Milwaukee's North Avenue cuts through a wide swath of neighborhoods that both Republicans and Democrats want to turn out to vote this year. It also reflects the area's racial and economic divides.
John Johnson is a research fellow at Marquette Law School's Lubar Center. He explains the demographic trends along this corridor.
"Many of the Midwestern cities, the Rust Belt cities are both really segregated on a lot of different dimensions and then also have this very regular grid system for the streets," explains Johnson. "So, you can find these specific streets [like North Avenue] in different places where you see almost everything that the metro area has to offer along one street."
Johnson says North Avenue is a prime example of one of these reflective streets, that shows the range of social and economic diversity in the metro area.
Johnson says when it comes to politics along this stretch, one trend he looks at is population growth, or actually decline. "Neighborhoods that aren't building any new houses are usually shrinking, which has consequences for political campaigns, because there's fewer votes that you're going to net out of a place like that."
Johnson notes that the city of Milwaukee's population has fallen to nearly 560,000 people. "We always used to say 600,000 and we're a long way from that now. And part of the reason for that is the neighborhoods in the sort of central section of North Avenue have seen their population fall by the thousands in just the last 20 years, and by even more if you go back to 1960 when the city's population peaked."
He says population decline is also happening to a lesser extent in the suburbs, too. "We see their populations declining a little bit due to people having smaller families." In contrast, if you go to the furthest east part of North Avenue closest to the lake, says Johnson, "Those are some neighborhoods that have actually grown because they built so many more apartment buildings in recent years. And so that's a really vote rich area that political campaigns spend a lot of time trying to turn out the vote in."
Another trend unfortunately reflected along North Avenue? Milwaukee's metro area is still very racially segregated. Going east to west, he says, "It's remarkable how quickly it shifts from a large white majority to a large Black majority. Holton Avenue is such a stark dividing line ... that line has really held up in a way that I think is a little unusual in modern American cities. It's why it's an example of the extreme segregation that characterizes Milwaukee. And it's still the case today."
This segregation was caused by housing policies like redlining and racially restrictive covenants, devastating efforts like the Park West highway project which cleared away land for a freeway along North Avenue that was never built, and trends like deindustrialization in the 70s and 80s. "And then the extraordinary levels of white flight that occurred in many American cities, also occurred in Milwaukee," Johnson says.
Is Milwaukee the most segregated metro area in the country? Johnson replies, "The segregation between white people and Latino people or white and Asian, Latino and Asian, those levels of segregation are not the highest in the country, but specifically Black [and] white segregation is the highest or the second highest depending on how you measure it in Milwaukee."
"I don't think there's a street that more clearly shows that [Black-white segregation] than North Avenue," he says.
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