A Look at the Controversial Community-Building Proposal in Riverwest
Originally published in Milwaukee Magazine March 2025 IssueOff of the main bar of Falcon Bowl in Riverwest is an event space – a simple, wood-paneled community room that for more than a century has hosted polka parties, civic meetings and celebrations. It’s a cornerstone gathering place of the famously eclectic neighborhood, but on July 2, the occasion was less festive.
Riverwesters gathered to share their feelings about a neighborhood improvement district (NID) proposed by Riverworks Development Corp. Those feelings, as it turned out, were mostly grievances.
The pitch to residents was an open-ended $50-a-year property tax increase on every residential unit and $125 per commercial unit, up to $500 a year per property. This money would fund cultural events and beautification efforts in the neighborhood.
By the time Ruth Weill, longtime Riverwest activist and Riverworks’ community engagement coordinator, took the mic to start the meeting, many of the 100 or so neighbors who came out had already made up their minds. Hostility was simmering. Beer was flowing. F-bombs, too – including one directed at Weill. After her short presentation with the Department of City Development, Weill turned to the audience for questions.
Presented with a mic, a middle-aged man stood to ask the first question: “How can we put a stop to this?” The crowd erupted with applause.
BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICTS (BIDs) have been allowed in Wisconsin since 1984, giving cities and villages a development tool to bring a wide range of activities to commercial and industrial areas including streetscaping, marketing and community programming.
The state created the variant focused on primarily residential areas in 2006, and Milwaukee created its first NID in 2009: the Brewery District, centered around the former Pabst complex on the west end of Downtown.
Milwaukee now has 10 NIDs in a patchwork stretching from the Brewery District northwest to the city limits. (There is none on the South Side.) Early in 2025, proposals were being developed for districts in Midtown and Tannery Row at the north end of Water Street. Most of Milwaukee’s commercial districts or corridors have one of the city’s 31 active BIDs.
Each NID has a different assessment method that determines who pays what. Some NIDs, like Washington Park and Sherman Park, charge $50 per residential unit. Others charge $200 per property. The Havenwoods NID charges only $25 per year for single-family units that are owner-occupied.
Factors like the amount of commercial properties are also at play – NID 1, the Brewery District, has the highest average charge per property due to the amount of mixed-use buildings, resulting in an assessment method more akin to a BID, according to Sally Svetic, neighborhood business development specialist with DCD.
The money raised by NIDs – which totaled just over $1 million in 2024 – can be used for a great variety of projects and improvements as well as administrative costs. In Harambee, the district serves as a housing repair fund, providing almost $1 million for home repair projects, like new roofs and emergency plumbing services, since its inception in 2018.
The newest NID, created in 2022 in Lindsay Heights, has helped with home repairs, landscaping services and new neighborhood signage. Safety efforts, landscaping and stormwater management are priorities for the Brewery District, Havenwoods and River Ridge.
That’s what made the Riverwest proposal unique. It would be the first in the city with a large focus on arts, culture and beautification initiatives – things like litter cleanup, art projects, murals, musicians for community events, community gardens. Organizers proposed raising over $260,000 a year to bring such ideas, reflecting the neighborhood’s vibrant arts scene, to life.
“It’s been talked about that Riverwest needs … something,” says Weill. “On a high level, people want all these good things to happen, but how is it going to happen?”
This neighborhood with an anti-
establishment bent just started its own ren faire last summer. It has its own community radio station and grocery co-op, its own 24-hour bike race. Did Riverwest need a formal, publicly funded organization to create the things that make it Riverwest?
Ten years ago, the neighborhood didn’t think so. In 2015, a single resident attempted to start a NID. Several meetings were held, and it was squashed in its early stages.
“He was new to the neighborhood and wasn’t aware of our culture or past accomplishments,” says Riverwest resident Sura Faraj. “What can it give us that we can’t give ourselves, if we have the will to do it? Sometimes money replaces the will.”
CREATING A NID is a big undertaking. A group of property owners work with a representative from the city to define district boundaries and create a database of all the property owners in that proposed boundary. From there, a focus group is formed to identify issues, develop a budget, figure out who will pay and how much, and establish a NID board.
They then take to the streets to meet with property owners and stakeholders to review their operating plan, conduct legal reviews, prepare petitions and distribute the plan, collect signed petitions in a strict and timely cadence. That’s where Weill and her team were – just a few months out from proposing the NID – when July 2 rolled around.
