Participants board the trolley, as Alderwoman Milele Coggs and Rocky Marcoux, commissioner of the Milwaukee Department of City Development talk over the tour. (Photo by Mark Doremus) During the first-ever Bronzeville Week in Milwaukee, a tour group piled into a rubber-tired trolley for a ride around the neighborhood and an update on the city’s efforts to redevelop the area. The guides were Rocky Marcoux, commissioner of the Milwaukee Department of City Development, Deshea Agee, a city economic development specialist, and 6th District Alderwoman Milele Coggs, who represents the Bronzeville Tax Increment District and the Bronzeville Cultural and Entertainment District. As the trolley puttered along, the trio teamed up to tout the area as a great place for private real estate investment and urban redevelopment. The selling points: great freeway access, high traffic volumes on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and North Avenue, lots of consumer buying power, low-cost residential and commercial properties available for development, and more. Do you have feedback on Milwaukee NNS's reporting? Take our survey to let us know how we're doing! The first stop on the tour was a brick house on the corner of W. Meinecke Avenue and N. Fourth Street that had been rehabbed by the city and sold, according to Coggs. “Everybody can’t build from the ground up but there are beautiful homes with beautiful bones throughout the Bronzeville area so we are attempting to use the resources available to us to bring those to life,” Coggs said. A few blocks later, the trolley passed several new townhomes developed by the Martin Luther King Economic Development Corporation. The trolley bus was full during the afternoon tour of Bronzeville. (Photo by Mark Doremus) “A true well-balanced neighborhood has renters, it has owners, it has multi-family apartment buildings and it has very large single-family homes,” Marcoux observed, “and Bronzeville has that right now. That’s one of the reasons we think it’s saleable – it’s in a real neighborhood.” He noted that the more people who live in the neighborhood, the more customers for businesses and the more people out walking — “eyes on the streets that help to keep crime down. “In Bronzeville we’re trying to do both the commercial and the residential,” Marcoux added. As the tour continued, the guides pointed out a library, corner grocery, fast-food restaurant and a Walgreens. “When you think about a community, you ask ‘Is everything there?’” Agee told the group. “You think about a pharmacy, a grocery, are there restaurants, is there retail, are there schools?” “We have a library here, a Walgreens pharmacy, a Burger King. There’s an art gallery, a dance studio, a business center, a fitness center. … All of those things are right here on King Drive.” The city’s Bronzeville redevelopment program has two components. The Bronzeville Tax Increment District (TID #59) was established by the Common Council in 2005 to restore economic vitality to an area that stretches from W. Garfield and W. Lloyd on the south to W. Center on the north, with a thin sliver running further north to E. Burleigh on both sides of King Drive. The east-west boundaries are 2nd and 7th streets. The Bronzeville Cultural and Entertainment District is a small portion at the southern end of the TID. It was set up to recreate the old Bronzeville neighborhood along Walnut Street, which was the business, economic and cultural center of Milwaukee’s African American community from the early 1900s through the 1960s. As the trolley, packed to capacity, ambled down King Drive, Marcoux talked up the commercial potential of Bronzeville. What the low-income neighborhood lacks in personal income, he argued, it makes up for in population density, and therefore purchasing power. Walgreens’ 2009 investment in a new, expanded building on King Drive is evidence of a vibrant retail market in Bronzeville, Coggs added. “When it was on North Avenue it was the highest grossing Walgreens in the region,” she said. “One of the reasons they moved here to King Drive was that they believed that with a drive-through pharmacy they could increase their sales by up to 30 percent annually. So there is no doubt that there is a lot of purchasing power in this area.” Marcoux also praised King Drive as a street that “presents well.” “You don’t see a lot of trash and graffiti,” he said. “The city has invested a significant amount of money in the lighting, in the street itself, millions of dollars over the last 20 years.” The tour soon arrived at the centerpiece of the Bronzeville TID, King Commons, a multi-use building with commercial space at street level and mixed-income residential units upstairs developed by the Martin Luther King Economic Development Corporation.