Reenvisioned corridor is just another scheme
Removing portion of interstate would hurt thriving Milwaukee neighborhoods
We’ve all heard that you can’t fight City Hall, which really means you can’t fight and win, but that’s only half-true. Sometimes miracles happen; rarely, but just often enough to keep the fire of democracy burning in our hearts.
But when the opposition includes not only City Hall, but the Departmentof Transportation, real estate developers, and a broad group of people who are innocently helping the people they should most oppose, well, a Frank Capra movie ending probably isn’t in the works.
Let’s try anyway.
In recent weeks, the public has been asked to weigh in on the future of a portion of Interstate 794 currently linking the Hoan Bridge to Interstate 94. The plan includes seven options, including updating it in its current form, a few designs reducing its footprint and opening land for development, and, finally, a complete removal of the highway.
A website built to advocate for the nuclear option, rethink794.com, advertises that destroying it will “reconnect” the Third Ward with downtown. Removing the freeway and increasing ground level traffic will somehow “address a plague of pedestrian deaths,” and that it will help reverse Milwaukee’s population decline.
Noble goals.
Oh, and by the way, it will also open up an estimated $1.5 billion of real estate for land developers. But that can’t be the central motivation behind the project. No sir. I will grant that opening 32.5 acres of prime downtown real estate would be an economic boon to someone, but it certainly won’t be you or me. I applaud the work of Mayors Tom Barrett and Cavalier Johnson in revitalizing our downtown; it as vibrant and safe as at any point in my life.
Trickle down, trickle out economics a bust for average taxpayers
Yet the same people who decry “trickle down economics” as nonsense continue to push the idea of “trickle out economics” – my own term for the belief that improve
ments to downtown inevitably result in improved neighborhoods elsewhere around the city.
I love Milwaukee, but drive through it today, from north to south, and tell me the average Joe, living on a potholed street in an average neighborhood, has reaped the benefits of the downtown renaisance? A better seat for a Bucks game, sure. Is that enough?
Of course that doesn’t mean 794 should stay, merely that someone other than a corporate landlord should get a slice of the pie.
Yet consider this: the area that has benefited from the “trickle out” is the one area that will be most adversely affected by the proposed actions: Bay View.
In my youth, Bay View held largely to the traditional boundaries of the village it once was; then easy access to downtown and the greater freeway system spurred growth and brought in new blood. Arguably, those imaginary borders now reach north as far as Becher Street, and threaten to widen even more.
So, the rare success, and what do we do? Propose severing the route used to connect the area to downtown and beyond; severing it from the jobs that pay some of the highest property taxes in the city. Isolate it, once again, with what was once, and will be again, a bridge to nowhere?
Yes, the Hoan Bridge will still exist – and will plop you at the tail end of the city, along the lake, right where festival traffic is highest, then ask you to travel city streets a mile or so before rejoining the freeway. In other words, it will be a route of last resort.
When I mention this I’m told that westbound traffic can just move onto I-43, a scant couple of miles to the west. That’s true.
But remember one of the alleged benefits of removing 794 would be an increased focus on pedestrian safety.
How is anyone helped by a plan to increase road traffic to and from I-43 in neighborhoods on the south side, or alternatively, through downtown city streets? And how will that switch affect the already heavily used infrastructure of I-43?
This plan doesn’t reduce our dependence on autos, or the highways, it just forces the same amount of traffic into a smaller area and increases the burden on the people and streets of Milwaukee.
We can’t go back in time to fix this
I know highways have fallen out of favor. I often hear how they destroyed communities and undermined cities. You’re preaching to the choir; the street where my grandparents met and courted, and the house where my great grandma passed away all lie under the concrete of I-43. If I could go back to the 1950s and argue against them, I would do it in a heartbeat. But those social costs were paid more than a half century ago, and the concrete roadways have become a reluctant necessity of modern life.
When we have high speed, safe and reliable mass transit both across the city and out to the neighboring suburbs, I will be the first to advocate for highway removal. Until that time, no. The plan to remove a portion of I-794, is, and remains, nothing more than a moneymaking scheme trying to sell itself to the public as an act of social progress.
Let’s hope the public, and the decision makers, come to the same conclusion.
Dan Slapczynski is a lifelong Milwaukee resident and a former Community Columnist for the Journal Sentinel.