Milwaukee: A Case Study in Urban Geography

To introduce this topic, let’s look at an analysis of electoral politics in the Milwaukee metropolitan area, published in 2014 by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as a special report (linked below). The article is now 10 years old (you’ll notice that it refers to Scott Walker as governor, for example). However, this report describing the “great divide” in electoral politics between the city of Milwaukee and surrounding suburban counties as it existed in 2014 is still important background for understanding the geography of Milwaukee today. Today, it’s common to refer to an urban-rural political divide across the state, separating rural areas from Milwaukee, Madison, and smaller cities. In electoral politics, some of the suburbs may be moving closer to Milwaukee. However, if you are from Wisconsin and especially if you’re from Milwaukee or one of its suburbs, you will probably find a lot that still sounds familiar in this article.

As a student in Wisconsin, you may very well find yourself clearly on one side or the other of these political divides. If so, try to set those views aside for a moment and think about the information here objectively, almost as if you are reading a report on politics in another country.

This article deals with the geography of electoral politics, but also brings out other kinds of geography that are closely related and some ways more basic, such as the segregation of the Milwaukee area by ethnic origin. While the authors see race^[1] as a major factor explaining political differences between the city and suburbs, they also emphasize other factors such as income, age of the population, and proportion of people who rent or own homes.

In this lecture we aren’t going to try understand why people in the city or suburbs hold the views they do, much less which of those views are closer to reality. Instead, we are going to explore how and why the underlying human geography of the Milwaukee metro area developed. If this is one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country, by race/ethnicity, how did that come about? How did sharp contrasts in average income develop both within the city of Milwaukee and between the city and the suburbs? Are these divisions changing today, and in what direction? In most cases there aren’t simple, easy answers; often there are several possible answers. Which one(s) you think are most important depends on your perspective, but there is a great deal of historical and geographical background that you should be aware of in thinking about this.

Here is the link to the report you should read at this point. Again, keep in mind that this was published in May 2014. Note: While the interactive map at the very top of the page and the videos throughout no longer work, a series of wonderful maps is still visible and–along with the text–tells the key stories about geography. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel website may only allow you to view a certain number of articles per month if you don’t have a subscription, so make sure to go through it carefully in one or two viewings. If you have trouble viewing the article, please contact the instructor.

The maps and text of the article you just read paint a stark picture of divides between Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs. However, contrasts within the city are also important in understanding its geography. Here is another photo of the Historic Third Ward that was discussed in previous lecture slides, with old warehouses or factories on the left, and new condos on the right. Remember that not too long ago people who knew Milwaukee neighborhoods probably thought of the Third Ward as a “close-knit, mostly blue-collar, Italian-American community.” Today, it might be described as an “upscale, mostly white area,” a description that could also be applied to suburban communities that look very different from the former factories and warehouses shown here. There are number of interesting observations we can make about this example:

• It’s true, as we’ve seen, that the original physical geography of the city–the shape of the landscape, the location of wetlands and rivers, etc.–strongly influenced the locations of factories and lower-income neighborhoods in early years. However, both the perception of those neighborhoods and the reality of who lives there can change dramatically over time, in ways that few would have expected 50 years ago
• Those changes are related to cultural, socioeconomic, and political processes. The earlier residents of the Historic Third Ward lacked the political power to resist loss of their community to freeway development, which political and business leaders saw as essential to the growth of the city. Today, an urban lifestyle is popular with well-to-do young professionals (a cultural change, in some ways). Recent political leadership in Milwaukee has strongly emphasized redevelopment like this to attract the “creative class” (new residents employed in knowledge-based and creative industries), increase property values, and restore the city’s overall economic health.
• In the early to mid-1900s, Milwaukee neighborhoods were often described in terms of both occupation/income and the particular group of European immigrants who settled there. More recently–by the 1950s at least–there was a growing tendency to see different parts of the city as either “Black” or “white.” Both ways of describing neighborhoods often misrepresent their diversity and complexity, but each also represents a view of the city’s geography that strongly influenced politics, policy, and social conflicts.

