take into consideration the needs of both millennials and (baby) boomers — the two huge monster generations that we have — this could be a good thing for both of them," she said.