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What the heck is going on here? Everyone seems to be blaming everyone else & talking about how this city is almost intolerable to live in, to the point of moving because of perceived racial inequalities. I'm sorry, but we all choose our own paths...that's right WE do, not anyone else or anything else. It's called taking responsibility for your own actions. I am soooo tired of the whole "it's not fair", "whoa is me" mentality that I hear from everyone, close friends included. Excuse me, but since when did people become so lazy in their thinking that it's ok to blame others for things that happen to them, most likely from their own perceptions or actions? Crawl out from under that cloud of negativity & start seeing the light. The world CAN be a good place, Milwaukee included. If you step outside your own little bubble, you might actually notice that. Yeah, you'll see that crap happens, it's not good, it's not fun but it's also not your whole world. Live a little, have some fun, experience new things. Take a chance people, you only have one life, quit blaming others & using it as an excuse to hold back your own living.
I Still Say...after Seeing 49 Other States, None Compare To The Quality Of Life In Wisconsin, I Would Match Our State To Any, On Any Statistic, And Good Ole Wisco Is Usually Near The Top Or Compares Favorably. I Would Not Trade My Menomonee Falls Upbringing For Anywhere In The World. The Older I Get, And The More I Read These Post From All Over...the More I Realize, There Truly Is...no Place Like Home!!!
Yeh, I agree with you MrBiloxi, except for FEBRUARY. If you want to pay high property taxes that will benefit the state parks, live in Wisconsin. The parks are very very nice. The wealthier side of the state is the east side along Lake Michigan. Rich people from Illinois like to vacation in Wisconsin. Good places to visit include Spring Green (Frank Lloyd Wright architecture) the Kettle Moraine Parks area in southeastern Wisconsin, Door County up by the thumb of Wisconsin, Lake Geneva, the State Fair in Madison, all the University of Wisconsin sports activities, any lake in winter cuz you can go ice-skating on a lot of them, or snow-mobiling. Heck if you go to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, you have four lakes to pick from for a noon hour boat ride.
The restaurants in Wisconsin give you more food for a better price than a lot of places in the country. Wisconsin still is in the United States. (People have frequently asked me if it is in Canada-I'm not kidding) Schools in Wisconsin are pretty good compared to the rest of the country. People are mostly not stuck-up. There are lots of European restaurants in Wisconsin, especially German. Som Swiss, some Scandinavian. There are so many llakes in Wisconsin, you could probably have your own.
As far as the standard of living goes, check it out for yourselves. The standard of living is pretty good. The tough area is inner city Milwaukee. As far as what the poverty level is, well, that gets raised every year by the Democrat party. The higher the income level is to determine poverty, the more the Democrats can whine and complain. I living in California on $40000. Am I in poverty too? I could live a pretty decent life in Wisconsin on an hourly wage. ....well, not if I wanted to live on the shores of Lake Michigan, but a decent town, for sure. Would I like it? No. Would I try to form a small business, yes. And the University of Wisconsin has TONS of outreach programs to help people improve their lives and education level.
Last edited by karenabcde; 06-28-2008 at 01:00 AM..
Wisconsin is a great place to be, I agree. But places like inner-city Milwaukee can definitely use some extra attention. Poverty is a complex problem and requires a complex solution. I don't like the idea of shrugging the whole thing off, as if everyone's done all they could to help out the ill-fortuned in our fair city.
I think making poverty a partisan issue is a little offensive. Poverty diminishes the standard of living for all people, no matter the party with which they affiliate. I think everyone has at least some moral responsibility to help those less fortunate than themselves.
There is a project currently underway by the Milwaukee department of city development which aims to improve the quality of housing while also attempting to bring business vitality back to the main thoroughfares of the city. This project is NOT responsible for the huge condo boom which is happening in the downtown area, and is focused more on improving various neighborhoods throughout the city of Milwaukee. The makeover will take a few years and is supposed to help draw more business and more affluence back within the city limits. We'll see. Less poverty and more jobs usually translates to less crime. Main Street Milwaukee, as it is called, patterned after similar projects that have had success in other cities across the world. Here is a link...[url=http://www.mkedcd.org/MainStreetMilwaukee/index.html]DCD Main Street Milwaukee[/url]
A bigger factor in Milwaukee's future will be the willingness of the city officials to offer tax breaks and incentives to businesses that may be considering Milwaukee as a place to set up shop. This has been a huge roadblock for Milwaukee in the past, and hopefully its citizens will get wise and put the right politicians in office.
