Civic envy

Milwaukee has eclipsed Madison in two big ways

by

It’s probably the best putdown in the history of film.

In Casablanca, the slimy character Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre, asks, “You despise me don’t you, Rick?”

Humphrey Bogart, as the cynical nightclub owner, answers, “If I gave you any thought I probably would.”

That exchange always seemed to me to sum up the relationship between Wisconsin’s two largest cities. Madison and Milwaukee might despise each other, if they bothered to think about the other place at all.

Milwaukee looks south to Chicago. Madison compares itself favorably to places like Boulder, Colorado.

Milwaukee is industrial, gritty and diverse. Madison is the ultimate college town, physically pretty and culturally diverse in aspiration if not in reality. Milwaukee, once known as America’s machine shop, took the brunt of the hits to American heavy industry toward the end of the 20th century. Madison was primed to benefit handsomely from the knowledge economy. Milwaukee sits on a cold, forbidding great inland sea. Madisonians frolic, when the weeds and algae abate, in friendly little lakes.

The vibe of Madison is young, optimistic, confident, forward looking. Milwaukee’s zeitgeist was formed by its serious Teutonic city fathers and its somewhat fatalistic east European immigrants, who are, by the way, my very own people.

If Madison and Milwaukee had lunch together Madison would quibble with the waiter about just exactly how the kale was locally sourced. Milwaukee would order the meatloaf special and slip the free crackers into its coat pocket.

And yet to dismiss Milwaukee is to cheat ourselves. Madison’s cultural offerings in music, theater, museums, art and restaurants could be described as excellent for a city our size but in a narrow range. Milwaukee offers much more diversity across a much broader spectrum.

And while Madison enters its second decade of trying to establish a public market and to broaden its mass transit system, Milwaukee has accomplished both. Food and transit aren’t just nice amenities. They are serious economic development tools.

The modern economy is not about chasing smokestacks. (Foxconn represents the old strategy of trying to lure big industrial plants — how’s that one working out so far?) Instead it’s all about attracting a base of talented workers and entrepreneurs who can live pretty much anywhere. An interesting local food scene and ways to get around without owning a car are two things this demographic looks for. And Milwaukee is leading Madison in both areas as well as a couple of others.

As Madison’s mayor from 2003 and 2011, I championed streetcars and a public market. Though progress is being made, a modern transit system and a public market remain on our city’s wish list. So on some of my frequent visits to my old hometown, I visited Milwaukee’s market and rode its streetcar. How has Milwaukee succeeded where Madison, so far, hasn’t? I talked to some of the people who made them happen. Here’s what I found.

Let’s start with the Milwaukee streetcar, dubbed The Hop. At a cost of about $124 million, the 2-mile starter line opened in November 2018 to much fanfare. 

That initial line runs from the Milwaukee Transit Center, goes past the public market in the rapidly redeveloping Third Ward, and then north through the heart of downtown before it turns east again, ending at a park along the lakefront. Extensions are planned to the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Fiserv Forum where the Bucks play and further north to the one-time home of Milwaukee’s black middle class known as Bronzeville, and south to the gentrifying Walker’s Point neighborhood.

Rides have been free, and they will remain so at least through July, when the Democratic national convention comes to town. The cost of those free rides is underwritten by the Potawatomi Casino, which lies a few blocks to the west of the Transit Center.

Right now the only real destination on the line is the public market and yet ridership has exceeded expectations. The city’s annual ridership goal was 600,000, but on its first anniversary of operation in early November the city reported that ridership exceeded 800,000.

And there is another benefit. One of the things that is little understood about fixed rail systems, like streetcars, is that they aren’t just about transportation. They are a very visible and permanent public amenity that sparks other development.

According to Milwaukee’s Department of City Development, since the streetcar was approved, new development along the line includes 435 new apartments, 660 new hotel rooms and a 28 percent growth in property values, not to mention numerous restaurants and bars that cannot be directly attributed to the streetcar but might well not have happened without it. One new housing development is even called Streetcar Lofts.

“We’re trying to attract the millennial population,” says Bob Monnat, chief operating officer of the Mandel Group, one of the city’s biggest real estate developers and an early and strong backer of the streetcar. Monnat also sits on the board of Milwaukee Downtown, a business improvement district that runs the public market.

“[Young people] want to live in the urban setting and they want to live cost-effectively,” Monnat says. “They can’t afford a car. There’s no place to park it. You have to have effective mass transit. Everyone gets it.”

Rocky Marcoux certainly gets it. On a warm late summer afternoon I rode The Hop with Marcoux, the ebullient commissioner of the Department of City Development. It was too early for rush hour, but the train steadily filled up as we headed south toward the public market.

We got off there and sat outside at a shaded table. He reflected on the vehicle we just rode. “It’s sleek, it’s comfortable, it’s a hip way to get around. But we didn’t go through all the political challenges just because it’s hip. It’s a vital transportation component in a multi-modal system.”

Marcoux says that in addition to amenities like the streetcar and the market, Milwaukee’s big advantage over other larger metro areas is its relatively affordable housing, another issue that Madison struggles with.

