INTERACTIVE MAP: This map shows the percentage of residents living below the poverty level. Darker areas represent a higher percentage of residents below the poverty level. The city of Milwaukee is outlined in black.
A Time to Build | Journal Sentinel Special Report

Milwaukee's deep racial, economic divisions are challenges to rebirth

When Milwaukee's then-thriving factories sought the labor of African-Americans migrating from the South, roughly three out of four black families here were husband-wife. Today: 31%.

By Rick Romell of the Journal Sentinel staff
April 20, 2013

Part three of four

As Milwaukee continues to seek its path in an evolving economy that increasingly values knowledge and innovation over mass production and muscle, the area remains saddled by its history and by deep economic divisions.

The history is persistent and the contrasts are sharp. 

The metropolitan region as a whole - Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties - ranks in the upper half of large metropolitan areas in per capita income. But beneath that level of relative prosperity lie entrenched poverty in much of Milwaukee and wide gaps in economic well-being between city and suburbs, black and white.

In almost no large metropolitan area is there a greater difference in black and white income. In few if any large metro areas is poverty as highly concentrated within the major city - 73% of the area's poor live in Milwaukee proper, compared with 64% of the poor in Columbus, Ohio; 53% in Oklahoma City; or 47% in San Diego.

"Milwaukee stands out as a place where the poor are quite isolated," said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford University who has studied the growth of income segregation in the United States.

This matters.

It most hurts the poor themselves, who often lack reliable transportation to tap job opportunities far from the central city.

Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce

But the effects arguably spill over a wider area. The poverty in the city presents a potential drag on the region's economic health and its attractiveness to employers, said Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.

"It's dangerous for the economy of Milwaukee to look like a barbell, where you have concentrated wealth on one end and concentrated poverty on the other," he said.

Professor Chris Benner of the University of California, Davis said regions that are more segregated in terms of income or race tend to grow more slowly.

"There are a bunch of reasons intuitively why that may be the case," he said. "If you have a declining central city and poor infrastructure and a lot of broken windows and a lot of signs of poverty, it's going to be harder to attract new investment, harder to get businesses growing there. You've got all the loss of human capital, of high dropout rates and high levels of poverty and all those sorts of social dislocation that go along with that."

Those are among problems with which Milwaukee's black community has struggled. One result, and possible contributing factor: A decline in married-couple African-American families that has left Milwaukee almost without peer in the United States.

No large metropolitan area has a lower percentage of black husband-wife families, according to the 2010 U.S. census. Not coincidentally, none has a higher incidence of black poverty. The relationship between the two measures is strong.

Out of all 366 U.S. metropolitan areas, only one, Dubuque, Iowa, ranks below Milwaukee in percentage of husband-wife black families.

Danae Davis, a former Miller Brewing executive, is CEO of PEARLS for Teen Girls Inc. "This is shocking... . I would think we would be sounding the alarm."


"This is shocking," said Danae Davis, chief executive officer of PEARLS for Teen Girls Inc., a nonprofit that seeks to help girls achieve in school, avoid pregnancy and pursue their goals. "Thirty-one percent. I would think we would be sounding the alarm."

"I'm horrified," said Bishop LeHavre Buck, pastor of Triumph the Church and Kingdom of God in Christ and a married man for almost five decades. "I think it is just a tragedy."

Erosion of marriage

Marriage has been linked statistically to many good things - better physical and mental health, less crime, higher income, much less childhood poverty.

There is controversy over what is cause and what is effect when it comes to marriage and the positive characteristics with which it is, on the whole, connected. People who have jobs and solid prospects for future earnings, for example, are more likely to get married than the jobless.

Bishop LeHavre Buck, pastor of Triumph the Church and Kingdom of God in Christ "I'm horrified. I think it is just a tragedy."
Bishop LeHavre Buck, pastor of Triumph the Church and Kingdom of God in Christ, who's been married to his wife, Barbara, for nearly 50 years. He has long been an advocate of marriage.

"There's huge debate in this area," said Princeton University's Sara McLanahan, one of the country's leading family researchers. "There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of papers written on this."

The long-standing decline of marriage and corresponding rise of single-parent families has occurred among whites and Hispanics too.

As with African-Americans, Milwaukee's Hispanic community has a lower share of husband-wife families than Hispanic populations in most large metropolitan areas.

But the erosion of marriage has been most dramatic among African-Americans.

Since 1960, the percentage of white, non-Hispanic married couple families in metro Milwaukee has dropped by about eight points, to 81% in 2010.

For blacks here, the drop has been about 40 percentage points. It has been severe enough that a 2011 report by the local chapter of the NAACP declared, "Milwaukee's African American married-couple family is an endangered institution."

Among the underlying causes are demographics. Compared with the country as a whole, Milwaukee's African-American population includes a larger-than-average share of young adults, who are less likely to be married. Beyond that, Milwaukee has an especially disproportionate number of African-American women.

And Wisconsin incarcerates black men at an especially high level. In fact, a newly released analysis of 2010 census data by John Pawasarat and Lois Quinn of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that Wisconsin had the highest incarceration rate, with one in eight African-American men of working age behind bars. No other state came close.

Black 'underclass' emerges

Also at play are fundamental economic change and, arguably, government policy.

