The emptiest city in America

Yep. The Park East Freeway. It ran along the north end of downtown.

It was intended to run all the way out to the west side, but neighborhood opposition in the 60s and 70s prevented it from being built. Unfortunately, the decision didn't come until a swath of homes was torn down to make room for it. To this day, there's this weird gap right through the middle of Milwaukee where the freeway was to be. It accelerated the decline of those neighborhoods.

I don't live in Milwaukee anymore and didn't know the Park East had been torn down when I paid a visit downtown a few years ago. It threw me off big-time the first time I went back after it had been razed. I was like, "I could have swore there was a freeway here?"

Milwaukee's freeway history is interesting. Several planned freeways were never built. Here's a link from the extremely addictive (if you're into maps, etc. Wisconsin Highways web site.

http://www.wisconsinhighways.org/milwaukee/index.html

 

That's what both of my parents did. Both bought homes cheap in California in the early 80s, sold them in the late 1990s for insane profits and moved to cheaper places to live/retire.

 

Of the 100 homes portfolio, this was my favorite. Oddly, both homes on either side look like they are occupied and well-tended.

Been meaning to do a project on abandoned homes. Occasionally, the home-owner will die and because of the cost, or no family or squabbling heirs, fully furnished, very nice homes will just sit and decompose. I'm talking food still in the fridge, dishes still in the sink.
Guy I talked to locally said that just off the top of his head, he could think of 100 homes in my little part of the world that were in that situation.
Really pretty sad and local government has no mechanism in place to handle it.
And that has nothing to do with foreclosures, and those are also a problem.

 

Read it when it was first published back in the '70's

I was really interested in urban design and renewal at the time since we had an "expressway controversy" in Toronto in the late 60's & early 70's. Jane Jacobs had just moved to Toronto and she was one of the driving forces behind stopping an expressway which would have gone straight through the heart of the city.

Her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities" is, in my opinion, one of the seminal books on the subject. It completely changed the way I thought.

If I'm reincarnated, I want to come back as an urban planner.

 

And Illinois Nazis are still pissed off about that.


Milwaukee, as much as I love it, has to have one of the worst highway set-ups in the country.

Still amazes me there is no northern bypass ... if you are coming from the north and want to go west toward Waukesha or Madison, you have to go through downtown if you want to stay on the highway.

And there needs to be a second southern bypass from the Racine-Milwaukee County line out to Waukesha and I-94.

For those who lived through the Marquette Interchange reconstruction ... when they rebuild the Zoo Interchange in a few years, that will be 10x worse because there is NO way around that via highways.

 

And dammit, Bubbler ... I'm not going to be able work at all this afternoon thanks to that link you provided.

 

Come to Connecticut. The two major highways slice through Hartford and merge on Main street. You have left hand exits, exit ramps a 1/4 mile from an on ramp, areas where you have to cut across three lanes of traffic to merge. There is no bypass, and even thru traffic has to go through the city.
The best road site evah. This guy has too much time on his hands.

nycroads.com

and for CT road geeks

Kurumi.com

 

Experienced that, too. That's the second worst.

 

Meh. Fuck all those north side assholes! [/westsider]

You're right though. The weird thing is that when they built I-43, there wasn't much development on the far north side to get in the freeway's way. The late Northridge Mall commercial area hadn't been built yet. Strange.

And yeah. They could use a loop that goes roughly from Port Washington to West Bend to Delafield to Mukwonago to Caledonia.

Watertown Plank Road, Bluemound Road and Greenfield Avenue are going to get a whole lot busier.

 

The skinny from the belly of the beast, where Mrs. Donnie and I are the poster children for the Southwest bust:

* Our house is now worth 40 percent less than what we paid it three years ago. We weren't greedy speculators trying to make a buck, but instead just a couple of reporters shacking up and wanting to start a life. For those who suggest people are leaving Vegas and Phoenix, unless they are walking away from mortgages and/or going back to Mexico, ain't no one escaping these places anytime soon. Of the five houses closest to me, two were foreclosed, one sold at a $50k loss and one where the owner took on two roommates and refinanced twice, only because he does mortgages and knows people. If I sold right now -- that is, a credit-wrecking short sale for maybe $180-190k -- the bank could come after me for the difference between the remaining loan balance and what I received for the house. And then the IRS could come tax me on the difference as income. So basically, it's a giant crapball.

* I tried to call my lender after my wife lost her job, which was the larger income in the house. They wouldn't offer so much as a deferred payment because we're current on our payments and they said their "formula" offered no options. Obama's new plan doesn't help people who are as far underwater on their mortgages as we are. I'm just hoping to stay out of foreclosure when my adjustable rate (I know, an awful decision pushed on me by the lender at the time, when I was about to be laid off from my paper) resets in 18 months. Thank god Mrs. Donnie is working again and I now have a stable job.

* CityCenter is still hiring 12k folks, about half of which will come from other company hotels, thus opening jobs there. Lovely. In the past, every one of those porters and housekeepers could get a $300k loan to buy a house. Now, all they'd need is $100k to buy a nice foreclosure (for those who mentioned it, 1 in every 76 homes in Nevada is foreclosed -- by far tops in the nation.) They're still not going to get the loan.

* Unemployment in Nevada is at 9.1 percent. Predictions for next year go up to 11 percent. It's not much prettier in Arizona. Take a stroll through the Biltmore mall shops, which used to be some of the nicest in town -- they're empty. Like, Cartier pulled out. It's just sad.

* As for Echelon, yeah, not going so well. The Harmon tower on CityCenter shown in that picture wasn't capped solely because of money -- inspectors found out the construction was so poor (a trifling issue with the steel) they couldn't go any higher without risking compromising the structure. Of course, there is neither money nor time (they're trying to open late this year or early next) to solve this issue with anything but a lid on the place.

* PS -- Good luck even getting out to Anthem on I-17 to look at those foreclosures. The light rail construction forging on through the north Valley and beyond chokes traffic for a good 20-30 miles. Just a brief rant.

 

CityCenter is an awfully ambitious project even in an economy not in full wheeze mode.

 

Brokedown Palaces