Here is a map from Wisconsin’s Past and Present, showing neighborhoods in Milwaukee, classified by the predominant ethnicity and occupations of the people living there in 1850 to 1890. The two main groups of immigrants, German and Polish, tended to settle in specific parts of the the city. Their Wisconsin-born children and grandchildren also tended to live in those same areas, which expanded outward as the city grew. Other groups of immigrants followed the same basic pattern. In an earlier unit, we looked at a basic reason why immigrant communities like this developed: the attraction of sharing a language, culture, and places of worship with neighbors. There were more negative reasons for the pattern as well–landlords in a particular neighborhood might not rent to someone from the “wrong” ethnic group. While basic patterns of ethnicity shown on this map are accurate, based on census data, many of the neighborhoods had more diverse populations than the map implies. In addition, people in neighborhoods dominated by different ethnic groups typically shared many things in common, often working in the same industries, supporting the same political parties, and so forth.

Your assigned reading on Polish Routes to Americanization, by Judith Kenny, describes the Polish neighborhoods of the early to mid-1900s on the south side of Milwaukee. The image below shows an example of the many efforts made there to preserve and strengthen ties to Polish culture and to the country of Poland. This is a parade that took place as Poland was becoming an independent nation in 1918; the location is Kosciusko Park, named after a Polish hero who also took part in the American Revolution. Yet as Kenny discusses, many aspects of life on the south side of Milwaukee–including house styles–were much more American than Polish. By the time of this photo, the younger generation in these neighborhoods was already strongly influenced by American popular culture and by working with people from other ethnic groups. After World War II, many from that generation (or their children) moved to new developments in outlying parts of the city or the suburbs.

The maps below, also from Wisconsin’s Past and Present, focus on the patterns of Black settlement in Milwaukee. African Americans lived in Milwaukee from its earliest years, but in fairly small numbers until after 1915. Many more came to Milwaukee from the South or other Midwestern states to work in industry during World Wars I and II.  Migration of Black people to Milwaukee increased even more in the late 1940s and 1950s, and continued through the 1980s and 90s; it was part of the broader Great Migration of African Americans from the southern US, driven by the oppressive system of legal segregation and racist violence in the South as well as job opportunities in the North. This migration contributed to a significant demographic change in Milwaukee. Between 1950 and 1960, the city’s Black population increased by 187 percent.^[2] Before 1900, African American households were scattered across many areas of the city. In the 1900s, Black residents were increasingly restricted to a so-called “Inner Core” neighborhood on the north side. which expanded to the northwest over time.

While the so-called Inner Core seems similar to other neighborhoods dominated by German- or Polish-Americans, its origins and development over time were different in important ways. From its earliest years, the “Inner Core” was overcrowded and the housing was of poor quality and often barely inhabitable. Therefore, there was a strong incentive for African Americans to try to rent or buy better housing in other parts of the city. However, over time it became increasingly difficult for them to rent or buy outside the “Core.” New housing developments usually had restrictive covenants that property owners had to agree to, saying the homes could be occupied only by members of “the Caucasian Race.” An example is shown below with the key paragraph marked by a star. In 1948, the US Supreme Court ruled that these covenants could not be enforced. After that, the discrimination was not as formal but was often just as effective; Black renters or home-buyers were not shown homes or apartments in many parts of the city. Those African Americans who were able to overcome those barriers and buy or rent homes in white neighborhoods faced the threat of violence. In Chicago and its suburbs, there were major riots in the 1950s when Black families tried to move into white neighborhoods, and those events probably had an influence in nearby Milwaukee as well.

As a result, African Americans became much more concentrated than other ethnic groups, in a relatively small part of the city, and generally not by choice. This geographic concentration did allow the development of Black-owned businesses and community-based institutions, and made it possible to elect African Americans to the city council and eventually to the state legislature; however, the negative effects of housing segregation were clear to people in the community and were frequently pointed out by Black leaders (for a much more detailed though now somewhat dated history of these developments, see the book Black Milwaukee, by Joe William Trotter).

