Some lesser known justice facts about Milwaukee & Wisconsin
[Updated, 8/16] Media and others interpreting civil unrest in Milwaukee might want to dig deeper into a few issues:
* Cities are creatures of the state in Wisconsin, and during the Scott Walker era, Milwaukee has lost state-supplied revenue - - the program dates back decades as a substitute for local income tax collections - - and also lost the ability to expand its budget above state-mandated limits.
* The "hypersegregation" label applied to Milwaukee is regional, tolerated for decades.
Many of these issues and impacts have been studied and reported to death, but the state and region resist meaningful change.
* The state put a permanent limitation on Milwaukee's growth, tax base, job market and citizen opportunities when it froze the city's borders in 1955 through the so-called anti-annexation "Oak Creek Law."
As a result, suburbanization around Milwaukee boomed, and with it also a proliferation of discriminatory housing local ordinances which, though ruled illegal years later, remain camouflaged through legal substitutes mandating expensive home construction site and interior dimensions (in Chenequa, in Waukesha County, for example) or Mequon's decades-long five-acre lot minimum, now eased, that effectively kept residency upper-income and predominately white in that Ozaukee County community.
[Updated] SEWRPC, with staff and headquarters in Western Waukesha County that is far from Milwaukee, literally and philosophically - - and not even on a transit line - - prepares influential studies, provides technical assistance to governmental agencies in matters such as housing, water and transportation, and has the power to approve certain highway projects paid for with federal funds.
All effect job creation, access, distribution, and economic opportunity.
The commission's makeup, focus and output is heavily suburban and exurban.
Each of the counties has three commission seats. For most of its existence, the commission had no African-American members.
Most of the region has higher incomes and housing values than does Milwaukee.
Commissioner appointments are controlled by the Governor and the counties.
The City of Milwaukee, with a population larger than all the non-Milwaukee counties, and by far the largest number of transit dependent, minority and low-income residents in the region and state, has no designated commission seat or appointing authority.
Yet the commission's budget comes 100% from taxes, so the city of Milwaukee and its residents are taxed without representation for commission purposes.
More financial unfairness: Milwaukee County, which has the same number - - three - - of commissioners as do the other six counties, including far smaller and still rural Walworth, for example, picks up 33% of the counties' annual tax contributions to SEWRPC, according to the agency's most recent, and relatively stable budget.
I noted SEWRPC's disconnect from minorities in this blog's first month in February, 2007.
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In recent years, the commission did establish a task force on economic justice, but only after initial resistance and successful pressure from citizen and civil rights organizations.
The same kind of pressure recently led to federal civil rights litigation which forced the state to add a relative pittance - - about $13 million dollars worth of temporary transit services - - to a billion-dollar regional highway expansion at Milwaukee's western border with more affluent, faster-growing Waukesha County which the state is building at the recommendation of the commission.
More billions have been spent and will be added in future years to the same freeway expansion principally serving white, affluent areas in the region without transit extensions.
* Waukesha County, GOP state legislators, and then-GOP Gov.Tommy Thompson blocked light rail connections between the City of Milwaukee and Waukesha County then went further and blocked light rail development within the City of Milwaukee.
A summary story about light rail, regional politics and disparities and SEWRPC, here.
Some years later, Waukesha County officials pulled the plug on a jointly-funded bus line that connected the two counties, thus depriving Milwaukee residents of reasonable access to out-county jobs who, in large numbers, have no access to an automobile.
* As has been par for the course, the state just helped win for the City of Waukesha a jobs-and-growth guaranteeing diversion of water from Lake Michigan.
SEWRPC had already recommended Lake Michigan water transfers to communities, including Waukesha.
In other words, state and regional policies have kept Milwaukee and its residents land-locked, economically stunted, disconnected from neighboring wealthier, whiter areas and thus segregated - - regionally - - by race and economic status.
* Add in Walker's failed job-creation policies, his scandal-ridden and failed job-creation agency, his refusal to allow the minimum wage to rise above the poverty-enforcing level of $7.25/hr. and his deletion of tens of thousands of poor people from food stamp roles - - summary posting, here - - what do you think the ripple effects have been and will continue to be in the Wisconsin city with the largest number of low-income and unemployed people?
This blog has covered these issues for nearly ten years. There are hundreds of posts with supporting documentation. Use the index box at the upper left.
if we're going to have a discussion about segregation, let's look at the bigger picture.
* Cities are creatures of the state in Wisconsin, and during the Scott Walker era, Milwaukee has lost state-supplied revenue - - the program dates back decades as a substitute for local income tax collections - - and also lost the ability to expand its budget above state-mandated limits.
* The "hypersegregation" label applied to Milwaukee is regional, tolerated for decades.
Many of these issues and impacts have been studied and reported to death, but the state and region resist meaningful change.
* The state put a permanent limitation on Milwaukee's growth, tax base, job market and citizen opportunities when it froze the city's borders in 1955 through the so-called anti-annexation "Oak Creek Law."
