u/PantherU

Every conversation about what WisDOT should do with the Crumbling Curve of 794 immediately devolves into an argument over moving cars and trucks from the south shore suburbs to all places west. I am not posting this to discredit the argument, rather what I'd like to do is take this thread to have a general conversation about another aspect of the potential regarding the project: property taxes.

What you're looking at here is not the heights of buildings in Milwaukee. What you're looking at is a visualization of property tax revenue per acre. The darker blue areas are providing little to no property tax revenue, the darked red areas are providing great property tax revenue. The higher the spike, the higher the generation of property tax revenue to the city.

That visualization right there shows you why any land we can free up downtown is potentially a huge boon for the city. Adding tens of millions of property tax revenue annually lowers the slice of the pie each and every other property owner owes. So if you live in Enderis Park, Murray Hill or Bay View, freeing up this land for other use is nothing but a net positive for your property tax burden - regardless of whether or not they decide to lower, raise or keep the full property tax levy the same. Your slice of the pie is smaller.

The fact that all of the land under 794 is publicly owned - either by the city itself or by WisDot (which would end up back in the city's control after the project is complete) - is an even bigger deal, because unlike every one of these dead spots owned by some property owner in the city, the City of Milwaukee gets to decide through RFP (request for proposal) what kinds of developments are acceptable or preferred.

So we're not beholden to developers. They're beholden to us. If we want workforce housing downtown, we include it in the RFP and any developer who wants to build on the land has to include it. We don't have to just accept that every project built there has to be another Couture-style luxury tower. The city would control the RFP process for publicly owned land, which means we can decide what kinds of projects we actually want there. If we want workforce housing included, we can require it. If a developer wants to build a 40+ story tower with 300 luxury units, the city can say "fine, but a percentage of those units need to be affordable or workforce housing." That's the advantage of this land being publicly controlled instead of already sitting in private hands.

Want one of these housing towers to carry a grocery store on the street level so people living downtown don't have to get into a car to get food? Include it in the RFP. I know from speaking to WisDOT officials that some of the land does not provide a good base for tower developments. Great! The architect John Everitt sketched out a wonderful visualization of how the city could maximize good land use in the corridor.

Want to require developers to build beautiful buildings instead of the same bland five story apartment buildings that have gone up damn near everywhere? Guess what? We can do that! We can require developers to build beautiful buildings. Hell, we don't need developers at all. We can build a world class park if we want to and still have land on the sides for beautiful buildings.

Another issue is because our city, like most of the country, is incredibly car dependent. This space between Clybourn and St. Paul from Lincoln Memorial to 6th street (if you're looking at the full space) is the best land in the state that could be used for car-free living. Most of MCTS' busiest lines are along or within a couple blocks of this corridor. The Hop could actually find real utility in its current footprint (or by moving the L-Line south to St. Paul). The Intermodal Station is at the west end of this, connecting Milwaukee to Chicago and Minneapolis (and in the future Madison and Green Bay for planned Amtrak routes and Cudahy/South Milwaukee/Racine/Kenosha for the planned MARK Rail).

The City of Milwaukee has the same problem as most cities in North America: bad land use. We have a problem with tax fragmentation in that we have dedicated too much of our valuable land to things that are not providing real value to the city. Density is drastically needed because it spreads out our property tax collection to more hands, but we need density where it makes the most sense. It doesn't make sense to build a 500 ft luxury housing tower at Forest Home and 43rd, or Burleigh and Teutonia, or Howell and Oklahoma. We need the density where it makes the most sense, and this strip of land is the place where it makes the absolute most sense in the entire state of Wisconsin.

Now, there is other land downtown that needs development. Milwaukee needs an overhaul of its land use policy regardless of what happens on this Crumbling Curve space. The Summerfest surface parking needs to be consolidated into parking garages to free up land for uses that are actually productive for the neighborhood and the city without sacrificing the parking for those who choose to continue driving to festivals.

I thought it would be good to have a bit of a dialogue with folks about why some of us view removal as the best option for 794. Again, I'm not looking to discredit anyone's feelings regarding drive times or anything, I just want to keep this thread focused on the other stuff seeing as every thread everywhere else becomes about moving cars from the suburbs into and out of downtown. Let's talk about downtown.

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I want to make sure folks know that I'm not a developer, I don't work with developers. My entire professional career has been in the automotive industry. I got 'orange-pilled' by watching a youtube stream of someone playing Cities Skylines (I couldn't figure out how to make my cities financially sustainable) and the YouTube algorithm started recognizing me more and more urbanist content until I was recommended a video that made me start questioning my world view. I still love cars, but I've become hostile to car dependency.