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By all accounts, Milwaukee’s current building boom is one for the record books. It stands out for reshaping the city’s skyline and bringing historical amounts of development spending to the downtown and nearby neighborhoods, but it also has been going on for quite a long time. Many people trace its origins to 2010, just when the country was coming out of the worst recession in living memory. Surely, things can’t go on like this forever?
Remarkably, though, developers, city officials and others close to the situation don’t see the end coming—at least not soon.
Anyone wanting proof that Milwaukee has undergone a building boom of historic proportions need do little more than just look at its skyline—perhaps from a car driven northward over the Hoan Bridge. From that vantage point, it’s hard not to be impressed by the changes. Whereas the 42-story U.S Bank building had once been the sole structure towering over its neighbors, now there’s Northwestern Mutual’s 32-story headquarters building and 35-story 7Seventy7 apartment high-rise. Nearby, on a smaller scale, stands the 833 East office building and a new Westin Hotel, opened in 2017.
Drivers who get off the highway Downtown and head north on Water Street will find themselves going past the site of the 25-story office tower BMO Harris Bank is building across Well Street from City Hall. If they look to the west, they’ll catch sight of the $524 million Fiserv Forum arena, where the Milwaukee Bucks began playing last year.
Filling Empty Spaces
Those projects may be the most conspicuous signs of the building boom, but they tell only part of the story. Even as multi-hundred-million-dollar projects like the Northwestern Mutual headquarters reshape the city’s skyline, apartments, hotels, shops and restaurants galore are filling in once-vacant or underused places and leaving their own indelible mark.
For Rocky Marcoux, commissioner of the Department of City Development, one of the best ways to gauge how much development has taken place is to look at investment numbers tracked by the Milwaukee Business Improvement District #21. The district, which encompasses Downtown, has tabulated that roughly $5 billion was spent on development within its boundaries from 2005 to the end of last year. When that’s added to spending on projects now underway or planned, the downtown is on track to benefit from $7.7 billion worth of investment in less than 20 years.
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Those numbers in themselves show that it’s no exaggeration to call the current building boom a record-breaker. Again, though, the big figures can overshadow perhaps less spectacular but nonetheless impressive accomplishments. In the same period, Marcoux noted, there have also been 11,000 new housing units built in downtown Milwaukee and 8,000 in nearby neighborhoods.
“Once you factor in that in the past 15 years, give or take, we had the greatest recession since the Great Depression, and there was really no measurable activity during that time, that makes the numbers even more impressive,” he says.
If there is any hint of a slowdown, it’s in the development of multi-family apartments. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, says the local developer Josh Jeffers.
Jeffers, owner of J. Jeffers & Co., says there was a time, in late 2014 and early 2015, when apartments couldn’t be built fast enough Downtown. Units were being rented out practically as quickly as they were opened. Jeffers has done quite a bit himself to help meet that demand. His long list of projects includes both the renovation of the historic Mackie Building, at the corner of East Michigan Street and of the former Garfield Elementary School at 2215 N. Fourth St.
More Downtown Offices
With that market starting to slow, developers have now turned to building offices that are conveniently situated for their employees, many of whom are in their 20s and 30s and have moved Downtown. Jeffers plans to add the mix by putting up a building to house the offices of the law firm Husch Blackwell just south of the Mackie Building. “And I’m not sure whether there will be many office buildings completed after our building,” Jeffers says. “I actually think we will be the last one for this cycle. But I’d love it if I were wrong.”
That doesn’t mean, though, that a slowdown is imminent. Once developers have provided people with more places to live and work downtown, their next big opportunity will be to give them more to do. Jeffers predicted Milwaukee’s building boom will now move on to the construction of shops, restaurants and entertainment venues.
Jeffers’ faith that the good times will continue can be seen in his staffing figures. After founding J. Jeffers & Co. in 2010, he ran the business as a one-man show before starting to hire employees in 2015. Now he has 10 people working for him, including an in-house lawyer. If there is any reason to be anxious, Jeffers and others say, it’s coming from the direction of federal policy. Interest rates are on the rise as the Federal Reserve begins to worry about taming inflation. And President Trump’s tariffs threaten to drive up the price of steel and other construction materials. Projects are likely to become costlier.
Those pressures might be tapping the brakes on development but are unlikely to bring things to a halt. Mike Fabishak, chief executive of the Associated General Contractors of Greater Milwaukee, says he thinks there is still plenty of pent-up demand for repairs and maintenance work that was put off during the recession. “There’s all that lower, residual stuff,” he said. “A friend of mine owns an auto-repair shop that needs $300,000 to $400,000 worth of work. And people are now more prepared to pull the trigger on them because say, ‘I’ve been putting this off for a while.’”
Of the big projects that still define Milwaukee’s building boom in the minds of many, 2019 has at least one more in store: The mining company Komatsu plans to build its North American headquarters at a former industrial site in the city’s harbor district. But, for those who really want a sign that the building boom has not abated, much will depend on the long-planned Couture high-rise apartment tower.
If built, the Couture would bring yet another skyscraper to the city’s lakefront, this one with 44 stories. The project has hit more than its fair share of obstacles. Given local officials’ blessing back in 2012, the Couture almost immediately became the subject of a dispute with the watchdog group Preserve Our Parks, which questioned whether the project could be built on a site created years ago by filling in part of Lake Michigan.
That entanglement was cleared away only after the state Legislature intervened. Since then, the bigger question has been whether the developer of the project, Barrett-Lo Visionary Development, will be able to secure financing for the $120 million project. Barrett-Lo made progress in that regard in November by getting preliminary approval for a federal loan guarantee. Local officials have since re-stated their confidence that the project will eventually get done.
Both Jeffers and Marcoux count themselves among the optimists about the Couture. Jeffers says delays are to be expected whenever a developer is trying to push the boundaries of what anyone had thought possible in a particular market and that “every great deal dies at least once.”
Marcoux notes that local plans for the city’s streetcar call for eventually having a station at the Couture site. “I feel fairly confident that it’s going to break ground this year,” he says. “And it’s going to be a great addition to the lakefront and to the whole region.”
