EastSider
May 18th, 2005, 05:04 AM
I was reading some old articles that came out from the Journal Sentinel a year and half ago, and it inspired me to start a thread about it. The Journal came out with a 3-series article about the economic state in Milwaukee's inner-city.
I'd like to start a discussion about the state of the Midwest's inner-cities.
http://graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/news/img/dec04/brownJ4120404.jpg
Photo/Gary Porter
Let's start with some facts:
In 1970, at the city's industrial peak, the black poverty rate in Milwaukee was 22% lower than the U.S. black average. That turned around by 2000, when the black poverty rate was 34% higher than the national figure. Among the nation's 20 most populous cities in 2000, Milwaukee had the highest rate of black poverty.
In 1970, the median family income for African-Americans in Milwaukee was 19% higher than the U.S. median income for black families. By 2000, the black family income in Milwaukee was 23% lower than the national figure. In the 2000 census, Milwaukee fell to 49th among the nation's 50 largest metro areas in racial disparities in income.
Milwaukee had the highest black unemployment rate of the major cities surveyed in 2002 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau also found that 59% of Milwaukee's black males 16 and older were idle, and that the city's black unemployment rate was more than three times its white unemployment rate.
In 2003, an estimated 48% of Milwaukee black children under age 5 lived in poverty. Nationally, the Census Bureau estimated that 39% of all black children under 5 were living below the poverty level.
Wisconsin - where three of every four African-Americans live in Milwaukee - has the nation's highest rates of black teenage births and black incarceration, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and U.S. Justice Department, respectively.
Quotes about the economic situation:
"I don't need arguments of racial discrimination or integration to explain why Milwaukee does as badly," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
"When you deindustrialize white towns, you see the same phenomenon," Sum said. "Earnings fall. Marriage rates go down. Out-of-wedlock birthrates rise. You see the same behavior as you would in what we normally attribute as the urban underclass."
Before he agreed to be interviewed, Sum independently analyzed Milwaukee's census data in his own computerized "regression model" that compared the city's demographic, educational, economic and labor-market variables with those of the nation's 30 biggest cities. "If you had anything like that in the rest of the country, you would call that a massive depression," Sum said.
The city became a blue collar boomtown because it was once a hotbed of industrial innovation, a sort of heavy-manufacturing version of Silicon Valley. But when the industrial combines went out of business, the Midwest economy splintered into a spectrum of smaller, more agile high-skill firms that no longer rely on migrant or immigrant labor.
So what is Milwaukee doing about it?
The last time Milwaukee launched a conspicuous rescue effort in an economically stricken neighborhood, it spared few expenses and emptied the toolbox of 20th-century urban renewal strategies.
Steeltech Manufacturing Inc. opened in the early 1990s. In Metcalfe Park, one of Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods, parks and houses were cleared to make way for a gleaming $32 million steel refinishing plant.
Civic and business leaders were hoping to replicate the old model of factory job creation for a Northern industrial city. Steeltech trained the unemployed as welders. Minority managers received majority stakes. The plant began life with a $66 million federal contract, five forms of state and federal funds, loans from six banks, its own special tax district and 42 lawyers.
It failed spectacularly.
Aware that Milwaukee needs a come-from-behind strategy, initiative staffers have begun to assemble a new urban revitalization toolbox meant to catalyze the incubators of free enterprise, regardless of the entrepreneur's race, while supporting existing companies in the urban core.
Experts from Boston's Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, founded by one of Harvard's leading economic theorists, have flown to Milwaukee to draft long-term strategies. Last year, they published a 60-page prospectus that maps out business opportunities. The prospectus lists four sectors that hold the most promise in Milwaukee's urban core: back-office service firms to support the region's strong financial and insurance industries; health services, which feed off the city's cluster of medical technology industries; manufacturing, a Milwaukee mainstay that still employs one in five central-city workers in the city; and construction, which can capitalize on a big slate of planned public-works projects.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Marquette University have provided urban policy experts and are contouring curriculum into "advancement tracks." Eager to breathe life back into unused urban land, for example, Marquette is training minority students to find a new life for old commercial real estate.
"I think you'd be surprised to find that there are some 5,000 businesses in the inner city of Milwaukee, employing 120,000 people," said Katherine M. Hudson, former chief executive of Milwaukee-based Brady Corp. and one of the initiative's most passionate backers.
