1 Million Milwaukeeans. A South Bend Comparative.
1 Million Milwaukeeans Series: Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to speak with the Mayor of Milwaukee specifically on the topic of growing Milwaukee to 1 million people. The Mayor seems really in tune and willing to say: it’s not enough for there to be growth in the region, we need growth in the city limits itself. Over the next few weeks, I am going to be working on a series of comparatives for this substack to dive into the topic of 1 million milwaukeeans.
(Other Comparatives: Washington DC)
Over the last couple years, Joe Molnar (@JosephRMolnar), has written an excellent 7 part series and analysis of the history of South Bend Indiana, focusing on the the city's population growth, decline, and recent re-growth, called "More People."
For those that know Rust Belt cities like South Bend and Milwaukee, the story will sound eerily familiar. There was a long period of sustained growth beginning in the 1800s. The cities continued to grow during and after World War 2 as important industrial manufacturing hubs. At the same time, the cities & aligned private sector interests promoted a model of car-oriented suburbanization. Through political wrangling, the central cities lost their annexation capacity. Growth continued to suburbanize, but increasingly that growth was occurring exclusively outside the city limits with suburbanites returning for work and entertainment.
Molnar makes many astute observations about South Bend that I think are essentially true for Milwaukee as well. Here he summarizes them, but the series goes to great length to prove how each is true and contributed to city's population decline.
Read the series. It's well worth it.
But what I want to focus on is how South Bend shook off the rust and actually grew this past decade after experiencing core population declines since 1960. Here's a map of what household growth actually looked like between 2010 - 2020. The entire city experienced modest growth led by the core downtown.
If you had visited South Bend a decade ago, the downtown was a place you drove through. It was dominated a pair of huge, hostile one-way streets. The lights had been timed so if you drove exactly 30 miles per hour, you would hit every green light. So the experience of the city was lots of cars rolling through the downtown at medium speeds. There was no street life; it was a place you cruised through in about 3 minutes.
Downtown Streetview Circa 2009.
In a major downtown infrastructure project led by then Mayor, current US Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the streets were converted to 2-way. Bump outs were added at the crossing points to shorten pedestrian crossing distances. Things like refuge islands & roundabouts were added. It was a major public investment and the improvements in the pedestrian experience downtown were immediately noticeable.
Same Downtown Streetview Circa 2022
After decades of limited-to-no investment in the core besides government-led silver bullet projects, the market began to invest. Some of the historic building stock got renovated. Market rate new construction began to materialize. Today there's still a long way to go to be a best-in-class downtown, but there's a viable platform for coherent walkable growth and the city, investors, and residents seem well aligned to fulfill that vision.
The other big factor, in my opinion, is that add-on growth (hotels, stores, off-campus housing) related to Notre Dame (which is just outside the South Bend city limits and not part of the census population) was re-oriented from growing outward into St Joseph County and neighboring Mishawaka, to growing inward in the direction of downtown. I think this was the result of 3 major factors:
Those downtown improvements and re-growth has made downtown a more relevant & attractive node to grow towards.
There were significant streets improvements immediately around the campus that improved the walk and bikeability between the campus and North East South Bend neighborhoods.
A deliberate plan of re-investment by the University into the adjacent South Bend neighborhoods. Like many urban neighborhoods in the Rust Belt, the housing market had become deeply depressed with traditional financing in the neighborhoods adjacent to the University hard-to-impossible to come by. The University created a program to financially guarantee the value of houses built by university employees on vacant lots in the adjacent South Bend neighborhoods. Additionally, the University provided some financial backing to a medium-size mixed used commercial development also in the adjacent South Bend neighborhoods. In the last decade, those neighborhoods have stabilized and arms-length financing is now readily available.
The lesson for Milwaukee:
walkability and placemaking in key nodes is a growth creator & accelerator
find the major growth catalysts and remove physical & bureaucratic barriers to add-on growth adjacent. Milwaukee has major universities, a significant commercial downtown, parts of the city are adjacent to the major regional medical center. Marquette faculty could walk to work instead of commuting from Whitefish Bay or wherever.
Find the institutions that will step up and help unlock broken housing markets. There's lot of companies, schools, and institutions vested in the growth of Milwaukee, even the city government itself. We all know that the housing market is broken in much of the city. There's ways to guarantee housing values for employees until the adjacent local markets are rehabilitated.