It is still an underappreciated fact that the US government played an important role in the development of housing segregation in cities like Milwaukee. In the 1930s and 1940s, new federal government  and programs made mortgage loans more affordable and easier for many people to get. As we saw earlier, that allowed rapid growth of cities and their suburbs after World War II. However, lenders often denied mortgage loans to African Americans (a practice often called “redlining“), and the federal agencies involved in housing did little or nothing to prevent this.

In fact, federal agencies actually developed policies that increase that required this type of discrimination. Here is a map of the Milwaukee, produced in 1938 for the Home Owners Loan Corporation, a US government-owned corporation set up to refinance home loans for borrowers in financial trouble during the Great Depression. The neighborhoods of Milwaukee are color-coded on the map, according to lending risk. Red areas (“Hazardous”) are working class neighborhoods where mortgage loans were considered a high risk and lending was discouraged. Similar maps existed for all other major urban areas. You can explore the redlining maps for Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine, Madison, or other American cities via the Mapping Inequality website created by the University of Richmond. When exploring the maps on the website, be sure to click on the specific parts of the city to see scans of the original “Area Description” forms describing the neighborhoods, often invoking the racist and anti-immigrant views of the era. An example is shown below the redlining map of Milwaukee, for area D5 on that map (if you look at this area with the interactive maps on the Mapping Inequality site, you’ll see this neighborhood of the north side was later affected by major urban renewal projects and the western part of it was destroyed by construction of I-43, the North-South Freeway).

This is where the term “redlining” originally came from, but it’s important to note that most of the redlined neighborhoods of Milwaukee and some other midwestern cities had few if any Black residents at the time these maps were produced. For example, the “Inner Core” of Milwaukee where most African Americans lived at that time was shaded red, but so were other neighborhoods of the north and south side of the city that were inhabited mainly by lower-income first to third generation immigrants from Europe. These include some of the Polish-American neighborhoods discussed by Kenny, as well as what is now the Historic Third Ward. In Madison, part of the Greenbush neighborhood, home to both Italian-American immigrants and African Americans, was shaded red while the remainder is yellow (“Definitely Declining”). While redlining maps were no longer produced in later decades, lenders clearly kept and updated their own informal paper or mental maps of “hazardous” neighborhoods. Redlining discouraged home ownership and renovation of deteriorating housing in all of the redlined areas. Insurance companies also had a type of redlining, refusing to issue policies or charging higher premiums in certain neighborhoods. More recently, lenders have targeted subprime lending in historically redlined areas.

The key role played by redlining in Milwaukee was that it created well-defined zones in the city where housing deteriorated and home ownership was discouraged, most of which have eventually become predominantly Black or Latinx neighborhoods. At the same time, redlining created a major incentive for property owners in the largely white neighborhoods that were not redlined to prevent Black families from moving in, out of fear that would lead to a cutoff of lending or more expensive insurance (again, it is well worth looking at the detailed Area Description forms on the Mapping Inequality site, to see the role played by anti-immigrant and racist views in redlining from the beginning). Overall then, redlining played a major role in creating the present-day pattern of segregation in Milwaukee and similar cities, both by causing deterioration of housing in the neighborhoods now occupied mainly by people of color, and by creating additional incentives for white homeowners to support residential segregation. If you are interested in learning more about the lasting impacts of these policies, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition published a report in 2018 on the persistence of economic and racial segregation related to the redlining of many U.S. cities. Leah Foltman and Malia Jones of the UW Applied Population Lab also recently published a brief article on how historic redlining in Milwaukee continues to influence the contemporary racial segregation of the city.

Now let’s take another look at the map below from Wisconsin’s Past and Present. How did the Black neighborhoods of Milwaukee expand so much from 1940 to 1960, and even more from 1960 to 1980, if there was such strong resistance to Black families moving into white neighborhoods? First, remember that there was a major movement from older neighborhoods to new outlying subdivisions in cities across Wisconsin from the 1940s onward. In Milwaukee, this mainly involved movement from the old neighborhoods identified with specific ethnic groups, like the German neighborhoods of the northwest side or Polish neighborhoods of the south side. The residents who stayed in these neighborhoods were often older or had lower income, which made these areas vulnerable to “block busting.” Real estate agents or investors would rent or sell a few homes to African Americans looking for better housing outside the “Core.” The remaining white residents on those blocks, fearing that their property would lose value, sold it quickly at low prices, often to investors who then profited from selling or renting the same homes to Black families. This process contributed to “white flight,” or the movement of white urban residents to suburban areas.

