Sealcoating and Asphalt in Lake Hallie, WI

The building here is recent and it is still going: 42.6 percent of Lake Hallie's 3,222 homes date from 2000 or later. A drive that age has usually had one thing happen to it and one thing only, which is that the top has oxidized and gone gray while the structure under it has not moved. Sealing it costs a fraction of replacing it and buys another decade. Leaving it is what turns a maintenance job into a construction one.

A little over three homes in five here are detached, 68.8 percent, so a genuine part of what looks like residential work is really a landlord maintaining an asset. That changes the conversation: the question stops being how it looks and starts being the cheapest thing that actually works.

A village of 7,349 usually has one commercial street and a few blocks of houses around it, and {p.ShortName} is no exception. The lots along the main street are small with shared access, which makes the question there where one property's surface stops and the next one starts. The houses behind them are straightforward. The drives out past the village line are a different job again.

Lake Hallie sits between Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls at the junction of US 53 and Highway 29, with the Chippewa River along its western edge and the regional airport on its southern border. The lake itself is an oxbow, a piece of the river's old course. The village only incorporated in 2003, which is why so much of it feels, and is, new.