Another thing that could help the city's economy in the near future is a huge influx of people from the Chicagoland area into SE Wisconsin in 2007-2008. If they choose Milwaukee or its suburbs to reside and still commute to Illinois for work, it could help boost the local economy.
I know this is probably inconceivable for a city the size of Milwaukee, but I really think that the city/state should step in and provide more "quality of life" funding to all citizens who fall below the povery line. They would be able to use the money to fix up the exterior of their homes or make other improvements. There is some of this funding available, but it's pretty limited and so hard to qualify for that nobody uses it. If Milwaukee can improve the overall look and feel of its neighborhoods, restore them, make them safe and pleasant places to live, things will naturally start to improve.
There is this vicious cycle that occurs in all cities across America. Your blighted neighborhoods attract the more destitute people of society. And the crime rates keep going up in these areas, while the property values fall, and even more impoverished flock to these areas. Milwaukee has alot of these neighborhoods right now. The only way you can break this cycle is to offer better education for EVERYONE, higher paying jobs for as many as possible, get the drugs and gangs off the streets, and make it lucrative deals for citizens to fix up their properties. Accomplish these somehow, and BAM! you got yourself a real community!
Uh, excuse me, but I don't hear Hispanics complaining or Chinese people complaining, or Japanese people complaining, or Irish people or Swedish people or Russian people or Canadians or Europeans complaining.....how is it that the Black people have so much to complain about and get credit for doing so?
I have been following this forum for several months now but I have been motivated to make a post (a rather long post) concerning this thread.
I presently live in downtown Milwaukee but I am all too familiar with inner city blight and despair. I have recently moved to Milwaukee in February, and this city is doing WAY better than my hometown.
I grew up in Birmingham, AL, which had a reputation for being the most segregated city in the nation (a reputation that haunts the city to this day). My communities were all black, my schools were all black, my immediate world was full of black faces but television, magazines, and businesses did not illuminate my experiences. I grew up in cramped housing projects in a single parent family (at one point my cousins had to live with us); the median income was barely $5000/year. My mother flatly refused to accept welfare and she worked mopping floors while putting herself through school. She got her GED and went back to get her associates degree. She tried to pursue a bachelor’s but it proved too stressful and expensive (there were plenty of times the refrigerator was empty and I was only guaranteed a meal from the school’s free lunch).
There were absolutely no positive male role models within a 5 mile radius, it seemed. My community was no help and sadly, my [male] relatives were not an inspiration either. Going to school everyday watching winos disgrace themselves with bottles of rotgut, drug dealers openly making transactions with guns tucked in the small of their back while walking through walkways that reek of stale urine and broken bottles, garbage, and drug paraphernalia on the ground, I knew that an education was the only thing that could get me out of there (if you’ve never lived in such an environment you can not know how inundating it is; you will come to believe that the whole world is just like this).
My mother taught me the value of perseverance and acquiring an education despite the lack of immediate payoff (we were still in the projects for 4 years after my mother had gotten her associates degree). I never used my ethnicity as an excuse for failure or success; if you are an individual of integrity and exceptional character, as well as intelligent with a strong work ethic, it will be apparent to any employer. I focused on my studies despite the numerous distractions: almost daily shootings, drug abuse, illness/disease, pestilence, and the general behavioral symptoms of generational poverty, including psychosis (lots of people who were once completely normal have gone crazy).
I was an honor roll student; I was inducted into the National Honor Society and the Math Honor Society. I was made class valedictorian and my IQ consistently tested in the 98th percentile from grade school. I went away to college on a full academic scholarship; along with several other scholarships (my mother didn’t pay a dime). I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and I haven’t looked back since. I prefer not to talk too much about my past because it does not speak for me as an entire person but I still understand how it has shaped what I have become.
The entire city [Birmingham] was written off by business leaders and was considered a lost cause. Birmingham has consistently ranked in the ten most dangerous cities in the US for several years, even outranking Compton, CA. I am by no means proud of these statistics in the least; I am illustrating a point that there are other places that would put Milwaukee to shame. I am surprised at the ease in which I can navigate traffic here and the dearth of sprawling subdivisions is a plus. The inner city still looks nice: there are not a lot of condemned or unoccupied houses, burned out homes, vacant lots overgrown with weeds, nor is there a lot of gang graffiti (I been up through Locust, MLK, Teutonia, and the side streets and this area is actually not bad for a city its size). Compare this to Detroit, St Louis, or even Birmingham and you have to give Milwaukee credit. I have lived in Houston and I have spent some time in So Cal and I have lived in Knoxville, TN, as well as visited a number of other major cities and Milwaukee may not be among the best but it is far from the worst.
