Photo credit: Mike Steele
Sam Sims says hardly a day goes by that he doesn’t hear one of his neighbors expressing anxieties about being pushed out by new money coming into his part of Milwaukee. Living about three miles north of where all the development is taking place in Downtown Milwaukee, Sims and others in the Williamsburg Heights neighborhood—bounded by Keefe Avenue north to Capitol Drive and I-43 east to Holton Street—might seem to be at a comfortable distance from any real threat. Sims, though, said developers have not been overlooking his part of the city.
The peak of interest perhaps came about two years ago, when it wasn’t uncommon for residents to find flyers in the mail asking them to sell their properties. Inspectors were also visiting the neighborhood more frequently, citing homeowners for code violations. Some of that pressure has since subsided, Sims said, yet developers, many of them from out of town, continue to open apartment buildings. The transient residents who move in do little to promote stability.
That’s not to say the attention has been entirely unwelcome, said Sims, who is also president of the 5 Points Neighborhood Association. As Milwaukee’s Downtown undergoes its biggest building boom in decades, one of the most common complaints has been that outlying parts have not been able to share in the bounty.
Don’t Push Us Out
Yet, if development is to start spreading north from the city’s center, Sims and others are adamant about what they don’t want—the sort of gentrification that forced many long-time residents out of the Brewers Hill neighborhood, just north of Downtown, in the 1970s. “We all know and understand the history of Brewers Hill,” Sims said. “And that brings a bitter taste to the mouths of people in our area because we understand and we see some pushing. In fact, we see a lot of pushing.”
Sims and his neighbors now have the ears of city officials. In late November, the Milwaukee Common Council passed a resolution calling on the Department of City Development (DCD) to produce an “anti-displacement” plan meant to ensure long-time residents aren’t forced out when development comes their way. The plan isn’t due until March 1 and is still in its earliest phases.
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Vanessa Koster, a planning manager in the DCD, said the final product will most likely build on work that has already been done along similar lines as a result of a federal Transit Oriented Development grant the city received in 2016 to prepare for possible extensions of the city’s streetcar line along Martin Luther King Drive and into the Walker’s Point area. This work is to include a housing market analysis that will look at ways to preserve existing affordable housing and provide more options to low-income residents.
Affordable Housing?
Beyond that, city officials seem to know as much about what the anti-displacement plan cannot contain as what it eventually will. Koster said state law and legal precedents prevent the Common Council from adopting an ordinance requiring that affordable housing be part of any new residential project. The furthest they can go in that direction, she said, is to make affordable housing requirements a condition of receiving either public assistance or a waiver of certain zoning rules.
The Common Council tried to do just that in December with an ordinance that would have called on developers who are building certain residential projects in the city’s Downtown area and receiving at least $1 million from the city to set aside 20% of their units for low-income tenants. Council members, though, postponed their vote after hearing from city officials who cautioned that strict new rules could discourage development. They instead decided to wait until the spring, when the anti-displacement plan would be out.
In the coming months, city officials will no doubt have to answer a central question: Is gentrification actually happening in Milwaukee? If it’s not, then all the displacement planning will amount to little more than a wasted effort. Some have given reasons to be skeptical.
In a report from two years ago, the nonprofit group Center for Community Progress looked at whether anything resembling gentrification could be said to have taken place in Milwaukee from 2000 to 2012. The study paid particular attention to what the researchers deemed three markers of gentrification: an increase in median per-capita income of 10% or more; a significant increase in median house values; and an increase of 20% or more in the white population. The study found that very few parts of the city showed more than one of these markers.
Of the areas that were heavily developed during those years, some were already wealthy but relatively unpopulated, making it unlikely any sort of displacement could take place. Others saw an increase in the white population, but not in a way that seemed to displace long-time black and Latino residents. The one exception was a five-block area near where North Holton Street meets East Wright Street. Here, an increase in the number of white residents was accompanied by a decrease in black and Latino residents.
