How to Grow Milwaukee to 1 Million

UWM. Photo by Dave Reid.

It was back in 2022 that Mayor Cavalier Johnson declared a bold goal for Milwaukee, to nearly double the city’s population of 577,222, growing it to 1 million people. He reaffirmed that powerful vision in his annual State of the City speech delivered last week.

And how will he accomplish this? By changing the zoning code to allow for more density, adding economic opportunities and increasing public transit options, Johnson has suggested. A 2023 story by Mike Gousha and John D. Johnson echoed this while offering other ways to grow the city’s population. But they’ve all missed the key way to power a city’s potential:

Grow the university. Build the research funding and capacity of UW-Milwaukee and watch the city’s economy and population grow.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. “Decades of research have demonstrated a clear link between universities, regional innovation, and economic development,’ a story by the Urban Lab notes.

Research by economists Edward Glaeser and Albert Saiz has found that the percentage of workers with college degrees is a “powerful predictor of urban growth.” As the “number of college graduates per capita doubles, the expected growth rate over the decade rises by roughly 4 percent.”

“College towns are emerging as economic powerhouses, thanks to their outsized share of the young, highly educated workers who are in such high demand,” a story by Axios reported. “And as more students stay put after graduation, college towns’ potential is only growing.

As urbanist Richard Florida has written, “Silicon Valley is unimaginable without Stanford University. The innovation ecosystem of Boston and Cambridge turns on MIT. And research universities have played a key role in reviving cities and neighborhoods hollowed out by crime and deindustrialization. Pittsburgh’s revival, for instance, has been spurred by technologies pioneered at Carnegie Mellon, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles.”

“Universities play key roles in innovation (based on patents) and local entrepreneurship (based on startups),” he noted. “Metropolitan areas with a research university have 62 percent more patenting (that is, patents registered within the metropolitan area) than those that do not… Metros that are home to at least one research university have nearly 50 percent more venture-capital investment in startups than those that have none.”

One need only look 75 miles away to UW-Madison to see how a leading university can grow a city’s economy and population. Over the last three decades Dane County has seen its population grow from 385,362 to 568,203, with much of that growth coming since 2010, at a time when most of the state including Milwaukee, had flat or declining rates of growth.

As to its economy, a recent study ranked Madison as number one in tech development in the entire Midwest. “The state capital had the highest ratio of tech employment opportunities with 71 of every 1,000 occupations being in the tech space,” the Business Journal reported. “Madison also had the second-highest median salary for tech professionals at about $89,000. It also ranked third for tech establishment density with a score of 31.1 tech establishments out of 1,000.”

Ranking number two was Ann Arbor, Michigan and number four was Minneapolis-St. Paul, both urban areas with top universities.

A study by Credit Review ranked Madison as the 15th best city, among top 100 metro areas in the nation, to start a small business in arts, entertainment and recreation. Ranking first was college town Austin (University of Texas), ranking second was Provo-Orem, Utah, which is nearby Brigham Young University and third was Raleigh-Cary, part of the famed research triangle in North Carolina.

And the York IE Fastest-Growing Startup Cities report ranked Madison as the third fastest growing start-up city in the country, ahead of places like Denver, Colorado, and Cleveland, Ohio with a start-up growth rate of 793%.

UW-Madison is a research powerhouse, ranking eighth in the nation among American universities in research and development expenditures, with more than $1.5 billion in 2022. UW-Milwaukee ranks 201st on that list with just over $56 million.

Milwaukee’s one-time teachers college did not became a university until 1958, more than a century after UW-Madison and has made some progress on the research front in the last 25 years, but it has not been steadily upward.

A key impediment to that effort is underfunding by the state and the Universities of Wisconsin system, as business executive and former journalist John Torinus has repeatedly argued. Statistics in one recent study showed that state funding per pupil was $12,475 for UW-Madison in 2010 versus $5,410 for UWM. By 2019 the gap had decreased with $9,108 for UW-Madison and $5,351, but that was all about cuts for Madison and no gain for Milwaukee. As a 2021 report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found, UWM ranks second to last in state funding among a group of 14 peer institutions across the United States.

That is the challenge for Milwaukee and its mayor. Better funding could grow a stronger university that does more research that spins off more economic growth and jobs for Milwaukee. It also means more graduates for local businesses like Northwestern Mutual (2,195 of its workers are UWM graduates) Rockwell Automation (721 UWM grads) and U.S. Bank (539 UWM grads).

Business groups like the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and the M7 group have at times noted the importance of UWM, but they will need to do far more than that to win more funding for what has become the second most important university in Wisconsin. It will need to be a concerted lobbying effort, much like the push for a city sales tax but sustained over many years.

The state’s newly remapped legislative districts may be a help in this effort, giving Milwaukee representatives a bit more clout in Madison. That said, overturning a 60-year history of overlooking and underfunding UWM will not be an easy thing to accomplish. But if you’re trying to dream big, and looking to nearly double the city’s population, the surest way to get there — hard as that may be to achieve — is with a vibrant urban research university.