Date of Award

May 2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Architecture

First Advisor

Brian Schermer

Committee Members

Sammis White, Lawrence Witzling, Kirk Harris

Keywords

Capital abandonment, City information modeling, Digital twin, Disinvestment, Expressway construction, Urban renewal

Abstract

This research conducts historic patterns analysis of the city of Milwaukee’s inner core housing submarkets from 1910-1970. The study time period captures Milwaukee in its most highly densified and industrialized state prior to suburbanization. To effectively assess the demographic, economic, spatial, and public policy implications of events in the housing submarkets, this research adopts a multi-disciplinary approach to provide a cohesive historical perspective in the city. Theoretically, this research relies on the literature about investment-disinvestment cycles, invasion-succession cycles, and the typo-morphology of the built environment. Methodologically, this research utilizes city information modeling (CIM) and digital twins to re-create conditions in Milwaukee’s housing submarkets. This approach produces an evidence-based assessment of housing geographies in the city’s inner core neighborhoods.

This research demonstrates that Milwaukee’s inner core informal housing submarkets developed as a result of deliberate action. Through a coordinated containment strategy over multiple decades, these geographies produced cumulative effects that negatively impacted the affected neighborhoods. On the part of City leadership, the decision making was a mix of ignorance, incompetence, and malice; but, the result was the same. Over a 60-year period, a “second-class city” was created in Milwaukee’s inner core neighborhoods based on class, ethnicity, and race. This research identifies three key periods between 1910-1970 that thematically demonstrate inflection points in the city’s inner core housing submarkets: the densification and industrialization of 1910-1930, the distributed spatial economy and stagnation of 1930-1950, and the disruption of expressway development and urban renewal from 1950-1970.

By 1910-1930, Milwaukee reached a new era in its city structure, daily activity, and economic productivity. The city had never previously been as dense or industrialized as it became by the 1910s. While this became a point of pride for City leadership, it also revealed challenging concerns that had not previously been encountered: unsanitary neighborhood conditions, overcrowding in housing units, and deterioration in the central business district. Simultaneous to this uncomfortable epiphany, the emergence of a new era of American urban intellectualism began with Garden Cities, decentralization, and Progressive Reformers. This convergence of ideas and challenges produced Milwaukee’s response: the designations of select wards as slum districts in 1916, the City’s first zoning code in 1920, the City’s first platting regulations in 1924, and the development of the Garden Homes public housing project. While these reforms were highly regarded and lauded for their Progressivism, they simultaneously produced a “second class” city in the inner core neighborhoods. Through a strategy of containment and defensible space, Milwaukee’s reforms confined lower-income and working-class neighborhoods of multiple ethnicities and races to an early version of the Iron Ring. This juxtaposition created a paradoxical environment of seemingly well-intentioned public policy that contained implicit and explicit segregationist motivations and consequences that developed the spatial genesis for what would become Milwaukee’s informal, inner core housing submarkets.

The Great Depression and World War II cast controlling shadows over the 1930s and 1940s. What can appropriately be called the “Lost Years” or the “Stagnant Years,” Milwaukee could not keep pace with infrastructure investments and the city’s housing submarkets were largely inactive until the mid-1940s. This period was a study in contrasts. The Federal government adopted an interventionist approach in housing markets through a series of Housing Acts in the 1930s that produced the nation’s first public housing developments, national standards for home credit underwriting, and a financial system to backstop the home mortgage market. This was all predicated on a new period of urban intellectualism that saw a strong focus on city structure, neighborhood compatibility, and comprehensive planning. Conversely, the Milwaukee Common Council – though it was aware of the severity of conditions – refused to substantively act and engaged in almost 15 years of obstructionism preventing any meaningful reform. This intransigence and neglect on the part of City leadership produced an acuteness of deterioration in the inner core housing submarkets whereby numerous ethnic and racial communities were contained in stagnant conditions. Simultaneously, Milwaukee continued to decentralize and de-populate the city’s economy and residents to its rural periphery. This began producing a disparate spatial economy that juxtaposed the mixed-use, interconnected inner core neighborhoods with suburban fringe development. Because Black residents were contained to Milwaukee’s Negro District, only White residents were able to access the fringe housing. This – in conjunction with the Second Great Migration – catalyzed the racialization of the city’s housing submarkets and clearly demarcated the inner core informal submarkets from the formal submarkets on the periphery.

The post-World War II era represented an expansive new beginning for the United States. After enduring the economic collapse of the Great Depression and material restrictions for war production, all levels of American government and average citizens alike were eager to embrace prosperity. The Housing Act of 1949 heralded a new urban paradigm in American cities as it codified the urban renewal program into law. The economic hypotheses for urban renewal and expressway development expressed an idealism in the potential for the rehabilitation and redevelopment of deteriorated neighborhoods. However, when that high-mindedness collided with the complex reality of the socio-cultural, economic, and spatial characters of individual neighborhoods, the consequences were devastating. Milwaukee’s urban renewal project areas and expressway routes were especially damaging to the inner core neighborhoods, which all shared the distinction as lower-income and working-class communities of various ethnicities and races. The displacement of households resulting from neighborhood clearance operations resulted in distortions to housing submarkets. White households benefited from a higher degree of housing mobility to leave inner core submarkets, which further exacerbated the depopulation of Milwaukee’s central area. In contrast, Black households were contained in and around the Negro District with a limited, lower quality housing supply. Ironically, while urban renewal and expressway development were meant to revitalize inner core neighborhoods, they did the opposite. While Milwaukee’s historical segregative geographies were an evolving mix of socio-cultural behaviors and market controls, urban renewal and expressway development gave them permanence.

Much of contemporary Milwaukee’s most challenging conditions in the inner core neighborhoods can be traced to the pivotal decades of 1910-1970. Importantly, these conditions cannot be viewed as solely the product or problem of the modern era, however. They are historical remnants of decision making and the inheritance of previous City leadership that remade Milwaukee’s inner core housing submarkets. To properly address neighborhood conditions, contemporary decision makers must heed the warnings of Milwaukee’s historic housing patterns. This research serves this purpose by recreating the historic structure and evolutionary process of the city’s inner core housing submarkets, thereby creating a guidebook of observations and lessons learned for decision makers.

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