Milwaukee is full of clock towers. The Allen-Bradley Clock Tower, largest in the world, is just one of an entire skyline dotted with clock towers, fancy and plain, big and small. This is not the sort of place where you can lose track of time.
Milwaukee is much more than its clock towers; the distinctive neighborhoods and local character of the city are incredibly charming.
Milwaukee is surrounded by the type of sprawl typical of most cities. Vast tracts of housing sliced up by collector roads and interspersed only by churches and schools. These post-war neighborhoods are bland and unusually devoid of clock towers. Milwaukee's pre-war developments are much more interesting. Our hosts in Milwaukee proudly informed us that no place in Milwaukee is more than a block away from a bar. They weren't overestimating in the least.
I wasn't able to find any studies linking this sort of neighborhood to a reduction in drunk driving but if you can walk to several different bars within three minutes, you're left without any reasons to drink and drive. Drinking isn't the only use for these buildings, many have been repurposed creating de facto mixed used neighborhoods.
Milwaukee was fortunate enough to have some visionary political leaders over the last 35 years. It was one of the first cities to reject additional freeway construction through their downtown area and perhaps the first to permanently remove an undamaged freeway. The demolition of the Park East Freeway opened up the heart of the city to the north side and greatly in the increased the vitality of the city.
The north side is very nice in a small town sort of way, but the south side is very nice in a big city sort of way. Large elegant buildings line the streets of the Historic Third Ward just south of downtown. This upscale district of warehouses turned condos is really breathtaking.
It has some obvious problems though. It's streets, designed for heavy horse and wagon traffic are incredibly wide. The city addressed the problem by turning the center of the street into parking lots.
This is a remarkably good way to create an unpleasant place. It seems like the district planners decided that instead of optimizing the ward for it's residents, they would try to bring in "tourists" to public markets and upscale shops. It's a good way to convince retailers to pay higher rates, but it doesn't work so well to make a place that survives beyond its initial hype. The issue of too-wide streets is not easily dealt with in our current development scheme, I'll have more to say about that during the Denver/Boulder issue.
Unlike the north side, the south side is conveniently cut off from the city by an enormous interstate highway (I-794). It happens to be elevated, so if community planners ever had the drive, they could make an effort to reduce the disconnection by carefully designed spaces under the highway. Milwaukee is full of rivers that naturally dice up the city, they don't need any more mobility barriers than the ones that nature provides.
One thing that Milwaukee residents seem to understand is the critical importance of restorative spaces in human environments. Throughout the city, we came across the sort of bright colors the liven up the sometimes somber mood of Wisconsin winters.
It's always nice to see some play areas that actually look fun. Playgrounds of metal sticks and plastic panels ordered out of a catalog are only good at regimenting children away from their creative and innovative minds.
Milwaukee's school stock is among the best I've ever seen. Even in cases where they're forced to board up windows to reduce capital and utility costs, they find ways to brighten up the picture.
And let's not forget the roof tops. This light-hearted scene lay up against a major thoroughfare. The only apparent purpose was to provide tired commuters with something pleasant to dwell on during their nerve wracking dashes to and from work.
Milwaukee is a place full of serious people who manage not to take themselves too seriously. My guess is that all of this has something to do with the concentration of so much beer in such a small city. I'll leave you with one final picture that I'll call "The Future is Now".
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Milwaukee - Wrap Up
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Milwaukee - Sewer District
The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District (MMSD) is arguably one of the best in the nation. Sewage districts, which span multiple jurisdictions, are forced to navigate difficult waters. Not only are they unable to force regulatory changes within their own boundaries, they often only cover portions of watersheds, leaving sections of waterways that drain into their area of responsibility totally out of their control.
For any sewage district to meet their mandate to treat sewage and act as a steward for waterways, they must forge political alliances between urban and suburban leaders. Two decades after the "Sewer Wars" in Milwaukee, it is clear that those alliances are now treated with great value. Outlying communities no longer threaten to break from the district and money flows into MMSD coffers to pay for infrastructure upgrades.