This sequence of events was repeated many times in most large cities of the Midwest, not just Milwaukee. As this process unfolded, each of these cities was increasingly seen as divided simply into areas defined simply as “white” or “Black,” quite different from the complicated pattern of ethnic neighborhoods that could be mapped in the early twentieth century.

You may wonder whether the political leadership of Milwaukee took any action to reduce residential segregation, or prevent it from developing. This is an interesting question because the city was controlled politically by either the Socialist Party or the Democratic Party through much of the period we’re discussing, and both of these organizations had platforms centered on support for the interests of working people and improved social services available to all. Nevertheless, the political leadership of the city did little to change its segregated nature and in some cases actively resisted efforts to do so. Frank Zeidler, the last Socialist mayor, did make some attempts to address the issue of segregation, but it is widely believed that one reason he eventually decided not to run for re-election in the late 1950s was the strong resistance he encountered.

As the geography of the city was increasingly seen as a pattern of neighborhoods sharply divided by race, the public schools in Milwaukee became increasingly segregated. This was not legal (de jure) segregation of schools, as in the southern states at that time; instead it was de facto segregation resulted from the way the school board defined the areas served by neighborhood schools, so most schools were virtually all Black or all white. Schools with mostly African American students were often overcrowded and poorly funded, facts established in lawsuits during the 1960s. In this case also, the city’s political leaders generally supported the status quo and resisted efforts to break down segregation.

At this point, it’s worth thinking a little more critically about changes in how neighborhoods, or territories, in the city of Milwaukee were redefined and reconceptualized over the time we’ve just discussed, from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. The geographers Jenna Loyd and Anne Bonds recently critiqued the typical discourse regarding the zipcode 53206, which includes predominantly African-American neighborhoods on the north side of Milwaukee^[3]. These authors note a persistent set of ideas often held by both conservatives and liberals in the US, in which poverty, high unemployment, and crime are blamed on a “culture of poverty,” something inherent in the cultural background and lifestyle of particular groups of people. Furthermore, this concept is extended to say that particular places–like specific city neighborhoods or zipcodes–foster continued poverty and crime, again because of the supposed culture or lifestyle of their residents. As Loyd and Bonds emphasize, these recurrent explanations of poor, high-crime neighborhoods in terms of individual failings ignores key structural factors such as discrimination in hiring, redlining, deindustrialization (which we’ll discuss below), and a long history of neglect and hostility toward poor neighborhoods from city governments and police.

In fact, ideas very similar to the “culture of poverty” concept were once applied to working class neighborhoods of immigrants in the early twentieth century, which were stigmatized as hotbeds of irresponsible habits and crime and marked as “Hazardous” on the early redlining maps. However, Loyd and Bonds emphasize that these stigmatized places have become racialized in Milwaukee and elsewhere through the history we have just discussed: Black people were confined to particular parts of the city, which were then increasingly identified as the places that inherently produce persistent poverty, crime, and so forth. This in turn has been used to justify particular policing policies that have resulted in high rates of incarceration, and to support urban renewal projects that destroyed and displaced some Black neighborhoods.

Even as those policies were pursued in various forms, however, there were also campaigns to oppose discrimination in housing, police brutality, and segregation of the public schools, throughout the twentieth century. The most important of these took place in the 1960s (see Wisconsin’s Past and Present, p. 78). Marches, school boycotts, lawsuits, and a range of other actions targeted. The photo below is of a protest at a Board of Realtors meeting; the protesters carry signs with the names of suburbs where African Americans were discriminated against in renting or buying homes. In response to the protests, a city open housing ordinance was passed in 1968 to outlaw housing discrimination in Milwaukee, around the same time as the federal Fair Housing Act was passed by Congress, which also legally prohibited housing discrimination.