Twenty-five years ago, social theorist William Julius Wilson pointed to the severe erosion of manufacturing jobs in the nation's old industrial cities during the '70s and '80s as a key factor underlying the emergence of a black "underclass." Increasing joblessness among black men, he concluded, spurred a number of negative effects, including a decline in marriage.

Since then, other researchers have picked away at elements of Wilson's analysis, but his 1987 book, "The Truly Disadvantaged," was groundbreaking and remains one of the most-often cited works of sociology.

Milwaukee could be Exhibit A for his theory. From 1979 through 1987 alone, the metropolitan area lost nearly 60,000 manufacturing jobs - more than one in four.

The loss in Milwaukee County, the jobs closest to the vast majority of black residents, started earlier, persisted longer and was even more devastating. From the mid-'60s through the early '90s, more than 86,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared - 46% of the county's industrial base.

In 1970, Milwaukee was close to the U.S. average in terms of married-couple African-American families. During the following 10 years, the percentage here fell off a cliff, dropping much more sharply than it did nationally. The decline was so severe that by 1980, Milwaukee already was at or near the bottom of the country in percentage of black families with both a husband and a wife.

At the same time, the number of young-adult black women was increasing more rapidly than the number of young-adult black men. One possible but disputed factor: Relatively high welfare benefits during the '70s and '80s - as much as 50% more than in neighboring Illinois.

The existence - or not - of so-called "welfare migration" was heatedly debated, without resolution. But in any event, Milwaukee continued to be a major destination for poor African-Americans even after the area had shed tens of thousands of the factory jobs that previously had lured workers.

During the late '80s, some 6,800 African-Americans with incomes below the poverty line moved to Milwaukee from other states, demographer William Frey, then with the University of Michigan, found.

No city except much-larger Atlanta attracted more, and this was after manufacturing employment here had cratered. Frey called the movement to Wisconsin, along with a similar trend in Minnesota, "unprecedented," and said it might have been related to better social services or welfare payments.

Researchers have not found strong evidence that welfare has played a major role in the transformation of American family structure generally since 1960. But neither have they found conclusive evidence for other causes.

"Indeed, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the main contribution of empirical social science to our understanding of family change has been to show that nothing caused it," Harvard University scholars David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks waggishly observed in a 2003 paper. "Yet despite the absence of an identifiable culprit or a smoking gun, families did change."

Taken separately, individual economic factors - how much money men earn, increased job opportunities for women, the level of welfare benefits, the ratio of men to women - cannot explain the decades-long decline in marriage. But a reasonable argument can be made, Jencks said, that the different economic forces came into play at different times. And together with the advent of the birth control pill, legal abortion and a shift in attitudes about morality, they collectively led to less marriage and more out-of-wedlock childbearing.

Deterrents to marriage

Strictly from an economic perspective, federal benefit programs give low-income people incentives not to marry, Urban Institute economist Eugene Steuerle argues. In fact, Steuerle recently described not getting married as "the major tax shelter for low- and moderate-income households with children."

In an interview, he said the country's tax code and benefit system basically says that "if you don't care (about marriage), we're going to treat you a lot better than if you do care. And so the people who take marriage vows, particularly among low-income people, end up paying a large penalty."

If a poverty-level mother of two marries a man making $20,000 a year, for example, the family can lose about $3,000 in earned income tax credits alone. Erosion or loss of benefits such as food stamps can push the penalties still higher.

"These things add up to hundreds of billions of dollars of marriage penalties across the population," Steuerle said.

President Barack Obama's 2014 budget proposal calls for strengthening families "by removing financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples." In 2009, Obama modified the earned income tax credit, reducing its penalty on marriage. Now, the budget also would give states $35 million to test strategies to overcome financial deterrents to marriage.

Significant penalties remain in the earned income credit and other benefits, however, and Steuerle isn't optimistic about the prospects for change.

He has suggested a minimum tax rate on low- and moderate-income families, and modifying the earned income credit so that the benefit would go not to the family but to the husband and wife individually, allowing each to keep the subsidy on their wages.

A central problem, he said, is that the various benefit programs were adopted piecemeal, leading to a host of unintended consequences. To address that, he favors broad social-welfare reform.

Pat McManus, president and CEO of the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin Pat McManus, president and CEO of the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin

Pat McManus, president and CEO of the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin and an advocate for strengthening father involvement in African-American families, said that potential loss of benefits does deter some people from getting married, but that the true driving force among the clients she sees regularly is more fundamental: lack of a decent job.

"People don't get married when they don't feel they have an economic future," McManus said.

Her point, which echoes Wilson's now-25-year-old analysis, is critical. This is far from the first time Milwaukee has had sharp economic divisions. Historian John Gurda noted that around the turn of the 19th century, for example, Prospect Ave. was at its affluent peak, lined with fine homes, while just a few blocks away, "You've got this grinding poverty of the Poles along Pulaski Street, Brady Street. . . . That was squalor, it was really squalor back in those years."

But there's a key difference: The impoverished immigrants who poured into Milwaukee a century ago had strong prospects of improving their lot in a rapidly growing economy. When cities can offer that chance, some scholars argue, the fact that they attract the poor is not something to be lamented, but a mark of urban success.

So far, that's a distinction that has eluded today's Milwaukee.

Part 2: It all starts with an idea. :: Part 4: This could go either way.