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If you don’t take care of something, it dies.
It’s an unseasonably warm April afternoon, and Antoine Carter is looking at the remnants of the first community garden he built 14 years ago. It’s on a residential block south of Moody Park in the heart of the 53206, around the corner from the 24th Street home where Carter spent his teenage years.
That house, like several on the block, is now vacant. The garden thrived until around 2021, when his mom moved out of the neighborhood. “The garden didn’t have a leader, and it died,” Carter says.
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Carter sees the whole North Side in this one ex-garden. The abandoned duplexes, the empty lots, the ghosts of block parties.
When one cog falls out, the whole culture goes with it. Carter knows he can never fix all the macro problems that plague his beloved streets, but he does plan on trying.
Since 2011, Carter has made a career by being a connector. For six years, he was the self-appointed “community garden guy,” rocking cargo shorts as he led sustainability efforts with Milwaukee Urban Gardens and Groundwork Milwaukee.
Now 39, he’s since worked primarily in nonprofits and fundraising, with Imagine MKE and now the Milwaukee Public Library Foundation.
The arts have also been central. He’s been involved in organizing more than 50 murals around the metro, connecting building owners or governments with artists local and national to “colorify” Milwaukee.
Carter taught a service learning course for a semester at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and is the current Wisconsin Club Artist-In-Residence curator.
The thread uniting those disparate experiences: “It’s all development.”
“An OG once told me you can be a Space or you can be a Voice,” Carter says. “I think there’s a way to be both.” As a Space, Carter is the co-creator of “Brotary” – about 18 movers and shakers, mostly Black men, seeking to improve Milwaukee through fields ranging from tech to government to philanthropy.
As a Voice, Carter elevated Milwaukee in front of national audiences in interviews with The New York Times and PBS News before the 2024 election, speaking on how Kamala Harris could win Black men’s votes.
His next venture takes that concept to concrete. Seeing an acute need for safe housing, Carter is looking to develop adjacent vacant lots owned by the city along Center Street, about four blocks south of Moody Park. His vision is for three mixed-rate apartment buildings totaling around 60 units.
For Mayor Cavalier Johnson to achieve his goal of Milwaukee surpassing 1 million residents, Carter says, this area cannot remain ignored. There need to be shovels and hard hats, not wrecking balls and arson.
“You see cranes Downtown but then you don’t see anything on the North Side. That’s disappointing,” Carter says. “I want to be the change and make things better for people in the same situations I grew up in. … The North Side is home, and the people there deserve better. I can do it.”
