UWM Students Design A Future Without I-794
Students envision two options for developing area around freeway-to-boulevard conversion.
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Students envision two options for developing area around freeway-to-boulevard conversion. Back to the full article.
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Categories: Real Estate
I always like seeing the project work of the UWM students and my personal hope is that the freeway comes down and Milwaukee can optimize the value of this exceedingly underutilized land.
Two things:
~ Jeramey, thank you so much for sharing all of the project boards…I will be spending at least a couple hours going through them this weekend. The problem is that the image sharing widget, at least for paid members, doesn’t readily accommodate images with a hyper portrait orientation that are also so content rich, and likely created to be shared on boards that are at least 2’x4’. (I read most everything on an iPad so I can enlarge words and images easily at whim. The best workaround for me was to go to my laptop, right-click and image, and copy it to a new tab, which allowed me to zoom in once.) is there something Urban Milwaukee can do on its end?
~ Second, one of the boards, I believe from the Mastadon group, scopes out a 30-year period for redeveloping all the newly available land, a bit humorously after another board claims developers will “flock” to the property, or some such thing. While the image of flocking and the projection of a 30-year period seem a bit incongruous to me, I do get that it will take longer than I would want. (Hey, it’s been 23 years since the Park East freeway was replaced with McKinley Boulevard and there are still 2-3 plots that remain to be developed in the nine-block stretch between 6th Street and Milwaukee Street. Part of my desire to speed up the process is totally driven by self-interest—I will be 92yo if I make it 30 more years and would love to see the results. In addition, for the city and the entire region to benefit from the new development and tax revenue ASAP, I wonder if there is a way for officials to fast track projects. Architecture students are used to doing charettes for their projects. Perhaps officials, the public, and developers can begin to come together in a sort of charette process, once a decision on the fate of the freeway is made but before removal work is completed, to consider highest and best uses for the land and sell sites to developers who will be ready to move in short order.
In the end, all exciting stuff!