As far as a remedy to the poverty situation, it is a combination of parental responsibility, personal responsibility, and a concentrated effort from non-profit organizations and volunteers (the government should not be asked to be the nation’s sugar daddy with social concerns-their focus should be to regulate/propose/enforce federal laws and manage those institutions). If proper parenting and the instilment of basic values are absent from the home, no other manner of social policy will help (they are band-aids). A shiny new school with internet access and state-of-the-art libraries, laboratories, and athletic facilities will have little effect (a number of new high schools have been built in Birmingham just like this and there are still gangs and shootings present). Contemporary efforts to reverse the tide of disparity in the inner cities are mostly misguided. A lot of the advocates of said programs are well meaning but they have not fully researched the initiatives they tout. The problem with my proposed solution is that it does not produce an immediate physical result (like the building of a new school) and local officials will have nothing to point to as an example of their “doing something about it”. It is easy to say something needs to be done about the dropout rate and the incidences of teen pregnancy but how can it be done? If your mother was 16 when she had you and your absentee father is in prison or a deadbeat, where is proper guidance going to come from? Non-profit organizations have not been successful in luring the masses into their social betterment programs (the stigma of being a sellout or some kind of dork because you are going against the grain is very strong in these communities). Misery likes company, and anyone trying to succeed is a pariah (my mother kept to herself in de facto; I had few friends growing up although my sisters fared better than me). If you can shake the apparent equivalence of success or achievement with “being white” or showing disdain for black people, then you’ve won half the battle.
This is not a “black/white” issue or a “liberal/conservative” issue; this a human issue (I am so sick of blame being tossed squarely upon some entity or institution as if they are 100% responsible for all the grief). Complex social problems have complex causes with solutions that are even more complex. It is shortsighted to assert a one-shot fix (schools can not raise children, proper parenting still can not teach children academics, HUD homes, Section 8 housing, and food stamps do not provide employment with a livable wage). Handing out contraceptives does not teach self respect and there are not enough Big Brothers/Big Sisters to go around. We do not need emphasis on one of these factors-we need emphasis on them all.
I know that I can not expect everyone from the inner city or the suburbs to be the student I was but there is no telling how many others are in ghettos all over the US with the same potential as I that will never make it because one of the key ingredients is missing. If a person has not walked in my shoes, they can not hope to know how tough it is to get out of poverty.
I have been following this forum for several months now but I have been motivated to make a post (a rather long post) concerning this thread.
I presently live in downtown Milwaukee but I am all too familiar with inner city blight and despair. I have recently moved to Milwaukee in February, and this city is doing WAY better than my hometown.
I grew up in Birmingham, AL, which had a reputation for being the most segregated city in the nation (a reputation that haunts the city to this day). My communities were all black, my schools were all black, my immediate world was full of black faces but television, magazines, and businesses did not illuminate my experiences. I grew up in cramped housing projects in a single parent family (at one point my cousins had to live with us); the median income was barely $5000/year. My mother flatly refused to accept welfare and she worked mopping floors while putting herself through school. She got her GED and went back to get her associates degree. She tried to pursue a bachelor’s but it proved too stressful and expensive (there were plenty of times the refrigerator was empty and I was only guaranteed a meal from the school’s free lunch).
There were absolutely no positive male role models within a 5 mile radius, it seemed. My community was no help and sadly, my [male] relatives were not an inspiration either. Going to school everyday watching winos disgrace themselves with bottles of rotgut, drug dealers openly making transactions with guns tucked in the small of their back while walking through walkways that reek of stale urine and broken bottles, garbage, and drug paraphernalia on the ground, I knew that an education was the only thing that could get me out of there (if you’ve never lived in such an environment you can not know how inundating it is; you will come to believe that the whole world is just like this).
My mother taught me the value of perseverance and acquiring an education despite the lack of immediate payoff (we were still in the projects for 4 years after my mother had gotten her associates degree). I never used my ethnicity as an excuse for failure or success; if you are an individual of integrity and exceptional character, as well as intelligent with a strong work ethic, it will be apparent to any employer. I focused on my studies despite the numerous distractions: almost daily shootings, drug abuse, illness/disease, pestilence, and the general behavioral symptoms of generational poverty, including psychosis (lots of people who were once completely normal have gone crazy).