One remarkable episode in the many protest activities of the 1960s created long-lasting images in the minds of many in the Milwaukee area. These were the open housing marches from the north side, across 16th Street Viaduct (a long bridge over the Menomonee Valley which then separated the city’s white and Black communities) into the south side, and the counter-protests by white residents of the south side. The marches were led by the youth organization of the Milwaukee NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), Father James Groppi, and Vel Phillips, a member of the city council who had been fighting for an open housing ordinance for years. A typical march route and a photo from a march are shown below. Note that this route went through white working class neighborhoods to Kosciusko Park. Earlier, we saw that Kosciusko Park was a symbol of ties between south side residents and Polish history and culture. The marches continued for 200 days, with thousands of counter-protesters often surrounding a few hundred civil rights marchers, separated by large numbers of police. Many still photos and some television news footage of the marches are available through the UW-Milwaukee Libraries digital collections, if you are interested. Their “March on Milwaukee” website has a number of great resources including a timeline and a map of the marches. The marches ended when the city open housing ordinance was passed.

The demand made by the marchers was essentially just the opportunity to rent or buy homes outside the near north side. The article Polish Routes to Americanization noted the importance of homeownership and property to many immigrants and their descendants in Milwaukee, including the Polish-American neighborhoods of the south side. The reaction of counterprotesters from these neighborhoods, the slogans they used (often including “White Power” and other openly racist language), and their view of the protestors as invaders emphasize the degree to which their view of their property rights and their community had become racialized through the same processes that shape perceptions of zipcode 53206 and the north side in general.

The image below of the old Blatz brewery, now converted to condominiums, captures three distinct but related concepts on how the urban geography of Milwaukee has continued to change since the time of the 1960s protests. One of these concepts is deindustrialization. Beginning in the 1960s but especially in the ’70s and ’80s, industries that were once centrally located within cities have often either closed down or relocated to suburban areas (the Blatz brewery, near downtown, closed in 1959). For people in older city neighborhoods this often cut off access to good industrial jobs, lowering incomes and increasing unemployment. Deindustrialization had especially strong negative effects on African Americans and other minorities concentrated in older parts of cities like Milwaukee.

The conversion of the old brewery to upscale housing also illustrates the idea of New Urbanism. New Urbanism is a complicated set of ideas, based on the view that we have lost the sense of community that was present in older urban neighborhoods that allowed frequent interactions with neighbors, walking to stores and restaurants, and so forth. In a previous lecture we saw a kind New Urbanist development in Madison, designed to recreate that urban lifestyle. Another version of New Urbanist development can be described as: Creating housing and business districts that will draw affluent people back into the city, from the suburbs. The Blatz brewery redevelopment fits this concept, as does the Historic Third Ward and many other examples in older parts of Milwaukee. A final concept–cultural capital–plays a big role in most of those projects. Milwaukee’s cultural capital is its heritage as a blue-collar industrial city (a “Genuine American City”), turned into a theme that appeals to many new residents even if a lot of the industry is gone.

Now let’s jump ahead to the present decade. In some ways, the revitalization of downtown and some other neighborhoods is striking. Major corporations have moved their headquarters into the city, in part to attract employees with amenities ranging from the lake shore parks to the Deer District. Still, it’s not hard to find sharp boundaries that separate neighborhoods with very different average incomes, unemployment rates, health issues, housing quality, and incarceration rates, boundaries that originated in the segregation that developed over the twentieth century, although many have shifted geographically through gentrification and other processes. As the city government and business leaders have promoted redevelopment of industrial areas to attract young professionals back into the city, there have been frequent charges that this does not benefit and adds to the neglect of poor Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. Recent protests over controversial police shootings bring out the widespread sense within these neighborhoods that the police act as a occupying force; at the same time many responses from white Milwaukeeans and especially white suburbanites still reflect the idea that crime and violence are inherent to these places, somehow disconnected from the racism and segregation that produced them. Clearly, the geography of the city and how people view it still bears the mark of the history we’ve just reviewed, and city residents and visitors are influenced by their understanding of that geography as they make decisions about where to look for housing and about where they feel safe or welcome. The book Evicted, by Matthew Desmond, contains many examples of this as it follows Black and white residents of Milwaukee struggling to access and keep affordable housing.

