Segregation. The word conjures images of the Deep South, a Jim Crow past of snarling police dogs and whites-only toilets. In fact, it is a national problem that has long outlasted the era of openly racist law. It persists, five decades after the U.S. government passed the anti-discrimination Fair Housing Act. It persists under the country’s first black president. It persists in a place barely farther south than Toronto.
For Milwaukee, it’s a tale of black and white, a city so marred by segregation; it affects every part of life
“You’ve got 40% of the population is poor, you’ve got very high rates of joblessness, in some of those neighborhoods well over 50%, of the working age population not working and on top of that you have the high concentration of high segregation.” University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Professor and Director for UWM’s Center for Economic Development Marc Levine said.
Two weeks after voting to strike and two days after Thanksgiving, members of Auto Workers (UAW) Local 833 are staffing picket lines round the clock near the Kohler plant in the Wisconsin village that bears its name. It’s 35 degrees outside and sunny—in fact, almost balmy compared to what it will be when the Wisconsin winter sets in. While hopeful that the strike won’t last that long, UAW members are nonetheless prepared to tough it out.
A new state-by-state analysis from the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that Wisconsin experienced the biggest decline in middle-class households in the country between the years 2000 and 2013. Moreover, Wisconsin saw a 14% decline in median household income. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Marc Levine explains “that our economy relies on manufacturing perhaps more than any other state; when manufacturing gets hit hard, Wisconsin gets hit hard too,”
During the past several years, the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Center for Economic Development (CED) has produced a number of studies focusing on transit
service and access to jobs in the Milwaukee region. This study examines the impact of transit service cuts and service expansions that have occurred between 2001 and 2014 on access to jobs in the Milwaukee Metro area.