Common Ground Gets National Attention

Southlawn housing complex, part of the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee. File photo by Jeramey Jannene.

The front-page story by the Washington Post is an embarrassment for Mayor Cavalier Johnson and Willie Hines Jr., the executive director of the city Housing Authority and former Common Council president. It portrays a battle by the mostly elderly residents of College Court Apartments on 33rd and Highland to get the patio at the complex reopened. They believed it had been shut down as a punishment after 21 tenants signed an email to Hines complaining about conditions at the public housing complex.

“Instead of a response,” the story reported, “the residents had awoken a few days later to find a padlock on the gate to the building’s patio, limiting access to the only outdoor space where tenants could gather in the evenings to grill or visit with friends. Building management later said the lock was needed to keep out trespassers. To the tenants, it felt like an act of retribution for speaking up.”

The tenants are among some 11,000 Milwaukee residents — more than 90% of them low income Black and Latino — who rely on the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee (HACM) for shelter. The agency operates 5,106 rental units and distributes $40 million a year in federal rent subsidies.

Over the past year the nonprofit advocacy group, Common Ground, has been working with these tenants, charging that they endure flooding, rats, heating outages, bed bug infestations and mold at some of these housing complexes.

The group’s work has generated a hailstorm of news stories by the local press, including Urban Milwaukee, and now the issue is getting national attention. Recently Adrianne Todman, a top federal housing official, announced that her agency “has taken all these concerns seriously, and there will be something done about it.” Todman is acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD, which provides the city’s Housing Authority with most of its funding.

Meanwhile, after six months of delays, the city announced it would take action, assigning two inspectors to inspect HACM properties, a decision that a Common Ground representative hailed as a “historic day,” Urban Milwaukee reported.

While the issue is far from settled, the city’s action was a victory for Common Ground and yet more proof that the broad-based coalition is a force to reckon with, one that has improved conditions for low-income Milwaukeeans.

The group officially called Southeastern Wisconsin Common Ground was constituted in 2008 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit. Thirteen faith-based organizations had joined forces in 2004 to raise $750,000 in seed money to hire an organizer and lay the groundwork. As founder Bob Connolly told Urban Milwaukee in 2016, “We knew we needed to build a strong and powerful organization to deal with some of these long-standing problems.” Common Ground’s organizing model has been used for 75 years by the Industrial Areas Foundation. “It’s an international organization and we are one of 65 sister organizations.”

The group grew its membership to include “congregations, religious groups, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, unions and neighborhood associations,” according to their website. That includes 50 organizations representing more than 44,000 members in the four-county metro area. That broad coalition, in turn, helps create leverage.

An early and big victory was the creation, in 2012 of the Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative, which provides health insurance for small businesses, nonprofit organizations and individuals and is part of the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange, with 25,000 members.

In June 2013, Common Ground released a study showing that that two-thirds of the outdoor athletic and recreational facilities at public schools throughout Milwaukee County were in terrible, poor or fair condition. The group demanded that if taxpayers were going to spend $250 million on a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, the plan should also allocate at least $150 million for children’s athletic facilities.

Their effort got national attention from the New York Times and ultimately helped influence decision making by local officials, including Milwaukee Public Schools spending $20.5 million on upgrades to athletic fields and the city supporting MKE Plays, a public-private initiative launched by Ald. Michael Murphy to renovate 12 of the city’s deteriorated playgrounds. The city committed $500,000 to the project and Murphy raised $1.3 million in private dollars for the project.

Common Ground also scored a big victory in 2015 by doing research showing a direct connection between then-Bucks’ owner Wes Edens and the nation’s foreclosure crisis. In Milwaukee, many of its under-water homes failed after its owners were sold subprime loans by Nationstar, a subsidiary of Fortress Investment Group, the company owned by Edens. The issue so embarrassed Edens he agreed to provide $30 million in funding to Milwaukee to provide support for mortgage restructuring.

The group’s effort to take on HACM began in 2020, and by March 2023 it had interviewed or collected information from more than 1,200 HACM residents, spanning 17 properties. The list of problems was long and as HACM would later contend, are part of national problem: “It is important to note that there is an estimated $70+ billion in non-emergency capital needs backlog collectively among Public Housing Authorities in the United States due to decades of disinvestment by the federal government,” the Milwaukee agency noted. “HACM’s backlog is estimated at over $200 million.”

But Common Ground wanted action, and not buck passing between the city and the federal government. The group brought residents of city public housing to complain at a Milwaukee Common Council meeting in September 2023 and council members expressed concern and outrage at the dreadful conditions tenants suffered.

Yet it would take more than seven months before two city inspectors from the Department of Neighborhood Services began inspections of HACM properties. Some of the delay was due to questions over how much power the city has over federally funded facilities. Meanwhile Common Ground kept up the pressure, calling for Hines resignation.

The decision by the federal HUD leader that the federal government will look into the Milwaukee situation has strengthened Common Ground’s position. But even before that announcement Common Ground’s leaders had made clear that they saw the city’s decision to assign two inspectors to monitor HACM housing as only the beginning. They expect more improvements to HACM’s management until its many residents “live comfortably and safely,” they declared.

Common Ground’s past history suggests that vow should be taken very seriously by city officials.