As a result, suburbanization around Milwaukee boomed, and with it also a proliferation of discriminatory housing local ordinances which, though ruled illegal years later, remain camouflaged through legal substitutes mandating expensive home construction site and interior dimensions (in Chenequa, in Waukesha County, for example) or Mequon's decades-long five-acre lot minimum, now eased, that effectively kept residency upper-income and predominately white in that Ozaukee County community.
No other Wisconsin municipality has had its borders - - and its future - - politicized, influenced and fixed by a special state law:
Through the use of restrictive covenants, exclusionary zoning, and aggressive police patrols, these suburbs have over the years tried to keep the City of Milwaukee, as a real and symbolic embodiment of the “urban,” out of their self-styled sanctuaries. These policies, in turn, have had the effect of concentrating the poor, people of color, single moms, and unemployed young men in the City of Milwaukee itself. The new suburbs form what [historian John] Gurda calls the “iron ring” around the City of Milwaukee, and there is no obvious way to break through the ring.
* The state created a seven-county Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission in the late 1960's made up of Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Walworth, Ozaukee, Washington and Waukesha Counties.Interestingly enough, the new suburbs are the very communities in which support for Governor Walker is strongest.
[Updated] SEWRPC, with staff and headquarters in Western Waukesha County that is far from Milwaukee, literally and philosophically - - and not even on a transit line - - prepares influential studies, provides technical assistance to governmental agencies in matters such as housing, water and transportation, and has the power to approve certain highway projects paid for with federal funds.
All effect job creation, access, distribution, and economic opportunity.
The commission's makeup, focus and output is heavily suburban and exurban.
Each of the counties has three commission seats. For most of its existence, the commission had no African-American members.
Most of the region has higher incomes and housing values than does Milwaukee.
Commissioner appointments are controlled by the Governor and the counties.
The City of Milwaukee, with a population larger than all the non-Milwaukee counties, and by far the largest number of transit dependent, minority and low-income residents in the region and state, has no designated commission seat or appointing authority.
Yet the commission's budget comes 100% from taxes, so the city of Milwaukee and its residents are taxed without representation for commission purposes.
More financial unfairness: Milwaukee County, which has the same number - - three - - of commissioners as do the other six counties, including far smaller and still rural Walworth, for example, picks up 33% of the counties' annual tax contributions to SEWRPC, according to the agency's most recent, and relatively stable budget.
I noted SEWRPC's disconnect from minorities in this blog's first month in February, 2007.
------------------------------------
The Wisconsin ACLU, from its Milwaukee offices, has rightly told the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission that the agency is moving far too slowly with the formation of a task force on environmental justice.
SEWRPC has had months to get this outreach effort underway but has not made task force appointments and is not aggressively getting input on appointees from communities to whom this long-overdue outreach effort is aimed, the ACLU says in its new release.
With its laissez-faire approach, SEWRPC is skating on thin ice with watchdog groups like the ACLU, and federal regulators who could use federal civil rights to light a fire under SEWRPC, as the ACLU further reminds SEWRPC by letter.
The Pewaukee-based agency already has minimal credibilty with large sections of the region because of its pro-suburban history, and giving the task force formation a low priority only reinforces SEWRPC's negative image.
At this very moment, SEWRPC and other entities are discussing major changes to transit and water management policies that will guide development in the region for generations, and will therefore profoundly impact low-income residents.
Yet those residents are regularly shut out of many of these policy discussions - - a problem the environmental justice task force could help remedy.
If SEWRPC had a comprehensive planning strategy and a more inclusive mentality, it wouldn't need an environmental justice task force in the first place: its commissioners and multiple committees would have integrated genuine environmental justice principles and goals into all their work as a matter of routine.
For example, if environmental justice were an important thread in SEWRPC operations, its last housing plan for our heavily-segregated region wouldn't have been done in 1975, and SEWRPC would have been a champion for transit expansion, not $6.6 billion in new, suburb-serving freeways lanes.
It's a disgrace that community groups representing low-income and minority populations had to demand a task force in the first place, and reprehensible that SEWRPC continues to drag its feet on its implementation.
SEWRPC has had months to get this outreach effort underway but has not made task force appointments and is not aggressively getting input on appointees from communities to whom this long-overdue outreach effort is aimed, the ACLU says in its new release.
With its laissez-faire approach, SEWRPC is skating on thin ice with watchdog groups like the ACLU, and federal regulators who could use federal civil rights to light a fire under SEWRPC, as the ACLU further reminds SEWRPC by letter.
The Pewaukee-based agency already has minimal credibilty with large sections of the region because of its pro-suburban history, and giving the task force formation a low priority only reinforces SEWRPC's negative image.
At this very moment, SEWRPC and other entities are discussing major changes to transit and water management policies that will guide development in the region for generations, and will therefore profoundly impact low-income residents.
Yet those residents are regularly shut out of many of these policy discussions - - a problem the environmental justice task force could help remedy.
If SEWRPC had a comprehensive planning strategy and a more inclusive mentality, it wouldn't need an environmental justice task force in the first place: its commissioners and multiple committees would have integrated genuine environmental justice principles and goals into all their work as a matter of routine.