All this information has been copy/pasted for the Series that was published in the Journal Sentinel. I, in no way, did justice to these articles, so I apologize for any misleading editing. Since the articles were printed, more initiatives have been brought about by the city, and public groups. Examples include the proposed minimum wage increase, and the sustainable development guidelines brought on by the Menomonee Valley(Milwaukee's late industrial core) redevelopment, which is making huge strides.RenewTheValley.org (http://renewthevalley.org/index.html)
I'd like to start a discussion about the state of the Midwest's inner-cities.
http://graphics.jsonline.com/graphics/news/img/dec04/brownJ4120404.jpg
Photo/Gary Porter
Let's start with some facts:
In 1970, at the city's industrial peak, the black poverty rate in Milwaukee was 22% lower than the U.S. black average. That turned around by 2000, when the black poverty rate was 34% higher than the national figure. Among the nation's 20 most populous cities in 2000, Milwaukee had the highest rate of black poverty.
In 1970, the median family income for African-Americans in Milwaukee was 19% higher than the U.S. median income for black families. By 2000, the black family income in Milwaukee was 23% lower than the national figure. In the 2000 census, Milwaukee fell to 49th among the nation's 50 largest metro areas in racial disparities in income.
Milwaukee had the highest black unemployment rate of the major cities surveyed in 2002 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The bureau also found that 59% of Milwaukee's black males 16 and older were idle, and that the city's black unemployment rate was more than three times its white unemployment rate.
In 2003, an estimated 48% of Milwaukee black children under age 5 lived in poverty. Nationally, the Census Bureau estimated that 39% of all black children under 5 were living below the poverty level.
Wisconsin - where three of every four African-Americans live in Milwaukee - has the nation's highest rates of black teenage births and black incarceration, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and U.S. Justice Department, respectively.
Quotes about the economic situation:
"I don't need arguments of racial discrimination or integration to explain why Milwaukee does as badly," said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
"When you deindustrialize white towns, you see the same phenomenon," Sum said. "Earnings fall. Marriage rates go down. Out-of-wedlock birthrates rise. You see the same behavior as you would in what we normally attribute as the urban underclass."
Before he agreed to be interviewed, Sum independently analyzed Milwaukee's census data in his own computerized "regression model" that compared the city's demographic, educational, economic and labor-market variables with those of the nation's 30 biggest cities. "If you had anything like that in the rest of the country, you would call that a massive depression," Sum said.
The city became a blue collar boomtown because it was once a hotbed of industrial innovation, a sort of heavy-manufacturing version of Silicon Valley. But when the industrial combines went out of business, the Midwest economy splintered into a spectrum of smaller, more agile high-skill firms that no longer rely on migrant or immigrant labor.
So what is Milwaukee doing about it?
The last time Milwaukee launched a conspicuous rescue effort in an economically stricken neighborhood, it spared few expenses and emptied the toolbox of 20th-century urban renewal strategies.
Steeltech Manufacturing Inc. opened in the early 1990s. In Metcalfe Park, one of Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods, parks and houses were cleared to make way for a gleaming $32 million steel refinishing plant.
Civic and business leaders were hoping to replicate the old model of factory job creation for a Northern industrial city. Steeltech trained the unemployed as welders. Minority managers received majority stakes. The plant began life with a $66 million federal contract, five forms of state and federal funds, loans from six banks, its own special tax district and 42 lawyers.
It failed spectacularly.
Aware that Milwaukee needs a come-from-behind strategy, initiative staffers have begun to assemble a new urban revitalization toolbox meant to catalyze the incubators of free enterprise, regardless of the entrepreneur's race, while supporting existing companies in the urban core.
Experts from Boston's Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, founded by one of Harvard's leading economic theorists, have flown to Milwaukee to draft long-term strategies. Last year, they published a 60-page prospectus that maps out business opportunities. The prospectus lists four sectors that hold the most promise in Milwaukee's urban core: back-office service firms to support the region's strong financial and insurance industries; health services, which feed off the city's cluster of medical technology industries; manufacturing, a Milwaukee mainstay that still employs one in five central-city workers in the city; and construction, which can capitalize on a big slate of planned public-works projects.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Marquette University have provided urban policy experts and are contouring curriculum into "advancement tracks." Eager to breathe life back into unused urban land, for example, Marquette is training minority students to find a new life for old commercial real estate.
"I think you'd be surprised to find that there are some 5,000 businesses in the inner city of Milwaukee, employing 120,000 people," said Katherine M. Hudson, former chief executive of Milwaukee-based Brady Corp. and one of the initiative's most passionate backers.
All this information has been copy/pasted for the Series that was published in the Journal Sentinel. I, in no way, did justice to these articles, so I apologize for any misleading editing. Since the articles were printed, more initiatives have been brought about by the city, and public groups. Examples include the proposed minimum wage increase, and the sustainable development guidelines brought on by the Menomonee Valley(Milwaukee's late industrial core) redevelopment, which is making huge strides.RenewTheValley.org (http://renewthevalley.org/index.html)