With that background, it’s important to emphasize that the there is actually more ongoing change, complexity, and diversity in the human geography the city of Milwaukee than you may guess from popular perceptions or stories in the media. The Milwaukee area is still highly segregated, by income as well as race or ethnicity. You can see this using the simple dot-map below, which draws on data from the 2010 U.S. Census (this had not changed much in 2020). The dots represent density of population, by race/ethnicity as reported to the census. The map is centered on the Menomonee Valley, the east-west band that is blank because so few people live there. The blank area where the legend is located is Lake Michigan. This map shows the persistence of overwhelming white and Black neighborhoods, but also the presence of a large Latinx community and a growing Asian American population. While the boundaries between areas defined only by this single dimension of race/ethnicity are still sharp in many cases, some are fuzzier, and some neighborhoods within Milwaukee have clearly become more diverse in recent decades, for many different reasons. This could result from ongoing gentrification, in which case the diversity may not last as existing residents are displaced by rising housing costs, but that is not the only explanation. In addition, the average income level in some neighborhoods has changed significantly (the Historic Third Ward is an extreme example). While many of the suburbs, especially beyond the limits of Milwaukee County (beyond the limits of this map), are still overwhelmingly white, diversity is slowly increasing there as well. These changes often seem small or insignificant to long-time residents, but it’s important to recognize that the present-day human and economic geography of the city will continue to change as it has in the past, in response to economic changes but also to social movements like the civil rights protests of the 1960s.

For more information on this map, and for an interactive version for Milwaukee or other US cities, see http://demographics.coopercenter.org/racial-dot-map/. You may use a more sophisticated mapping tool (Social Explorer) for a project that is part of this urban geography module.

As we think about possible future changes in Milwaukee and the surrounding area, it’s important to keep in mind two factors that could clearly influence whether housing segregation (and associated economic divisions) will persist. The first is zoning, rules on land use usually made at a local level. Both the city of Milwaukee and surrounding suburbs closely regulate the type of housing that can be built in specific areas. For example, can it be multi-unit rental housing? Is there a minimum lot size for single family homes? These decisions greatly influence the diversity of the local population, in terms of both income and race or ethnicity. Remember those blocks of apartment buildings we looked at in the slide show on the development of the east side of Madison? Even though they’re confined to very limited areas, they strongly influence the overall diversity of that part of Madison. A recent complaint against Waukesha County (just west of Milwaukee) argued that zoning decisions limiting rental housing are a form of housing discrimination prohibited by the Fair Housing Act.

Second, there is good evidence that a simpler form of discrimination and exclusion of people of color from neighborhoods is still significant. After going through this lecture, listen to the podcast called Housing Rules (next item in this module), which describes simple tests that have been carried out around the country to detect discrimination against African American and Hispanic home buyers and renters. The same kind of tests have been carried out since the late 1970s, so we can actually look at how the level of discrimination is changing over time. Some key graphs from the 2012 report on Housing Discrimination Against Racial and Ethnic Minorities are shown below. Some types of housing discrimination have persisted without much change since the 1970s or 1980s, as the podcast emphasizes, but others have declined substantially. All of these forms of discrimination are illegal under the Fair Housing Act and other state and local rules, but it’s possible some persist longer because they are more subtle or easier to get away with. If you want to look at the whole report, it’s here.

Finally, as we try to understand the present geography of the Milwaukee area, and its possible future trends, it’s important to recognize that political and business leaders have actively worked to reshape and revitalize the city in recent decades. Those efforts have always been controversial and have disproportionately benefited white, well-to-do residents. The article you are assigned to read by Kenny and Zimmerman (“Constructing the ‘Genuine American City'”) discusses the policy of encouraging redevelopment within the central city, some of the ideas that underlie that effort, and its shortcomings. The article may be difficult reading but a lot of the ideas should be familiar by this point.

Here is a view of new housing along the Milwaukee River, built mainly on old industrial sites and bordered by older neighborhoods. View is looking west from the Humboldt Ave bridge, in the upper right of the map in Figure 5 of Kenny and Zimmerman’s article.