Before I get into what the MMSD is doing right and where they fall off the wagon, I'd like to give a brief overview of the treatment district, one of the largest in the country. The district covers 411 square miles over six different watersheds and dozens of local jurisdictions. They operate two separate treatment facilities, over 500 million gallons of storage capacity and 300 miles of collector pipe while managing flood control and mitigation for the entire area. Each jurisdiction owns and operates their own sewer pipes that feed into the MMSD collector pipes. Most of this area has separate sanitary and storm sewers, however 27 square miles in the heart of Milwaukee proper and a nearby community utilize combined sewers.
This small area of combined sewers collect so much water during rain storms and snow melts and that they often overwhelm the fixed capacity of the treatment plants. Each of the two plants can treat 300 million gallons of sewage per day but even a single inch of rain can add an additional 450 million gallons of water from the combined sewer area alone. Each storm event also brings additional groundwater infiltration into the 6000 miles of leaky pipes not operated or governed by MMSD.
For decades, rainfall in the Milwaukee area meant sewer overflows. If more water flowed to the treatment plants than they could handle, that excess water, usually a combination of stormwater and sanitary sewage, was discharged into the lake. The 1960's brought an environmental movement that no longer accepted 50-60 overflows per year and a solution was devised.
The decision was made (after much conflict) not to tear up streets in Milwaukee to separate the sanitary and storm sewers. Instead, 520 millions of gallons of storage capacity was built in tunnels burrowed deep beneath the city. The cost of this proposal (after much conflict) was shared between the city and suburbs.
$3 billion later, MMSD has nearly eliminated sewer overflows. Thanks to amiable communication between interested parties and ever evolving technological solutions, treatment efficiencies are increasing. Suburban communities have recently settled a lawsuit that will force them to upgrade their leaky pipes. Groundwater that flows into these pipes, greatly increases the risk of overflow and cost of treatment. MMSD operates hazardous waste collection as well as pharmaceutical collection as a way of avoiding costly treatment upgrades.
For over 80 years, the excess bacteria from secondary treatment is dried to create Milorganite, a popular commercial fertilizer. They sell 41,000 tons a year. The settled waste from primary treatment is anaerobically digested and produces $1.9 million worth of biogas a year. These programs are encouraged by the Wisconsin Beneficial Reuse Program which should act as a model for the nation.
MMSD has a website that shows they are striving for transparency. The have online tools showing sewage flow and treatment as well as river health advisories. Click on the link and you'll be able to find out how much sewage is flowing into each treatment plant at this very moment. All very cool stuff, if your city doesn't have informational tools like this, agitate!
But all is not well in metro Milwaukee. A recent watershed-by-watershed analysis revealed that most sampling sites in the watershed regularly exceeded acceptable limits for most pollutants, especially fecal coliform. A study by MMSD showed that only a fraction of this bacteria is now a result of sewage overflows. A vast majority of water quality problems are caused by runoff. The only place in the district with improved water quality is in the combined sewer area, where stormwater is treated to the same level as sanitary sewage.
This is a problem facing (or will soon face) all major sewage districts. They have exhausted the big fixes and are still left with big problems. We are entering the area of massively distributed little fixes. Rain barrels, green roofs, rain gardens and increased foliage are of little consequence if they are taken by their minuscule increments, but on a massive scale, they can have a massive effect.
MMSD knows this and to move in that direction, they have sold 10,000 rain barrels at-cost to district residents and subsidize rain garden plants. But they are unable to create the necessary vast scale of implementation under their current operating structure. Because they don't bill customers directly, they have no way to attach incentives to little solutions. To demonstrate their weak political position, it was only after years of cajoling that an informal agreement was put into place to limit the additional runoff caused by new development. Without legal authority, how can they possibly get communities to require rain barrel installation? Or implement green roof requirements?
I'm not sure if it makes more sense for the MMSD to evolve into an organization with some regulatory punch or if an entirely new body with a different mandate should be created. Since water-body quality is affected by activities throughout the watershed, one thing is overwhelmingly clear: effective management must be done at the watershed scale and it must have political authority. Those at the bottom of a river must have some say over what goes into the river at the top of it.
We can no longer rely on massive infrastructure solutions to clean up the mess we make. The most efficient and effective way to fix a problem is at its source. If that means new laws mandating rain barrels and green roofs, so bit it. If putting these new laws on the books takes a new political jurisdiction, let's make it.
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