The idea started with the late Ald. Johnathon Brostoff, who, before he was elected to Common Council in 2022, suggested a Riverwest BID to Weill. She went to Darryl Johnson, executive director at Riverworks, who suggested a unique flavor of neighborhood improvement district instead.
“Everyone thought it was a really cool idea,” Weill says. “It’d be the first of its kind in the city [with a focus on arts and culture]. We thought, ‘If it can’t happen in Riverwest, it can’t happen anywhere.’”
Weill had been doing community work in Riverwest for over 20 years and saw what was possible when the neighborhood banded together. The community was full of tenacious creatives who knew how to rally around a cause. But would this be the cause for them?
AS COMPLICATED AS IT IS to enact a NID, the bar is even higher to get rid of one. That’s happened only once, when Walker’s Point terminated its NID 8 in 2018.
State statutes governing termination of neighborhood improvement districts are complicated, to put it mildly. They require petitions signed by people who own 50% or more of the total value of the buildings in the district – as calculated either by property value or based on the assessments made by the specific NID.
Another mechanism can kick in to end a district if the type of properties in a district shifts dramatically between residential and commercial, or vice versa, and the board doesn’t petition to keep the NID. And the city retains the ability to shut down a NID at any time.
“This is my job,” says Svetic, “and it makes me scratch my head sometimes to try and explain it.”
This convoluted process ended up being one of the main arguments of opposition to the Riverwest NID. Once the train left the station, they argued, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the additional taxes.
“A NID can be created with zero votes,” says Faraj. “It can just be started by any group working with the City Plan Commission. Then, to get rid of it [because of the assessment structure] you’d need to hope to get signatures from the largest property owners, because their signature would be worth more than the rest of us.”
Says Matthew Rejc, neighborhood business development administrator with DCD: “I think it underscores going into creating a NID with a clear mind and clear objective, because it can be really complicated getting rid of it once it’s in place.”
THE JULY 2 COMMUNITY meeting was a critical litmus test. Within 24 hours, Riverworks would have to distribute the certified mailing of a public hearing notice and copy of the proposed operating plan to every residence in Riverwest at a cost of nearly $40,000.
The overall sentiment at the meeting was clear: a NID wasn’t the right fit for the neighborhood. A Riverwest resident of 20 years thought “people didn’t have enough time to know about this.” A neighbor of over 25 years said that a NID was “not something that Riverwest needed, that the community figures its own stuff out.”
An 85-year-old resident remarked that she was on a fixed income, and that with the recent passing of the Milwaukee Public Schools referendum, taxes were already on the rise and could be even higher be in a few years. “How are we supposed to trust that these people are going to execute on a plan?” another neighbor asked.
Some cited inequitable taxation: owners of some large apartment buildings on Commerce Street in Brewers Hill in the district would only be taxed for 10 units out of dozens, due to the per-property cap, while owners of homes and smaller buildings would bear the full per-unit burden.
There was fear of gentrification and how the tax would be passed on to renters. But most of all, the neighborhood would be powerless to stop the extra tax once it started.
A smaller group of people shared their support. A Pierce Street resident said that if $50 a year would get things done in this neighborhood, he was all in. He felt paying for improvements was a faster way to get things done over waiting for volunteers.
A Riverwest homeowner of over 30 years was frustrated. She served with the neighborhood association and saw it fail due to lack of participation. “You guys are talking a big game about improving the neighborhood by yourselves,” she said. “But I bet no one here is going to volunteer their own time or money.”
Emotions were high, people were yelling, neighbors were turning on neighbors. With a contentious audience and tens of thousands of dollars on the line, Weill had heard enough. “I turned to Matt [Rejc] and said, ‘We gotta kill it now,’” she recalls.
IT’S NOW BEEN SEVERAL MONTHS since the plug was pulled on the effort.
“We learned a lot from it,” says Weill. “We should have approached it differently – in hindsight, maybe done like a year of community input meetings and education around it. I do know that there’s a desire to have litter pickup and community art projects and street calming measures and all that kind of stuff.”
In the last few months, Weill and the team at Riverworks has been trying to get the Riverwest Business Association back off the ground since it lost steam during COVID, when businesses were struggling to keep their doors open. They’ve also been hosting resident gathering events to help neighbors meet, including one in December at Black Husky Brewing.
“We’re just really building this kind of stuff from the ground up,” says Weill. “We’re a community development corporation. It’s our job to connect residents and businesses to resources and to help quality-of-life issues and economic development. And we see a need here in Riverwest.”
