You probably know someone like this, or perhaps you are one: The person who absolutely will not stop talking about what a remarkable place Milwaukee is.
The city has always had its cheerleaders, but especially in recent years, and especially among a particular class of Milwaukeeans—generally young, generally upwardly mobile ones aligned with the creative class—local pride has reached a fever pitch. These days Milwaukeeans aren’t just happy to live here. They’re so uncontrollably stoked about it they want to shout it from the rafters, and an entire cottage industry has sprung up to help them do just that, from the placemakers at NEWaukee to the T-shirt sellers at Milwaukee Home and the designers behind that Milwaukee People’s Flag that two more of your neighbors just started flying last week. Breweries, coffee shops, restaurants, bars, newspapers, websites and radio stations are now locked in an endless effort to out-local one another. Everybody wants to make Milwaukee their brand.
When did loving Milwaukee become so fashionable? Most anybody who’s lived here for a while—save, of course, for those in the large swaths of the city blighted by segregation and walled off from economic opportunity—would probably agree that the city is a tangibly better place to live than it was just 15 years ago. Neighborhoods are growing denser by the month with new local businesses, while downtown is experiencing a run of major new construction projects unseen since World War II. Plus we’ve got beer gardens in our parks now. There’s good reason to be excited about everything happening here.
But without taking anything away from everything Milwaukee has accomplished, the city’s uniquely Milwaukeean brand of civic pride begins to seem a lot less uniquely Milwaukeean when you pull back a bit. Similar swells of local pride are happening in cities all over the country.
Brian Howe, a writer and editor for the Durham, N.C. weekly paper Indy Week, says you can’t miss the trend in his city, where a local clothing company has tapped into local pride with a line of popular “Durm” T-shirts. He describes a city resurgence a lot like Milwaukee’s.
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“Durham has that sense of fighting for its developing identity, which gives it that pridefulness and urgency that are less prominent in more stagnant places here,” Howe says. “Perhaps as recently as 15 years ago, there was nothing in downtown Durham. It was actually regarded as a scary place to go. Now it’s booming, and I would say that change has really taken place, and rapidly accelerated, over the last decade.”
Dan Grossman, Arts Editor of Indianapolis’s Nuvo Newsweekly, describes a similar phenomenon in Indianapolis, a spike in local pride following a concerted push by the city to build up a downtown that risked desertion. “Indy’s various mayors and their administrations should be given credit,” Grossman says, “but I think the real gel that is solidifying civic pride are the nonprofits that come in and create cultural life in areas that would otherwise be abandoned.”
This trend toward city pride seems especially magnified in cities that have either had economic obstacles to overcome or a historical chip on their shoulders, observes Thomas Calkins, a PhD candidate in sociology at UW-Milwaukee.
“There’s a connection to globalization and the post-industrial landscape, where you had major companies packing up and leaving, then cities like Milwaukee, Cleveland and Detroit going through this identity crisis,” Calkins says. “You had major corporate players, and all kinds of sections of the city sorting through this, trying to determine, ‘What is it as a city that we’re trying to sell?’ In the ’90s, Milwaukee became ‘A Great Place on a Great Lake;’ that was the campaign.
“And I think what we’re seeing now is that a lot of these cities, the Clevelands and the Toledos of the United States, are emerging from their inferiority complex.” Calkins continues. “I think people in Milwaukee are probably less concerned with comparing themselves to Chicago now, and that’s something I’ve seen in other places—a city shedding its inferiority complex. That’s what all these civic organizations were trying to do in the ’90s, but now it’s happening at the creative class level.”
Even cities and college towns insulated from those kinds of hardships are seeing a hearty boost of city spirit, including Athens, Ga. “It does seem like there is a general shift happening—because of increased connectivity, threat of homogenization or whatever—where young creative types want to feel like they are in THE place to be,” says Gabe Vodicka, managing editor of Athens’ weekly paper Flagpole. “So there is this rise in what appears to be civic pride, but it’s partly self-affirmation.”
One Philadelphia native concurred that his city’s spike in civic pride appears to be especially concentrated among the creative class. “Philly is also a good case study for that type of pride since it's a bit of an alternative home for a lot of creatives, a place a lot of artists and musicians move to from or instead of NYC as a way of facilitating their art making via lower rent and general affordability,” he says. “I think there's a potential outsider element to the city for that reason, a place people are proud to call home because there’s still some grit and a robust artistic community to latch onto.”
Luring Young Professionals
If young creatives are the driving force behind these surges of local spirit, then perhaps it only makes sense that Milwaukee has seen so much of it lately, since data suggests that Milwaukee’s creative class is growing. Census estimates show that Milwaukee has grown by about 5,000 people over the last five years, notes Leonard Nevarez, a professor of sociology at Vassar College.
“The 25-34 demographic accounts for 4,000 of those people,” Nevarez says. Meanwhile, the number of Milwaukeeans 25-and-over with a bachelor’s degree inched up by 1.6% between 2010-2015, “a rough overlap with that new growth.”
“Even in cities that have lost people overall, I find that countervailing growth in the 24-34 age bracket can signal a city has become attractive, cool, hip, etc. to a demographic who—more than others, all other socioeconomic factors being equal—have more freedom to live elsewhere,” Nevarez continues.
The uptick in this demographic is probably more than just a happy coincidence.
“It's common enough to find urban branding campaigns seeking to attract people of this age and education,” he says. “In fact, in the absence of other economic development opportunities, attracting the creative class with urban amenities and lifestyle is the dominant urban economic development strategy for most North American cities these days. And urban policy-shapers like Richard Florida have made much about the need for cities to cultivate a sense of place and tell a unique ‘story’ if they hope to appeal to this demographic. That doesn’t work everywhere, but maybe it’s working in Milwaukee.”
Florida himself seems to believe as much. Speaking in the city this summer at the Marquette Law School, the author behind the influential 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class described what he sees as “an urban revival on steroids,” singling out Milwaukee as a particular success story.
“It’s amazing what’s happened here,” Florida said. “Milwaukee has done a fabulous job of reinventing itself.”