For example, if environmental justice were an important thread in SEWRPC operations, its last housing plan for our heavily-segregated region wouldn't have been done in 1975, and SEWRPC would have been a champion for transit expansion, not $6.6 billion in new, suburb-serving freeways lanes.
It's a disgrace that community groups representing low-income and minority populations had to demand a task force in the first place, and reprehensible that SEWRPC continues to drag its feet on its implementation.
-----------------------------------------------
In recent years, the commission did establish a task force on economic justice, but only after initial resistance and successful pressure from citizen and civil rights organizations.
The same kind of pressure recently led to federal civil rights litigation which forced the state to add a relative pittance - - about $13 million dollars worth of temporary transit services - - to a billion-dollar regional highway expansion at Milwaukee's western border with more affluent, faster-growing Waukesha County which the state is building at the recommendation of the commission.
More billions have been spent and will be added in future years to the same freeway expansion principally serving white, affluent areas in the region without transit extensions.
* Waukesha County, GOP state legislators, and then-GOP Gov.Tommy Thompson blocked light rail connections between the City of Milwaukee and Waukesha County then went further and blocked light rail development within the City of Milwaukee.
A summary story about light rail, regional politics and disparities and SEWRPC, here.
Some years later, Waukesha County officials pulled the plug on a jointly-funded bus line that connected the two counties, thus depriving Milwaukee residents of reasonable access to out-county jobs who, in large numbers, have no access to an automobile.
* As has been par for the course, the state just helped win for the City of Waukesha a jobs-and-growth guaranteeing diversion of water from Lake Michigan.
SEWRPC had already recommended Lake Michigan water transfers to communities, including Waukesha.
In other words, state and regional policies have kept Milwaukee and its residents land-locked, economically stunted, disconnected from neighboring wealthier, whiter areas and thus segregated - - regionally - - by race and economic status.
* Add in Walker's failed job-creation policies, his scandal-ridden and failed job-creation agency, his refusal to allow the minimum wage to rise above the poverty-enforcing level of $7.25/hr. and his deletion of tens of thousands of poor people from food stamp roles - - summary posting, here - - what do you think the ripple effects have been and will continue to be in the Wisconsin city with the largest number of low-income and unemployed people?
This blog has covered these issues for nearly ten years. There are hundreds of posts with supporting documentation. Use the index box at the upper left.
if we're going to have a discussion about segregation, let's look at the bigger picture.
7 comments:
Well said James. The handcuffing of Wisconsin's largest city by the burbs and outstaters is a disgrace, as is the apartheid conditions that were largely caused by this mentality.
No place can survive when poverty is ghettoized like it is in Milwaukee. And sorry GOPs, but this sitiation is a problem for all of us, and it hurts all of us. Not just "those people."
Also don't forget about the billions of dollars funneled away from MPS and into voucher schools these last 25 years. Many of those vouchers have failed and/or not achieved, which further destabilized an area that didnt need the disruption
So how did you manage to post this blog entry twice? (It is "downstairs" this one with the same title and apparently the same text at of 4:15 pm Milwaukee time).
Good post -- excellent summary -- I am sure this is an accident and you want to have more space on your frontpage for more (w/o duplication).
There is another outstanding comment in the duplicate thread, however, so I hope you an combine and feature Jake's and anon's.
To Anon. 4:15 p.m. While I was editing the original, I changed the type face because some readers said the font was hard to read. I forgot that when I do that, Google recreates the post as if it were new. I don't know why. By the time I noticed there was a duplicate, a number of people had already read and shared it on Facebook and I did not want to kill that link. Sorry about that.
Ever looked into the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps?
http://collections.lib.uwm.edu/cdm/ref/collection/agdm/id/3028
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/05/30/where_to_find_historical_redlining_maps_of_your_city.html
On my list to read: https://books.google.com/books?id=zAnbCwAAQBAJ
Frank Zeidler's legacy is worth checking out. http://www.fampeople.com/cat-frank-zeidler
There is a photo of him in his memoir that shows a group of prosperous white guys standing behind him, watching him sign something obviously "white-approved". Even with those "handlers" keeping this mayor of a multi-culti city who was a many of vision and integrity -- on a leash, he helped every Milwaukeean.
And Milwaukee voters back then -- and now -- want(ed) an end to the stranglehold of corruption in both major political parties. This is what's making Milwaukee such a depressed city. Already 33 years ago, local Mondale-Ferraro campaign literature (in the early 1980's) talked about the city's loss of thousands upon thousands of manufacturing jobs.
Time travel to today, E voila! Instead of a truly thriving city on the lake, connected with the beauty of the rest of this beautiful state, honored as it is by the presence of indigenous nations, natural resources, Great Lakes and many cultures, we have a stupid city built at the expense of the vibrant African American and Latino/a residents of the segregated north and south sides of the city, when we could have the vanguard city of America.
Justice is our only path to peace and prosperity. No justice, no peace.
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