Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Yep. Relative to american urbanism, milwaukee punches WAY above its metro area size. Milwaukee has a lot more people living in higher denisty census tracts (>10,000ppsm) than any other Midwest city not named chicago, despite only being the 10th largest MSA in the region.
Milwaukee is exhibit A of why you should never judge a city by its MSA population figure.
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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.