Many things affect a school (or district’s) enrollment, but the most important is simply how many children live there.

In Milwaukee, recent birth trends point to a future of dwindling class sizes, beginning in elementary school and working their way up through the higher grades. Absent a spike in the birth rate or a big change in migration, the three sectors—district, charter, and private—will find themselves fighting over a shrinking pie.

Across the 1990s, the number of babies born fell by 13%. Then, the trend stabilized, even growing slightly, until the Great Recession. 773 fewer babies were born in 2010 than 2009, and annual declines continued after that. From 2009 to 2019, the number of births fell by 17%.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a drop in births similar to the Great Recession a decade prior. Births fell by 540 in 2020, 439 in 2021, and 358 in 2022. Losses stabilized in 2023, when the preliminary count shows 7,905 births, still 14% lower than prior to the pandemic.

During the 2010s, schools across all sectors reaped the benefits of Milwaukee’s stable birthrate during the 2000s. Many of the twelfth-graders who graduated this year were born in 2006. Since then, the annual number of births has dropped by 31%.

In the next graph, I compare the number of first graders entering any school in Milwaukee (district, charter, or private) with the number of babies born six years prior. Subsequent first grade enrollment is lower than births because more young families move out of Milwaukee than move into it. However, the size of the gap has remained fairly steady across the 19 school years for which I have data.

In every school year, the number of first graders enrolling has been 21% to 15% lower than the number of babies born 6 years ago. In other words, first grade enrollment has always been between 79% and 85% of the total births 6 years prior. In 2023-24, the figure was 83%, and in 2022-23, 81%.

Because of this stable relationship between births and subsequent first grade enrollment, we can use recent births to forecast the size of future first grade classes.

In the 2023-24 school year, 7,956 kids enrolled in first grade at any school within city limits. Six years prior, about 9,568 kids were born in the city. The children who will enroll in first grade in 2029-30 have already been born. In Milwaukee, they number 7,902.

If Milwaukee retains young families at the best rate from our recent past, it would still mean a decline of 16% in the number of first graders over the next 6 years. Retaining families at the worst rate would result in a 22% reduction. The simple linear model I use in the above graph predicts a 19% drop.

Again, these predictions are not based on a forecast of future birth rates; they are based on the number of babies who have already been born. Some combination of retaining more young families and attracting more migrants (domestic and international) could alter this trajectory. But the current path clearly points to a drop of nearly 20% in the number of first graders by the end of the decade. That decline will then work its way through elementary, middle, and high schools over the 2030s.

Only a few of the major races on Milwaukee’s spring ballot were competitive. Most notably, the latest Milwaukee Public School District funding referendum passed by fewer than 2,000 votes. Both Biden and Trump put up relatively weak showings in their respective pro forma presidential preference votes. Evan Goyke handily won a landslide victory against the incumbent Milwaukee City Attorney.

The following discussion is based on complete, but unofficial, election night vote totals. All demographic data is from the 2020 census. Registered voter statistics are based on the number of registrants entering election day; they do not include same-day registrants.

MPS Referendum

The referendum received about 41,600 “yes” votes to 39,900 “no” votes. The No’s actually won more wards—172 to 164.

As the map below shows, support for the referendum was strongest in neighborhoods along the lake and on the near west side. Opposition was strongest on the far south and southwest sides. Most north and northwest side wards also voted against the referendum.

These patterns do somewhat follow Milwaukee’s racial divisions. The “Yes” vote won majority non-Hispanic white wards (53.2% for “Yes”) while narrowly losing both majority Black wards (48.4% “Yes”) and majority Latino wards (49.4% “Yes”).

But these differences are small. The presence of children in a ward correlates much more strongly with the referendum vote.

In wards where fewer than 20% of households include a child under 18, the “Yes” vote won by nearly two-thirds of the vote, 65.8%. But in places where more households have kids, it lost. In wards where 20% to 40% of households have a kid, 45.9% of voters supported the referendum. Where 40% to 60% of households have a kid, the “Yes” vote took 46.9%.

These are just correlations. We don’t have data on how parents themselves voted. But we can say that the MPS referendum was most popular in the parts of the city with the fewest children.

Presidential Preference

No candidate remained campaigning against Biden or Trump in their Wisconsin presidential primaries. Still, both candidates put up relatively weak showings.

Across the entire county, Trump received 73.2% from Republican primary voters. Nikki Haley’s defunct campaign still got 16.6%. In 2020 (with no other named candidates on the ballot), Trump won 97% support among Republican primary voters.

Biden received 84.5% of the vote, compared with 12.2% for uninstructed delegates, and 2.5% for Dean Phillips. The last primary featuring an incumbent Democratic president was 2012. In that year, Obama won 99.1% of the Milwaukee County vote, and uninstructed delegates received 0.7%.

The table below shows the primary results in each municipality.

A slim majority of voters participated in the Republican primary in Hales Corners and Franklin. Democrats were in the majority everywhere else.

Among Republican primary voters, Trump generally did best in the southern suburbs, garnering 80% or better in West Milwaukee, Oak Creek, Cudahy, and Hales Corners. Haley did best in the wealthier north shore suburbs, receiving 30% or better among GOP voters in Shorewood, Fox Point, Whitefish Bay, and River Hills.

Activists opposing Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza campaigned in support of the “uninstructed delegation” option in the Democratic primary. “Uninstructed” support varied between municipalities with the most support coming in two usually quite different places. Shorewood is the most Democratic municipality in the entire county, and 15% of its Democratic primary participants supported the uninstructed campaign. But “Uninstructed” support was even higher, 16%, in Franklin, one of the county’s most conservative suburbs. In general, uninstructed support was higher in the southern suburbs and lower on the north shore.

