Instead of “Neighborhood Improvement”, Participatory Budgeting
On Wednesday, July 3, residents of Riverwest gathered at the Polish Falcon to shout down a proposed Neighborhood Improvement District, or NID. NIDs contribute to gentrification by increasing taxes on properties in a neighborhood to generate a pool of money given to a non-profit to “improve” the district.
The Riverwest NID has a website and a slideshow, but the details aren’t very important because they’re changing and because the Riverwest NID has been stopped. After getting told off by impatient and passionate residents, planners did the right thing, and took the Riverwest NID off the city planning committee agenda. We won.
When push comes to shove, whatever the details are, NIDs are ultimately controlled by wealthy property owners. According to Wisconsin state law, once a NID is created, it can only be removed by a petition signed by people owning 40% of the property value. That means the signatures of slumlords with a lot of properties, or developers with a few high value properties will be worth more than the signatures of owner occupants or frugal low-cost landlords. A renter’s signature on that petition is worth nothing.
Fortunately, on Tuesday, even though it was mostly property owners in the room, those property owners cared enough about their community and about renters to shut this NID down.
Why is this happening?
It's clear this process was started by Riverworks, an organization that has been taking money to “develop” Riverwest and Harambee since the 1990s. Some of our industrious and generous neighbors brought a petition and a box of flyers to the meeting. The flyers had valuable information about the NID and about Riverworks’ history of getting paid to deliver less than they were supposed to. You can contact the flyer-makers at stoptherwnid@gmail.com.
Riverworks has done some good, but that good has generally been in the direction of commercializing and sanitizing neighborhoods. The presenters said that Riverworks wasn’t necessarily the NID’s non-profit partner, but after hearing the opposition, Ruth Weill, Riverworks’ Community Engagement Coordinator, was able to get it removed from the city planning agenda with a text to her boss.
This is just another chapter in the city and developer’s slow grinding war of attrition against stubborn Riverwest residents determined to protect our affordable, gregarious, compassionate community. The harm caused by gentrification and abstract goals like “beautification” and even “safety” in a context of unaddressed systemic poverty and racism is too complex to fully explore here. Sure, no one wants parents to worry about their kids riding bikes, but if the approach to making this place safe for middle class families involves pushing all the working class people (disproportionately people of color) to other, denser, more neglected, and less safe places, then that should be a non-starter. Period.
Some neighbors spoke in favor of the NID, saying the now-defunct Riverwest Neighborhood Association (RNA) often lacked the funds needed to implement projects that did have broad neighborhood support. When I emailed stoptherwnid@gmail.com, they disputed this argument, pointing out that the RNA easily raised money with rummage and bake sales, but the money was often not spent. Seems likely that group decision-making was the bigger problem.
There is a very obvious solution to both of these problems: participatory budgeting. We already pay taxes to the City of Milwaukee, the County of Milwaukee, and Milwaukee Public Schools. All of them have elected officials who are supposed to spend our money on things we need. If they don’t give us what we need (and clearly, they don’t) then why do we think spending more taxes to create another group of people who will spend our money for us is a solution?
These three groups already raised a bunch of taxes. The school board tax was sadly necessary because public education is under attack. See our recent article about it. The city and county also raised sales taxes as part of the Act 12 shared revenue scheme, described in another recent Milwaukee Beagle article. Unlike property taxes, a sales tax doesn’t need to get passed on to renters by their landlords, it just hits us directly by making us pay more on every purchase.
Drilling down on some numbers, in 2024, the city budget controlled $1.9 billion, and the county $1.37 billion of our money. The City and County do not spend our money on things that align with our values. They spent nearly half on guns and handcuffs, on chains and cages and badges. In recent years our elected officials have been steadily increasing budgets for Milwaukee Police Department and Milwaukee County Sheriff’s office despite broad public opposition. Yes, public safety is important, but a violent, racist, authoritarian, and most importantly ineffective approach to public safety does not align with our community’s values.
What can we do instead?
If we want money to subsidize home repairs, enrich youth experiences, or otherwise enhance our community, we don’t need to increase everyone’s property taxes to get it. Rather than creating a fourth pool of money handled by a fourth elected board and spent by a fourth administrative group who we will need to oversee, so they don’t rip us off like Riverworks has, we just need to increase our control of the taxes we already pay.
Stoptherwnid suggests reforming the RNA. In our email conversation, they said that, outside of money, the RNA did good work, like hosting debates between candidates for office. This feels like a good step toward the accountability we need, but, if we’re talking about money, our bigger goal should be participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting is what it sounds like. Some part of the already collected tax revenues (we could borrow the NID formula and say $390,000) is set aside for things that residents directly chose, by vote, instead of what alders and supervisors pick for us.
This is not something only Riverwesters should get. It is not an eccentric, bohemian, new hippy idea. This is something that the African American Roundtable has been fighting for since 2019 on the northside. Riverwesters should join AART’s organizing effort so that every neighborhood in the city gets direct control of part of their tax revenue.
If every angry Riverwester pushing back on the NID was working in solidarity with AART on pressuring the city and county during budget season, testifying at hearings, pressing on alderpersons to invest in participatory budgeting, there would be no need for either compulsory NID funding, or RNA fundraising.
City and county officials say that their budgets are too tight to give us control of our money, but that’s not true. They spent the increased tax revenue on raises for themselves and on further expanding law enforcement funding. AART’s LiberateMKE campaign and Ryan Clancy’s controversial approach to the county budget have successfully redirected some money from law enforcement, but not enough. Meanwhile, NIDs have sprung up across the northside, taking residents’ money so that police don’t have to tighten their belts. That’s unacceptable.
Take action!
Participatory budgeting is an obvious solution, but it will not be an easy fight. The good news is, we already indefinitely delayed, and perhaps killed the Riverwest NID. We no longer need to go downtown and testify against it before the planning commission. Instead, we can focus our energy on testifying in favor of participatory budgeting during the city and county’s budget process this fall.
The bad news is, last year Governor Evers signed Act 12, a shared revenue law that will rob Milwaukee of revenue if we reduce law enforcement funding. Replacing this law with a real shared revenue system needs to be a top priority, long term. In the meantime, we can still take participatory budgeting money from law enforcement, we just need to also make them cover the penalty from Act 12. The police will have to tighten their belts even more, but that’s okay. Police have more than enough money to spare, because they mostly spend it on their personal enrichment, systemic racism, and on white supremacist terror, three things we don’t need to be funding at all!
Obviously, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Riverwesters can’t afford to put time and effort rehabilitating the NID because the best possible NID will only enable and entrench unaccountable government. More likely, the NID will join all the other government bodies, spending our money in ways that prioritize rich people over the rest of us and repressive racism over compassion, free-thinking and poverty reduction. We already can’t make the people we elected to Common Council, County Board, and State Government act right. Let’s not create a fourth board of people for us to contend with.
Here’s what Riverwesters and all Milwaukeeans can do, starting now, to win participatory budgeting:
Contact your Alderpeople and County Supervisors. Tell them to redirect money from law enforcement and implement participatory budgeting this fall.
Follow AART and join their efforts in the 2025 budget fighty. Donate to them.
In the current State Assembly races, vote for, donate to, and/or volunteer with candidates who make overturning Act 12 and winning real shared revenue a centerpiece of their platform.
In upcoming races at the County Board (April 2026) and Common Council (April 2028) vote for, donate to, and volunteer with candidates that will defund police and invest in human needs. If none are running, talk your most charismatic and compassionate neighbor into running against the current failures in office.
Treat police and police-friendly forces in the neighborhood with the respect they deserve (none).
