Milwaukee's Mayor Johnson wants 1 million residents

[Steely Dan]

Silly hyperbole of the headline aside, it looks like the Cream City wants to jump on board the upzoning/ADU express!

Mayor Johnson wants 1 million residents. City Hall has a plan to encourage more housing
Tom Daykin
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson wants the city to eventually have 1 million residents − and his Department of City Development is working on a plan to encourage more housing construction.

Growing MKE calls for such things as allowing townhouses, duplexes and other similar style homes on all residentially zoned parcels; permitting triplexes and fourplexes on parcels zoned for duplexes, and allowing more apartment buildings with up to eight units in denser neighborhoods served by mass transit.

The plan's recommendations also include creating predictable height standards for apartment and condominium buildings while removing limits on the number of dwelling units; updating design standards for those developments, and reducing their minimum parking space requirements.

The general idea: encourage construction of more housing with a focus on density, walkability and more options − including affordable choices.

Full article: https://www.jsonline.com/story/money...s/71476783007/

[iheartthed]

Does Milwaukee have good mass transit? A population of 1 million in Milwaukee would bring it in line with Chicago on density, so they will need a robust mass transit system.

[Steely Dan]

Milwaukee's city population will NOT be approaching 1M people anytime soon.

That's just attention-grabbing hyperbole.

It would require a population increase of 73% over the city's 2020 population of 577K.

Even if every single plot of land in the city was rezoned for a mega-tall, that kind of growth simply does not happen in old rust belt cities.

A much more realistic goal for the city would be to grow back over the 600K threshold by the end of the decade.



As for transit, Milwaukee is pretty weak.

A grossly underfunded bus system (welcome to America), and a relatively rinky-dink downtown streetcar dealie.

[mhays]

Nothing wrong with being aspirational. The missing-middle concept is certainly admirable. Yes the target sounds like hyperbole.

But who knows, maybe the city will gain steam at some point. Climate change could be a big factor.

My own city, Seattle, had barely come out of its 1980s nadir of 486,000 when new planning anticipated getting to the 700s. It happened in the end.

[Randomguy34]

Here are the draft recommendations: https://dailyreporter.com/wp-content...ons-Report.pdf

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

Milwaukee's city population will NOT be approaching 1M people anytime soon.

That's just attention-grabbing hyperbole.

It would require a population increase of 73% over the city's 2020 population of 577K.

Even if every single plot of land in the city was rezoned for a mega-tall, that kind of growth simply does not happen in old rust belt cities.

A much more realistic goal for the city would be to grow back over the 600K threshold by the end of the decade.



As for transit, Milwaukee is pretty weak.

A grossly underfunded bus system (welcome to America), and a relatively rinky-dink downtown streetcar dealie.

I actually think the Milwaukee mayor is hitting on a key cause of population decline in the Rust Belt. Most of the Rust Belt cities are built out but they haven't transitioned to upzoning already developed areas for density.

[homebucket]

Does Milwaukee have a modern and robust enough economy to stimulate such growth (demand)? I'm not sure if it's possible just by building more housing (increased supply) alone.

I imagine being so close (roughly the same distance from SF to Sacramento) to Chicago, limits its demand/job growth prospects in the same way SF suppresses Sacramento, if I can think of a local analogue.

[iheartthed]

Growth and density itself will be an economic generator of its own. A lot of hollowed out Rust Belt cities are missing a ton of local service businesses in their economies because they lack the critical density to support them. The act of densifying alone will have spin off economic effect.

[mhays]

I don't believe that. Retail spending won't change much per capita due to density. It'll just go do different places vs. the same growth in suburban form.

A person might have more unassigned spending money by avoiding a car, but they would also tend to pay higher rent in a growing urban district.

You can attract some urbanists by being a denser, more vibrant city, but the net plus won't be huge.

Growth itself will spur some activity but also new costs.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by mhays

I don't believe that. Retail spending won't change much per capita due to density. It'll just go do different places vs. the same growth in suburban form.

A person might have more unassigned spending money by avoiding a car, but they would also tend to pay higher rent in a growing urban district.

You can attract some urbanists by being a denser, more vibrant city, but the net plus won't be huge.

Growth itself will spur some activity but also new costs.

If there is no economic spin off then okay, but that isn't an argument against upzoning. However, it is not exactly a radical idea that low density zoning could be artificially depressing the local economy if it prevents the density to support local service businesses. You should be seeing this firsthand in Seattle. I've seen many neighborhoods in NYC transform after they were zoned for higher density.