Madison had its own aborted flirtation with streetcars. A study was completed in 2007 and proposed lines were laid out down State Street and looping through the downtown with extensions south down Park Street and east down Main Street. But the project was abandoned that same year amid staunch opposition.

Streetcars were a key initiative of my first term, but there was little support on the Common Council, in the business community or out in the neighborhoods. Even downtown business owners and developers were at best cool to the idea. Meanwhile, Dane County opposed it because the county wanted commuter rail to serve the suburbs.

In the summer of 2007 I attended a packed public meeting on the southwest side in the wake of a murder there. Residents accused me of ignoring crime while I was obsessed with streetcars. It wasn’t true but in politics perception is reality. I was bleeding political capital for a proposal on which I had no powerful allies. I ended the effort.

Now, 12 years later, there’s another new mayor touting a different transit technology called Bus Rapid Transit or BRT. And this time the prospects look much brighter.

“We’re in a different moment,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said in a recent Wisconsin State Journal podcast. “For better or worse the optics [for the streetcar] were not great, the messaging was not great.

“When we were talking about streetcars or commuter rail people weren’t feeling the pain,” she added. “I think they’re feeling the pain now. I think people are starting to experience more traffic congestion. People understand that if we don’t do something now, it will get worse.”

BRT promises many of the attractive features of rail but without the rails themselves. The buses would have their own dedicated lanes, there would be fewer stops while service would be more frequent, passengers would enter on platforms, and the vehicles themselves would be more like subway trains with no step up into the cars and multiple doors for fast loading and unloading.

The cost for the first stage of the project is $130 million. The city hopes to get the federal government to cover $100 million of that through its Small Starts grant program. That program is formula-driven, meaning that Madison would be assured of funding if it meets the criteria. And, despite the Trump administration’s hostility to anything that doesn’t promote the use of oil, the mayor says that she has already met with federal officials who have been encouraging. On Nov. 26, the city announced that it had received $7 million in federal funds to buy a portion of the Oscar Mayer property to use as a satellite bus facility, a crucial component for BRT.

Rhodes-Conway also scored a major victory when the council approved her proposed $40 annual wheel tax this fall. (Mass transit might be popular in Madison, but the wheel tax is not.) Of the $8 million raised, about $1.4 million will go to develop BRT and once the system is up and running that same amount will be dedicated to operating costs, which will be supplemented by projected increases in bus fare revenues and other sources.

An open question about BRT is if it will have the same effect on promoting redevelopment as streetcars have had in Milwaukee and other communities.

Tom Lynch, the city of Madison’s transportation director, says that BRT is primarily about moving people and less about land use. “Any economic benefit is ancillary,” he says. He notes that a BRT line in Cleveland is credited with stimulating $9.5 billion in new development while one in Grand Rapids has produced very little. He says Madison has not studied the potential here.

Still, the mayor seems to be counting on some new development around BRT stops as she suggests that transit-oriented development would help pay for the system through tax incremental financing, which uses increases in property tax revenue in a designated area to pay for improvements there. A string of TIF districts along The Hop line is a major source of funding for the Milwaukee streetcar.

Milwaukee’s fight for the streetcar was an uphill battle. Republican state legislators and local opponents threw up barrier after barrier. The project got built because of three things: an already earmarked pot of federal money, the support of influential downtown developers who saw that the area needed a boost, and a mayor who would spend limitless political capital to get it done.

But even now, after what appears to be a wildly successful first year, one of Mayor Tom Barrett’s opponents in next spring’s Milwaukee mayoral election is making the streetcar a centerpiece of his campaign. Milwaukee Ald. Tony Zielinski would, at least metaphorically, rip up the tracks.

“I would work to discontinue the operation of the existing streetcar,” Zielinski told me in an email.

Then Zielinski echoes an argument made by others who see the streetcar as a bauble for Milwaukee’s most comfortable citizens. “The downtown streetcar contributes to economic inequity,” he writes. “It makes no sense for the city to pay for a downtown streetcar at no cost [in fares] in one of the most affluent areas of the city when the disadvantaged are getting their services cut.” He references proposed cuts to bus routes, though in Milwaukee the bus system is operated by the county while the streetcar is owned by the city. In Madison, the Metro bus system is city-owned and BRT would be incorporated into Metro.

Marcoux counters Zielinski’s argument by pointing out that while the downtown represents only 3.5 percent of the city’s land area, it contributes over 22 percent of the city’s assessed value. So, by promoting downtown development, the streetcar ends up indirectly producing property tax revenues that benefit the entire city.

He also argues that the initial 2-mile route was always envisioned to be just the start and that the plan is to bring the system to less well-off neighborhoods. Ironically, that in itself is raising concerns about gentrification. In fact, some alders refuse to vote for funds to extend the line until that issue is addressed. A partial response is being put in place with a private $300,000 initiative to help low-income homeowners in gentrifying areas pay their property taxes.

So, how does Milwaukee’s streetcar experience compare to Madison’s BRT initiative? Like Barrett, Rhodes-Conway appears to be firmly committed to her transit proposal. And she has an advantage that Barrett didn’t have. While downtown developers were behind him, the broader Milwaukee business community was not a player. The Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce sat out the debate because of conflicting views among its membership. Here the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce is in favor of BRT.

