A Chinatown in beer city? On its face, the idea seems absurd. This has never been a town with a huge Chinese population.
But the city’s Chinese profile has been upgraded a bit. Yi Jianlian, the Milwaukee Bucks’ heralded rookie, attracted so much attention from China that some advertisers began buying courtside ads in Chinese. Then, in December, a new publication, the Milwaukee Chinese Times, was launched.
The latest idea is to create a Chinatown centered around the Viet Hoa Supermarket at 49th and North, which now has Chinese, Hmong and Vietnamese vendors. “The project has the support of a thriving Business Improvement District that is ready to take Uptown [neighborhood] to the next level,” says Common Council President Willie Hines, whose district includes this area.
“We need a Chinatown to make Milwaukee a class-A city,” says Wenbin Yuan, chief executive of Dakota Intertek Corp., an environmental consulting company.
Yuan is co-author of an about-to-be-published book on Milwaukee’s Chinese community. He estimates the metro area’s Chinese population at 50,000 people, including 35,000 Hmong. While Americans think of Hmong people as coming from Laos, Yuan says, they actually originated in China, where there are still some 18 million Hmong, far more than anywhere else in the world.
Of course, this diversity could complicate things. Back in 2005, when a Chinatown proposal was last floated, Hmong shop owners on National Avenue between South 27th and 39th streets argued that this strip was a more logical place to build an “Asiatown.”
But Yuan and others have argued you need a strong anchor to make it go, something like 99 Ranch Market, an Asian supermarket chain based in California. Yuan still thinks this is needed, but Hines thinks Viet Hoa provides enough of an anchor: “It already attracts a broad customer base – Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Hmong already travel from as far away as Brookfield and Racine to shop at Viet Hoa.”
When the Chinatown idea was last raised, Yuan notes, Mayor Tom Barrett said he supported the idea, but wouldn’t allocate any city funding for it. Odds are it will need some kind of initial support. Will the Uptown BID come through with any funding? Would a Tax Incremental District, often devoted to Downtown projects (and for my money, sometimes overused) make sense here?
The diversity of the Asian community that Hines points to is both a strength and weakness. The Asian Moon festival died, some observers say, partly because Asia is a very broad concept that takes in many very different cultures and causes inevitable divisions.
By contrast, the Irish, Italian and Polish communities have turned their festivals into cash cows that have helped bankroll community centers. Ethnic festival gold could ultimately fund the creation of a Chinatown, but re-establishing an Asian festival could be as difficult – or more – than simply creating the Chinatown.
In short, there may be no easy solutions here. But the customer base for Viet Hoa is exactly the kind of thing that distinguishes urban centers like Milwaukee – and just the sort of asset that Barrett and Hines should be looking to maximize.
The Masters of Urban Sprawl
Two weeks ago, Jim Rowen wrote a tough op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel blasting the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC) and suggesting the city of Milwaukee withdraw from it. Rowen, a blogger and formerJS reporter, served as an aide to former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, who could go into tirades about SEWRPC.
Rowen argues that SEWRPC represents taxation without representation: While the City of Milwaukee pays for a big chunk of SEWRPC’s budget, the city has no representative. Each of the seven counties appoints three members to the board. Rowen argues that SEWRPC has no minorities on its core staff and is deaf to urban concerns.
Rowen’s salvo provoked a second op-ed by executives from the seven counties served by SEWRPC. They called Rowen’s column “a throwback to the negative, isolationist policies of the past.” Take that.
Splitting the middle, a JS editorial suggested SEWRPC could do better, darn it, and maybe there could be a governance change to allow a city representative on the board. But Milwaukee should not secede, the cautious editorial cautioned.
SEWRPC was created in 1960, and its makeup reflected a legislature dominated by rural and suburban legislators who were mostly anti-Milwaukee. The board’s membership was created not to represent people, but land. Had it represented people, Milwaukee County would have had more than half of the representatives on the board. Instead, Milwaukee County got 14 percent of the board members and paid for most of SEWRPC’s budget because the budget was, yes, based on population. Even today, after more than four decades of urban sprawl increasing the population in surrounding counties, Milwaukee County still pays for 36 percent of the budget, with some counties paying as little as 6 percent.
The structure of SEWRPC was manifestly unfair. And because it represented land, it routinely supported using state taxes to build free highways to help move people from the city to outlying areas. Milwaukee largely paid the bill for recommendations that were contrary to its interests.
SEWRPC says it has supported transit and not just highways over the years. I don’t doubt it did some good studies, but its focus has never been pro-city for the simple reason that its representatives were mostly from rural and suburban (and now exurban) areas.
Rowen has proposed Milwaukee ape Madison, which has a one-county planning commission. But Dane County is the entire region for Madison, while Milwaukee’s metro area encompasses five counties.
The JS editorial suggested giving the city of Milwaukee one board member. But one representative out of 21 would do little to enhance Milwaukee’s clout and is too piddling a change for the legislature to even bother discussing.
The only reasonable solution is a board that is as representative of population as the bill for SEWRPC is. And it’s a solution, I predict, that may soon get promoted by Waukesha. Because after nearly five decades of growth, Waukesha County has grown to the point where it now pays for 28 percent of SEWRPC’s bill, not so far behind Milwaukee County, yet Waukesha only gets 14 percent of the board representation.
Some day, the other six counties of SEWRPC will make a decision that hurts Waukesha, and the politicians and people of that county will wonder why they pay double for a commission that is stacked against them. Then they will understand what Milwaukee has put up with for 50 years, and they will demand the legislature address the problem.
The Buzz
-WUWM-FM’s Jane Hampden, the station’s host for its Lake Effect interview show, has announced she will leave to take a job as a UW-Milwaukee journalism professor. Hampden was a pro: intelligent, enthusiastic and well-versed on the issues. She will be missed.
-Here are the percentages by which UW-Milwaukee raised tuition over the last 10 years: 5.5, 6.8, 6.9, 15.8, 18.7, 8, 0, 6.9 and 4.9. Other UW system schools had similar increases. Small wonder that students are leaving with huge debts. This amounts to a massive tax shift to the next generation, yet no politician ever seems to oppose it.
And the Sport Nut nominates Tiger Woods for sainthood. Almost.
