Housing secretary takes tour of Sherman Park property
Castro has a look around house that’s part of rebuilding program
U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro visited Sherman Park Friday to tour an abandoned home involved in efforts to combat blight and unemployment in Milwaukee.
The home is being torn down and rebuilt through the city’s Adult Build program, which aims to address Milwaukee’s foreclosed properties, unemployment and the need for on-the-job training and employment opportunities.
“This is a fantastic model for other communities to follow,” Castro said after touring the property.
Castro specifically praised Milwaukee residents’ learning important on-the-job skills while improving the neighborhood.
The dilapidated property, located on N. 36th St. near the corner of W. Center St. has been vacant for about six years, officials said. Workers have just begun work to demolish the home, which is full of shattered, boarded-up windows. It sits next to another home that was torn down and successfully rebuilt by the program.
The Sherman Park neighborhood was the scene of violent unrest in August after a man was fatally shot by a Milwaukee police officer while fleeing from a traffic stop.
Adult Build is one of several projects working to fight Milwaukee’s persistent problems with blight and unemployment.
Milwaukee County has another program, known as Opportunity Knocks, that renovates tax-foreclosed homes while providing job training to nonviolent House of Correction offenders. The county then provides re-entry services to the offenders after renovation projects are complete, and sells the houses to first-time homeowners through its Section 8 homeownership program.
“It’s important to show that it can be done,” said County Executive Chris Abele, who toured the Sherman Park property with Castro.
Abele added that the city, county, HUD and other organizations are now “all focused, probably more than we ever have been, on meaningful steps to actively empower a population that’s been ignored for too long.”
Additional money to fight blight in Milwaukee may soon be on the way. The City of Milwaukee could use up to $2 million in state grant money for the demolition and rehabilitation of blighted properties, under a measure recently approved by the Common Council.
That grant money is expected to pay for some 100 homes to be demolished and another 100 to be rehabilitated, with most of the work taking place at properties in the Sherman Park neighborhood. The money was awarded by the state Department of Financial Institutions as part of a $4.5 million funding package for Milwaukee that Gov. Scott Walker announced in the weeks after the unrest.
Travis Hunter, 33, said he first got involved in working on homes when he was 19 through the city’s Youth Build Program. The program has given him training in carpentry and deconstruction, as well as job flexibility so he can spend more time with his 7-year-old son, he said.
“I haven’t really been trying to get a full-time job since he was born, I’ve been focusing on his well-being, and being able to be there for him,” Hunter said.
“It gave me the opportunity to work for myself,” he said.