Milwaukee had a source of federal funding already set aside. While Madison would need to apply for its funding the mayor and Lynch seem confident about their prospects.

As for the politics, at least at the moment there are no council members or other prominent politicians opposing BRT. And Rhodes-Conway makes an equity argument in favor of BRT saying that, combined with other improvements in the bus system, it would increase mobility for the transit dependent.

About the time that Milwaukee was opening its public market in 2005, Madison was just starting to think about creating one here. Milwaukee’s market got off to a rocky start, but it has thrived for over a decade while Madison has conducted a handful of studies and eyed at least four different locations.

The location I liked best in 2010 was the site of the Government East parking ramp, which is now slated to come down soon as part of the Judge Doyle Square development. My idea was to call it Public Market Square and that area would have included a market, a new hotel to serve Monona Terrace, a new city office building, a transit center and a high-speed rail station.

We were moving rapidly toward that vision. Gov. Jim Doyle had secured $810 million in federal money for the train. A regional transit authority, or RTA, with taxing power had just been put in place, which enabled streetcars to come back on the table as part of a broader regional transportation plan. And a consultant’s report had recommended the parking ramp site for a market.

Then some things happened. In November 2010, Scott Walker was elected governor and rejected the train money. Republicans took over the Legislature and repealed the RTA before it could do anything. And a few months later I lost my reelection bid and the new city administration changed direction on the market, essentially restarting the whole process.

Now the city hopes to break ground on a market in about a year at the city-owned fleet services facility on the corner of East Johnson and First streets.

But that is contingent on at least three things. First, the new fleet facility, under construction on Nekoosa Road, needs to be done in time for the move. Second, construction bids on the project, which are expected to be solicited next spring or summer, need to come in close to the projected $13 million in capital costs. And third, maybe most crucially, the private Public Market Foundation needs to meet its fundraising goal of $4 million. As of October, it had raised $1.1 million.

As manager of the city’s Office of Business Resources, Dan Kennelly is the lead city staffer on the project. He and the city’s Public Market Development Committee have studied Milwaukee’s market.

“The Milwaukee Public Market is a great example of a successful market,” Kennelly says. “We’ve learned a lot from them, but the Madison market is going to be a bit different.”

Kennelly says that the Madison market will have more space, more vendors, and it will emphasize startups as opposed to the more established businesses in the Milwaukee market.

In Milwaukee, the market is owned and operated by a local business improvement district. Madison’s will be owned by the city but operated by the market foundation.

Business improvement districts are another area where Milwaukee is outpacing Madison.

BIDs are voluntary associations of property owners who form districts and agree to extra taxes in order to pay for local projects that benefit the area. They are one way to get around state-imposed budget constraints. Milwaukee has over 30 BIDs while Madison has just one.

“Every time I’m in [Milwaukee] lately I’m talking to somebody who’s this dynamic, energetic, smart person and they’re often BID directors,” says Kennelly. 

One of those people is 37-year-old Matt Dorner, economic development director for Milwaukee Downtown, who lives near the public market in the vibrant Third Ward and hasn’t owned a car for four years. He rides The Hop, uses Milwaukee’s Bublr bike share, and walks.

“We’re competing for people,” says Dorner. “Young talent is looking for the type of city they want to be in even before they lock in a job. Transportation alternatives is one of those key components that they’re looking for.”

For Milwaukee a lot of things are coming together: the public market, The Hop, the business improvement districts, affordable housing. Next July, it will have a chance to showcase to a national audience when the Democrats come to town.

But, of course, attention does not come without risk. An indication of what can go wrong is Barrett’s push earlier this year to build a short streetcar extension toward, but not quite all the way to, the Fiserv Forum, where the convention will be held. That ran afoul of city politics and was killed in a council committee. If Madison’s political Achilles’ heel is discussion without end, Milwaukee’s is rank pettiness.

Still, Milwaukee has accomplished two major projects that are the calling cards for a city of any significant size that wants to compete for relevance in the marketplace of human talent.

When I visit Milwaukee I can’t help but feel a little melancholy about what might have been in Madison. But I also think that BRT makes sense today just as streetcars make sense now in Milwaukee and might have worked in Madison a decade ago. Moreover, the community support for BRT is much stronger than it ever was for streetcars.

And while I continue to believe consultants’ reports that found a public market needs to be in areas of high foot traffic like Milwaukee’s is, I think Madison’s location will probably work anyway. Kennelly points out that it is roughly a block away from the highly trafficked and rapidly developing East Washington corridor. Plans for additional phases of BRT even call for it to swing right past the market just as The Hop does in Milwaukee.

Even without a fast train it’s worth a visit to Milwaukee. Our public market will look similar and our BRT system will have some of the same features as The Hop. But those things will be uniquely Madison too, born of our own history, economy and politics.

We’re very different cities both competing for the same thing: talented people. And we share at least one thing: the antipathy of the Republican Legislature. We can learn from each other.