While downtown Milwaukee booms, the city’s low-income neighborhoods are still struggling with high levels of poverty and crime.
There are a number of important efforts ongoing to try to revitalize Milwaukee’s low-income neighborhoods. Recently, there was good news and bad news related to some of those initiatives.
First, the bad news: Construction of Century City I, a new 53,160-square-foot industrial building in the Century City Business Park near North 31st Street and West Capitol Drive is complete. That’s good, but developer General Capital Group has not yet secured any tenants for the building.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Department of City Development commissioner Rocky Marcoux spoke at a recent open house event for the building attended by commercial real estate brokers.
“We all recognize that this neighborhood needs more family-supporting jobs,” Barrett said.
Absolutely, but it will not be easy to convince businesses to come to a high-crime area, especially after homicides spiked in the city last year.
“Crime’s an issue anywhere you go. It’s no more an issue here than it is in the Menomonee Valley or anywhere else you go in the city of Milwaukee,” Marcoux said. “There are strategies around dealing with issues.”
Now, the good news: The latest plans were unveiled recently for St. Augustine Preparatory Academy, a recently approved voucher school at 2607 S. Fifth St. on the south side of Milwaukee. The school is the passion project of Gus Ramirez, executive chairman of Waukesha-based Husco International. Ramirez said he and his family will commit $70 million toward construction and operating costs for the school over the next 10 years.
That is a tremendous investment.
“Milwaukee’s children need additional educational options, and we will continue working intensely to create what we believe will be one of Wisconsin’s best educational institutions, which will serve as a model for others in Milwaukee and around the country,” Ramirez said.
The voucher school program has been controversial and, of course, not every voucher school is a good school. But Milwaukee needs as many high-performing schools as possible to educate as many children as possible, be they public, private, choice (voucher) or charter schools. One size need not fit all to improve education in the city.
The city also needs top notch educational leaders and it appears St. Augustine will have one. Alfonso Carmona, currently the principal of Robert Healy Elementary School, a high-performing public school on Chicago’s south side, has been selected to become superintendent of St. Augustine.
“We decided on our way back to Chicago to drive by the site, to drive through the neighborhood,” Carmona said. “That was it. That was the end of the conversation for us. Driving through the neighborhood; looking at the needs of the neighborhood. I honestly didn’t know how low performance was among students in Milwaukee. It is my time to dedicate the next several years to a neighborhood that certainly needs better schools.”