Still, the report cautioned against concluding that long-time homeowners had actually been displaced. The change in population might simply have been the result of black and Latino tenants moving out and whites moving in. In its conclusion, the report asked whether excessive fears about gentrification risk drawing attention away from a far more pressing concern: the city’s declining housing stock. “Without minimizing the problems that can be created for lower income families in the path of gentrification,” it stated, “it can reasonably be argued that neighborhood decline is having a far greater impact on the city’s lower income and minority communities—including the massive loss of equity and wealth associated with the declines in property values taking place.”
Of course, the Center for Community Progress’ report looked at a time period that came decades after development displaced long-time residents of Brewers Hill. Whether that previous example of gentrification was what city officials had in the back of their minds in November when they set an anti-displacement plan in motion was unclear. The two Common Council members who proposed the anti-displacement resolution, Alderwoman Milele Coggs (Sixth District) and Alderman José Pérez (12th District), couldn’t be reached for comment for this article. Whatever those officials’ reasons, at least some of their constituents don’t think new development is necessarily something to fear.
Glenn Mattison, a life-long Milwaukee resident living in the part of the city represented by Coggs, said he knows of no reason why development has to come with the harmful side effects that give the term “gentrification” its bad connotation. “Some people are going to lose out,” Mattison said. “There’s no doubt about that. But you can’t have it both ways. You want to have investment. You want to have development.”
Mattison said he sees big differences between Brewers Hill and the places where residents might be worried now. For one, he said, the houses in Brewers Hill tend to be bigger than those found in his own neighborhood near North Second Street and West Keefe Avenue. These large houses were a major reason why Brewers Hill proved so attractive to wealthy newcomers wanting spacious homes that would put them close to Downtown at a relatively low cost.
Also, the houses in Brewers Hill, once again because of their size, ended up being subject to fairly high property taxes after being rehabilitated. In places throughout the U.S. where gentrification can truthfully be said to have occurred—in places like Brooklyn, N.Y., say—one of the biggest causes of displacement has been property taxes that have risen beyond what long-time residents can afford.
The Benefits of Redevelopment?
Even though some residents had to leave Brewers Hill, Mattison said he can’t say the changes that occurred there were all for the bad. He said he can remember when that part of the city was essentially “Skid Row.” Many of the people he’d see out on the streets were alcoholics; drugs and prostitution were not uncommon. Mattison said he sees no reason why city officials can’t adopt policies that encourage the benefits of redevelopment while at the same time holding any resulting displacement to a minimum.
One of his fears now, he said, is that his neighbors might be so opposed to gentrification that they frighten away developers. “I understand where they are coming from, but they are little too hostile in their approach,” he said. “They are turning people off. They see bogeymen behind every door.”
He said one helpful step would be for there to be policies in place that make it easier for renters to buy properties. He reports that many of his neighbors are retired and living on fixed incomes. If they were forced to leave, but at least owned the homes they were living in, they’d have this advantage: They could get money for their property.
The city has various programs that offer loans and grants to help residents both buy houses and make repairs to properties they own. Most of these, though, come with requirements calling on participants to put up matching money of some sort. This sort of assistance thus remains out of reach for many.
Various researchers who have studied the effects of gentrification agree that it’s hard to argue that people living in neighborhoods that have long been neglected should shut the door on newcomers simply for fear that residents will be run out. Jonathan Wynn, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, said gentrification can have desirable effects that go beyond the immediate benefits of economic development.
If newcomers move into a neighborhood without displacing the original residents, members of both groups will soon find themselves out doing things together. They’ll go to the same churches, send their children to the same schools and eat at the same restaurants, Wynn said. This will help to counter one of the most dismaying trends in modern life, he said—the tendency of people to live around only others whom they perceive to be part of their group.
