Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
I've never been to Milwaukee, but looking on population density maps, almost all of the hyper-dense tracts (15,000+ PPSM) are in Latino neighborhoods on the southern side of the city. The built vernacular there isn't incredibly urban. It looks like lots of cottage-style detached wood framed structures with a few larger homes mixed in. Many of them are split into two-units, and it looks like in some cases there might be houses in the alleys. But overall, I'm guessing the relatively high population densities come from a mixture of minimal urban blight (e.g., very few vacant lots or abandoned buildings) and a high number of people per household.
If other Midwestern cities besides Chicago and Milwaukee experienced substantial Hispanic migration, we'd probably see unusually dense neighborhoods of this sort in them as well. |
St. Louis would have definitely benefit from a Latino migration. It would easily be the second densest city in the Midwest if it hadn't lost 2/3rds of it's population. Remarkably, I feel that St. Louis still feels the 2nd most structurally dense in the Midwest outside Chicago.
You just don't see blocks in the Midwest like this outside Chicago and Cincinnati, which are the other two old world Midwestern cities.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.5672...7i13312!8i6656
Chicago is an interesting city, because it's definitely a Great Lake city through and through, but you can tell there was a lot of vernacular exchange between Chicago and St. Louis as well. There are architectural nuances that I see in St. Louis that I haven't seen in any other city besides Chicago.