Where No City Has Gone Before

EVEN AMONG AMERICA’S fastest-growing cities, it's hard to find one that has pulled off what Mayor Cavalier Johnson wants Milwaukee to do: Reverse a 60-year-long, 22% drop in population, then grow 73% without expanding its borders. “While the mayor's goal of reaching 1 million residents is laudable, it's really quite unrealistic,” says Marc Levine, professor emeritus of urban studies at UW-Milwaukee. Excluding Sun Belt examples that aren't comparable, “no major city has done that in the U.S. over the past 40 years.” Some Southern and Western cities have grown explosively in recent decades. Austin, Fort Worth and Charlotte more than doubled their populations from 1990 to 2020. But those cities already were growing in most prior decades, and they have annexed large swaths of neighboring territory. Three of the Midwest's fastest-growing major cities in that period – Columbus (up 43%), Madison (up 41%) and Indianapolis (up 21%) – also faced few if any previous population dips. Robert Schneider, a professor of urban planning at UW-Milwaukee, points to several big cities that have grown after shrinking for at least 20 years, including Denver (down 9% from 1970 to 1990, then up 53%), Seattle (down 11% from 1960 to 1980, then up 49%) and San Francisco (down 12% from 1950 to 1980, then up 29%). Johnson isn't the only mayor seeking that kind of turnaround. Three other large U.S. cities lost population in the last 30 years – Detroit (down 38%), Baltimore (down 20%) and Chicago (down 1%) – a period in which Milwaukee's population dipped 8%. Detroit and Baltimore have been losing population since 1960, as Milwaukee has, while Chicago rebounded in two of the last three decades. Like Johnson, those cities' leaders are pursuing New Urbanist strategies, Schneider says. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is following a similar playbook of developing walkable neighborhoods with improved transit, while eliminat ing blight and avoiding gentrification. Duggan summed up that approach in his 2013 campaign slogan: “Every neighborhood has a future.”