Another advantage of gentrification, Wynn said, is that it can bring better services to previously neglected places. Streets will be repaired sooner and more thoroughly, and trash and garbage pickup will become more regular. And community policing will most likely increase, as well. That sort of change can be welcome in places with a lot of crime, but also can have drawbacks, Wynn said. Neighborhoods where mostly minorities live tend to be “hyper-policed,” he said. Preventing this from happening in gentrifying neighborhoods often requires putting law enforcement officials through special training. “Gentrification can be something that’s desirable,” Wynn said, “as long as the negative effects are minimized.”
This once again leads back to the question of whether development taking place near Milwaukee’s Downtown area can really be said to be putting anyone at risk of being forced out. Various newcomers to a neighborhood just north of Brewers Hill say they have at least one strong reason to believe displacement has yet to be become a serious threat: The houses they have moved into weren’t owned by anybody, except for a bank, when they bought them.
Ali and Andrew Becker said they were attracted to the house they bought at the corner of North Palmer Street and East Wright Street largely because it’s close to St. Marcus Lutheran School, where they both work. The Beckers also liked that living in the neighborhood would put them among many of the very same families that send their children to St. Marcus, “And we look at the students we serve and the effects of non-stable housing and the effects of transient populations,” Andrew Becker said. “You want neighborhoods to improve, but not at the cost of having a certain demographic move out.”
When the Beckers bought their house, the last person to live there had been a squatter. Before that, a family had to leave after their bank foreclosed on their mortgage. On their way out, they stripped the house of everything they could take, even plumbing, and spray-painted the walls. Judging by the general state of the neighborhood and the amount of work that needed to be done to the house, the Beckers knew they couldn’t go into the project expecting to get their money out.
Even obtaining a loan was difficult. With most recent house sales in the neighborhood running in the range of $17,000 to $30,000, they couldn’t find a bank willing to finance their rehabilitation. In the end, they put about $20,000 of their own money into the project. Their “white privilege” (as they put it) eventually came to the rescue when family friends agreed to put up 80 acres of land they own up north as collateral for a $130,000 loan.
The chances of seeing a return on the investment have improved much sooner than anyone expected. A house down the block recently sold for $199,000. Yet, even amid these signs of a heating-up property market, the Beckers say they know of no one who has had to leave involuntarily. Helping with the overall neighborhood stability is the fact that few of the Beckers’ immediate neighbors are renters. “I think this block is pretty well established as a homeowner block,” Ali Becker said.
Buying Up the Block?
Pat Connolly, another “newcomer” to the neighborhood (he has been there for 11 years) agreed that development still has a long way to go before it will begin to put pressure on long-time residents. He said Milwaukee is a place teeming with opportunities, some of which he is looking to scoop up as a landlord. Connolly now owns three properties: the house he lives in on Palmer Street, a nearby house that he leases to tenants and another rental property in Madison. He plans to add two more within the next year.
“A couple of neighbors are like, ‘Are you going to buy up the whole block?’” Connolly said. “And I say, ‘I might.’ I’m looking to move fast.” Yet, even as Connolly buys up properties, he is seeking to lay to rest any misgivings city officials might have about his motives. Connolly said he is committed to staying in the neighborhood and to being a fair landlord to his tenants, and he hopes city officials—who have had a series of well-publicized clashes in recent years with unscrupulous landlords—come to recognize that he is acting in good faith. With enough time to prove himself, he said, he should be able to show members of the Common Council and others that they have more to gain working with him than they do working against him.
“I’m trying to offer low-income housing,” Connolly said, “and then I hear so much back and forth about there’s not enough people doing this. And, in my daily walkabouts, I don’t run into a lot of people like me.” Still, whatever the reality, many are convinced people like Connolly will be coming around a lot more often in the next few years, and not all of them are likely to have the best intentions.
For that reason, people like Sims give the Common Council credit for getting ahead of the concerns with an anti-displacement plan. Unlike at certain times in the past, city officials now seem to be willing to at least listen to long-time residents’ concerns about gentrification, even if those concerns ultimately prove unfounded. “You’ve got to have a strong center and economic base,” Sims said. “We don’t want to fight them. We want to expand that and bring it into our neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s work with them.’”