If they do upzone in Milwaukee and experience the accompanying development boom then the growth will come from populations that likely do not live in Milwaukee now. People are not likely to trade their suburban house for an apartment in the city. But it could attract population growth that typically avoided Milwaukee before. Particularly immigrants and younger Americans in their early career.

[Tom In Chicago]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

As for transit, Milwaukee is pretty weak.

A grossly underfunded bus system (welcome to America), and a relatively rinky-dink downtown streetcar dealie.

Hey, I rode that thing last Saturday for about 3 blocks. . . it was free and I had no idea until this past summer that Milwaukee even had a light rail system!

. . .

[sentinel]

Can Chicago and Milwaukee swap Mayor Johnsons?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by mhays

My own city, Seattle, had barely come out of its 1980s nadir of 486,000 when new planning anticipated getting to the 700s. It happened in the end.

Well, yes, but Milwaukee and Seattle occupy different universes when it comes to growth over the past half century.


MSA growth 1970 -2020:

Seattle: 120%
Milwaukee: 12%


Seattle city proper was bound to capture some of its exploding metro population over the past 50 years.

Metro Milwaukee has been relatively stagnant by comparison, thus prospects for major, city proper growth are much dimmer.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

I actually think the Milwaukee mayor is hitting on a key cause of population decline in the Rust Belt. Most of the Rust Belt cities are built out but they haven't transitioned to upzoning already developed areas for density.

For sure, household size decrease is a huge part of the population decline, so built-out cities like Milwaukee can only ever hope to grow again by densely upping the number of housing units.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

If there is no economic spin off then okay, but that isn't an argument against upzoning. However, it is not exactly a radical idea that low density zoning could be artificially depressing the local economy if it prevents the density to support local service businesses. You should be seeing this firsthand in Seattle. I've seen many neighborhoods in NYC transform after they were zoned for higher density.

If they do upzone in Milwaukee and experience the accompanying development boom then the growth will come from populations that likely do not live in Milwaukee now. People are not likely to trade their suburban house for an apartment in the city. But it could attract population growth that typically avoided Milwaukee before. Particularly immigrants and younger Americans in their early career.

It's not an argument against upzoning. Density is important for a variety of reasons, including sprawl reduction (which also needs outer barriers) and vibrant neighborhoods.

Low density doesn't prevent spending at local businesses. Mostly, it pushes the same dollars from walkable districts to strip malls. There are a million variables here, but that's the baseline shift.

Seattle has seen some benefits but also some negatives, some counterintuitive. This pains me as a militant pedestrian with no car, but it turns out parking lots can be important to business districts. They often bring in far more customers than the buildings that replace them. Brooklyn retail streets can do well purely based on walking and transit, but tweener districts seem to need both.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by mhays

Seattle has seen some benefits but also some negatives, some counterintuitive. This pains me as a militant pedestrian with no car, but it turns out parking lots can be important to business districts. They often bring in far more customers than the buildings that replace them. Brooklyn retail streets can do well purely based on walking and transit, but tweener districts seem to need both.

That's true, car storage is unfortunately still a necessary evil for most most "tweener urban" (10K - 30K ppsm supporting residential density) neighborhood commercial nodes/corridors.

But the form of said parking stil matters too.

In the commercial district in my neighborhood (~20K ppsm supporting residential density), construction recently started on a 63 unit midrise that replaced a surface parking lot that was HEAVILY used by customers going to the adjoining neighborhood shopping district around the corner from it.

The business owners SCREAMED AND HOWLED about how the loss of the parking lot would kill their businesses.

The compromise that was able to get approved: add a public parking garage on the second floor of the new development to replace the lost public parking.

Certainly not a perfect solution, but still light years better than that stupid fucking old surface parking lot that was there.

[mhays]

The developer must be losing money on it (to get approval), unless they're subsidized. Even if it's paid parking, it won't pay enough.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by mhays

The developer must be losing money on it (to get approval), unless they're subsidized. Even if it's paid parking, it won't pay enough.

The entire project is being developed by an "affordable housing" group, with lots of government money and tax incentives in the pot, so I'm sure the parking compromise was all worked out as part of the grand deal.

[hauntedheadnc]

If he manages to hit that goal, I bet he calls up all the other mayors and lets them listen to this over the phone:

• Video Link

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by mhays

Low density doesn't prevent spending at local businesses. Mostly, it pushes the same dollars from walkable districts to strip malls. There are a million variables here, but that's the baseline shift.

There will likely need to be more physical locations of service businesses to serve the same number of people in a dense area than in a low density area. This is due to the higher cost of space and the proximity advantage that becomes a competitive differentiator in dense cities. This means that more stores and more jobs are created from density (and might also contribute to a higher cost for goods and services).