Within the city of Milwaukee, the uninstructed campaign generally performed best in the Riverwest neighborhood, with pockets of significant support scattered elsewhere in the city.

Milwaukee City Attorney

Evan Goyke won 63.3% of the vote, defeating Tearman Spencer in the race for City Attorney. He performed particularly well in the Washington Heights neighborhood and the neighborhoods along the lake. Spencer’s support was mainly limited to parts of the north side of the city.

Goyke carried 211 wards (to Spencer’s 124) and 10 of the city’s 15 aldermanic districts. Goyke won more than three quarters of the vote in the 3^rd, 14^th, 10^th, and 4^th districts.

Spencer’s best district was the 1^st, where he won two-thirds of the vote, followed by the 2^nd, where he won 63%.

Overall Turnout

Interpreting turnout is always challenging, because factors like the mix of elections on a ballot and the competitiveness of those races always vary from one election year to another. Turnout in April 2024 appears to have been middling, compared to recent past cycles.

• In 2020, about 210,000 voters, or 41% of registered voters, cast a ballot.
• April 2022 saw about 145,000 voters, or 29% of registered voters.
• This year, 165,000 voters participated, about 34% of those registered.

As a share of registered voters, turnout was highest on the north shore. The top-5 municipalities were Glendale, Greendale, Shorewood, Fox Point, and Bayside, among which turnout ranged from 42.1% to 45.4% of registered voters.

The lowest turnout came in West Milwaukee (22.6%), Cudahy (30.7%), West Allis (31.4%), and Milwaukee (31.6%).

Most landlords are small, but the largest 1% of networks own more than 40% of rental units.

By John Johnson and Mitchell Henke.

During the late 2010s, companies owned by a single landlord, Curtis Hoff, generated 5% of all evictions filed in Milwaukee despite owning just 0.5% of the rental stock. His properties racked up code violations at a rate three times that of other large landlord operating in the same parts of the city. The annual number of evictions they filed exceeded 90% of their total housing units.

Despite posting these eye-watering numbers, Hoff’s companies largely flew under the radar until a series of investigative articles in the early 2020s brought them to light, just as he was getting out of the business. That’s because Hoff’s properties were distributed among about 20 different limited liability corporations (LLCs), each of which was the official, legal owner of a different small set of properties.

It’s not that Hoff was trying to hide. Each of these companies began with the letter “A,” a practice dating back to the era when the courts heard each day’s eviction cases in alphabetical order. They all had their taxes mailed to the same address on Good Hope Road—an office building with a large “Anchor Properties” sign.

Still, if you searched the city’s property ownership dataset or the court system’s database, you would have no simple way of telling that all these properties were connected. And so, for years, few people figured it out. As the executive director of the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee told the Journal Sentinel, “Maybe we’re not connecting the dots like we should be. Nobody’s able to officially track who the problem landlords are.”

To help address this, we’ve built MKEPropertyOwnership.com, a website that lets anyone quickly discover the connections between legal property owners that already exist in publicly available data. A user can simply enter the address of any landlord-owned property in the city, and the website will show that parcel’s official owner, the other owners connected to it, and the total list of properties in the “ownership network.” We also include network-level code violation and eviction annualized rates.

Our process works by standardizing owner names, the addresses at which they receive tax bills, and their corporate registration addresses. We then use network analysis software to identify connected owner names. More methodological details are available on the “About” page. All our data sources are public, and we publish the complete code and source data in this public repository. The data updates each weeknight with the latest version of the city’s property ownership database.

Curtis Hoff no longer owns any properties in Milwaukee, but here is what our website might have shown in 2019, if it had existed. Each green triangle shows a different owner name and each orange circle shows a tax bill address. The lines show the number of times each of the two nodes are connected.

Although Hoff is gone, practically all other large landlords also use multiple companies. For instance, Milwaukee’s largest landlord is Joe Berrada, well-known as the “boulder guy” for his unique style of landscaping. His companies own around 9,000 rental units spread across more than 800 parcels in the City of Milwaukee. Our website identifies over 100 distinct companies associated with Berrada, each of which individually own fewer than 300 units.

Research from many cities shows that landlord size corresponds to different rental practices. Large landlords are much more likely to file evictions. They may also raise rents more aggressively than small landlords. On the other hand, small landlords may employ more discriminatory tenant screening methods than larger, more professional companies. In any case, there is much variation between the behavior of large landlords. As with Curtis Hoff, a handful of companies can account for a greatly disproportionate of eviction cases, for instance. All this means that targeted interventions by housing advocates can be quite successful.

In Milwaukee, we identify about 49,000 landlord-owned parcels in the city containing around 148,000 housing units. This is comparable with the Census Bureau’s estimate of tenant-occupied and vacant housing units. There are about 21,500 distinct owner networks in the data. Of those networks, 15,500 (or 72%) own just a single property. Only about 130 ownership networks own more than 25 rental properties. Nonetheless, those 130-odd networks collectively own more than a fifth of the city’s rental units.

Put another way: the majority of landlords own just 1 or 2 rental units, but the typical tenant rents from a much larger landlord. Our data shows that 44% of rental units are owned by the largest 1% of landlord networks.

We hope this website will be useful to a wide variety of users, including government agencies, community organizations, prospective homebuyers, and tenants; and we are committed to maintaining and improving the project for the foreseeable future.