I was an honor roll student; I was inducted into the National Honor Society and the Math Honor Society. I was made class valedictorian and my IQ consistently tested in the 98th percentile from grade school. I went away to college on a full academic scholarship; along with several other scholarships (my mother didn’t pay a dime). I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and I haven’t looked back since. I prefer not to talk too much about my past because it does not speak for me as an entire person but I still understand how it has shaped what I have become.
The entire city [Birmingham] was written off by business leaders and was considered a lost cause. Birmingham has consistently ranked in the ten most dangerous cities in the US for several years, even outranking Compton, CA. I am by no means proud of these statistics in the least; I am illustrating a point that there are other places that would put Milwaukee to shame. I am surprised at the ease in which I can navigate traffic here and the dearth of sprawling subdivisions is a plus. The inner city still looks nice: there are not a lot of condemned or unoccupied houses, burned out homes, vacant lots overgrown with weeds, nor is there a lot of gang graffiti (I been up through Locust, MLK, Teutonia, and the side streets and this area is actually not bad for a city its size). Compare this to Detroit, St Louis, or even Birmingham and you have to give Milwaukee credit. I have lived in Houston and I have spent some time in So Cal and I have lived in Knoxville, TN, as well as visited a number of other major cities and Milwaukee may not be among the best but it is far from the worst.
As far as a remedy to the poverty situation, it is a combination of parental responsibility, personal responsibility, and a concentrated effort from non-profit organizations and volunteers (the government should not be asked to be the nation’s sugar daddy with social concerns-their focus should be to regulate/propose/enforce federal laws and manage those institutions). If proper parenting and the instilment of basic values are absent from the home, no other manner of social policy will help (they are band-aids). A shiny new school with internet access and state-of-the-art libraries, laboratories, and athletic facilities will have little effect (a number of new high schools have been built in Birmingham just like this and there are still gangs and shootings present). Contemporary efforts to reverse the tide of disparity in the inner cities are mostly misguided. A lot of the advocates of said programs are well meaning but they have not fully researched the initiatives they tout. The problem with my proposed solution is that it does not produce an immediate physical result (like the building of a new school) and local officials will have nothing to point to as an example of their “doing something about it”. It is easy to say something needs to be done about the dropout rate and the incidences of teen pregnancy but how can it be done? If your mother was 16 when she had you and your absentee father is in prison or a deadbeat, where is proper guidance going to come from? Non-profit organizations have not been successful in luring the masses into their social betterment programs (the stigma of being a sellout or some kind of dork because you are going against the grain is very strong in these communities). Misery likes company, and anyone trying to succeed is a pariah (my mother kept to herself in de facto; I had few friends growing up although my sisters fared better than me). If you can shake the apparent equivalence of success or achievement with “being white” or showing disdain for black people, then you’ve won half the battle.
This is not a “black/white” issue or a “liberal/conservative” issue; this a human issue (I am so sick of blame being tossed squarely upon some entity or institution as if they are 100% responsible for all the grief). Complex social problems have complex causes with solutions that are even more complex. It is shortsighted to assert a one-shot fix (schools can not raise children, proper parenting still can not teach children academics, HUD homes, Section 8 housing, and food stamps do not provide employment with a livable wage). Handing out contraceptives does not teach self respect and there are not enough Big Brothers/Big Sisters to go around. We do not need emphasis on one of these factors-we need emphasis on them all.
I know that I can not expect everyone from the inner city or the suburbs to be the student I was but there is no telling how many others are in ghettos all over the US with the same potential as I that will never make it because one of the key ingredients is missing. If a person has not walked in my shoes, they can not hope to know how tough it is to get out of poverty.
Few people here stories about this. I know exactly what you are saying about education. My father was born and raised in Milwaukee(parents were part of the Great Migration after WWII). His father used to tell him not to go into the mills for living and urged him to get a good education(my grandfather used to work in the mills and there was this "I do this so you won't have to" mentality with my late grandfather. My father went on to graduate from high school and graduated from college with a bachelor's degree. He left Milwaukee in the early 1980's. It was a good thing my father good a decent education because if he tried to get the same job his father had, good luck. Milwaukee was suffering alot of job losses by the time he was in college.
The level of income defining poverty is defined by the last DEMOCRAT committee on poverty. Those who live in "poverty" in this country have a home with running water, heat, food stamps, subsidized healthcare, television, and dvd players. College students who are motivated to attend college may not even have these things, but they are not considered to be impoverished, just starving students.
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