Every April, as her local utility ends its winter shutoffs and begins shutting off power to customers who are behind on their payments, Milwaukee resident Elizabeth Brown faces a dilemma: pay her rent on time or keep the lights on.
Brown, 50, has lived in a rental home in Amani, a historically black neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, for seven years.
The legacy of historic redlining and underinvestment from the city is still felt, with more than half of the neighborhood’s residents living below the poverty line. Dominican CenterA non-profit organization working to revitalize local communities.
Brown, a mother of nine with two young children still at home, struggled to pay her $775-a-month rent during her unemployment period. Now she has a steady job as a youth organizer and dreams of buying her own home, escaping “slum landlord” status in a rental where the kitchen plumbing doesn’t work and other serious problems remain unresolved.
But Brown faces challenges coming up with a down payment and passing a credit check after a lengthy dispute with the absentee landlord, a Utah-registered limited liability company, who bought the home in 2022.
“There are landlords who rent to you because you’re in financial difficulty, and they take advantage of that,” she said. “They don’t manage the property… They just collect the rent and don’t do anything else.”
Milwaukee became the most rent-burdened city in the Midwest last month, surpassing big cities like Chicago and Indianapolis when it comes to the percentage of income the typical renter must devote to housing, according to Realtor.com®’s latest rent report.
The Milwaukee metropolitan area’s rent-to-income ratio was 27.4% in May, up from 26.8% a year ago and well above the national average of 24.7% for major cities.
The median rent in Milwaukee was $1,690 last month, up 4.3% from a year ago and rising faster than local wages. Local experts say the city’s rent affordability situation is dire and could play a key role in future home prices. Next Presidential Election.
Milwaukee’s key role in the 2024 election
Wisconsin is one of the key battleground states that could decide the November election, along with Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Donald Trump won all of the states except Nevada in 2016, and President Joe Biden won all of the states except North Carolina in 2020.
To win Wisconsin, Biden will need to win high voter turnout in Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold that narrowly flipped the state in Biden’s favor four years ago. To underscore the city’s key role in the 2024 election, Republicans are holding their national convention in Milwaukee next month, where Trump will be formally selected as the party’s nominee.
Brown said he believes action on affordable housing in Milwaukee is urgently needed at the city level, not the federal level, but he warned that frustration over rising rents and the cost of living in hard-hit Amani neighborhoods could affect voter turnout in November.
“You don’t know if you’re going to have food the next day, you don’t know if you’re going to have power, you don’t know if you’re going to have a home, and you want me to worry about something else? You want me to worry about voting? There are a lot of people who don’t want to vote. They feel like no matter who’s in power, nothing’s going to change,” Brown said. “People are fed up.”
A White House spokesperson told Realtor.com that Biden Recent Proposals It would lower housing costs across the nation by funding the construction of millions of new homes, offering down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers, and cracking down on “rent gouging by corporate landlords.”
But many of those proposals will face an uphill battle in Congress, where Republicans currently control the House of Representatives, and the Biden team has the daunting task of communicating to voters his plans for housing, which differ sharply from Trump’s.
Trump, who first gained fame as a real estate mogul, blamed Biden for rising rents and mortgage rates while accusing the Democrat of plotting to “destroy real estate values.”
During a closed-door meeting with House Republicans last week, Trump reportedly described Milwaukee as “horrible.” NBC Newshe argued, was “specifically referring to Milwaukee’s problems, specifically violent crime and voter fraud.”
“For Wisconsinites, the difference in leadership this November couldn’t be clearer: Donald Trump was in Washington yesterday promising CEO tax cuts and openly working to cut affordable housing programs,” Timothy White, Wisconsin’s Biden-Harris spokesman, said in a statement to Realtor.com.
“Businesses and homeowners shouldn’t be making record profits while hardworking Americans struggle to pay their bills. That’s why President Biden and the Vice President [Kamala] “Harris has taken on corporate greed, made lowering costs a priority and proposed the boldest housing plan in a generation to lower housing costs, including by increasing supply,” White said.
“Wisconsinites deserve a president who will fight for them, not for them, and that’s President Biden,” he added.
Why is rent so expensive in Milwaukee?
In Milwaukee, 53% of renters spend more than a third of their income on rent, exceeding the threshold for affordability. Community Development Alliance.
Black and brown residents are being hit hardest: In majority-Latino neighborhoods, 60% of households are paying rent they can’t afford, and that number rises to 70% in majority-Black neighborhoods.
“Milwaukee’s housing market is extremely tough for both renters and homeowners, especially for Black and brown families,” said Teig Whaley Smith, CDA’s chief alliance officer. “This is largely due to local policies that artificially reduce the number of housing units available and state policies that distort the housing market, resulting in more rentals than homeowners.”
Whaley-Smith said that after the 2007 financial crisis caused a wave of foreclosures in low-income areas, out-of-state investors flocked in, buying up properties and raising rents.
“Homes that could be purchased with a mortgage of around $700 a month just seven years ago can now be borrowed for only $1,400 a month, and that money is being drained out of our economy,” he said.
2021 Report Milwaukee Journal Sentinel He said the number of single-family rental homes in the city has more than doubled since 2005, reaching 18,800 units.
Nearly half were valued at $75,000 or less, and 5,000 of the rental homes were valued at less than $50,000. At those prices, even with interest rates above 7%, a typical 30-year mortgage payment would be less than $550 — far less than what many renters are paying for a home.
Brown’s rental home is a case in point: Records show the bank foreclosed on the home in 2004, then it went through a series of off-market transfers between LLCs before a Utah-based company finally purchased it in 2022. In need of extensive renovations and repairs, the home was recently put on the market for $54,900 and is awaiting sale.
Brown said she has stopped paying rent altogether because the house is uninhabitable and she doesn’t know what will happen once the new owners have completed handover of the property.
“They buy houses without seeing them,” she says. “I have no idea what they’re going to do, but no matter what they do, I have to get out of that house because it has to have all the interior gutted.”
