Stroll Along Renters Boulevard in Milwaukee

Introduction

If I were to stroll down some streets in Milwaukee, what should I expect to see? To anyone familiar or living in Milwaukee, these will be obvious but to an outsider, such as myself, without these statistics on rented structures, I might as well be trying to guess whether hipster turtles prefer mock Van Gogh prints or posters of Wes Anderson movies on the side (or maybe bottom - how do turtle shells work ?) of their shells.

I use 2015 American Household Survey (AHS) data to characterize the structures that are rented in Milwaukee. Many of the graphs confirm things we already know but it is nonetheless a good exercise to verify our intuition. These are mostly exploratory exercises akin to throwing darts in the dark and, hopefully, as the series go on, questions and answers will be refined. I may make this a regular post for other cities too when the idea aquifer is running dry. If you have suggestions or aching questions - I welcome your input.

Complete non-sequitor, it is perhaps ironic that this post on US cities is composed in a Canadian hipster cafe whilst taking a fresh of breath air away from the poor and worsening air quality in Los Angeles. As always, notebooks used to generate the items below are available on GitHub.

What do people rent (or get to rent?)

From the table and barcharts below, we can quickly summarize the building and unit types observed in Milwaukee. We see that the most commonly rented units are in 2 unit apartment complexes though single family detached homes also seem quite popular (we see later because they’re old and filtered down). Milwaukee does not seem to have a large stock of large apartment complexes of 50 or more units as they total about 12.5% of units. Assuming that single-family and small complexes are probably not professionally managed, about 40% of renter units are not professionally managed in Milwaukee. We also see that in Milwaukee, most units are as old or older than my grandparents. For example, about 15\% of units predate 1919 while another 15% were build in the 1950s. In fact, only 7% of rented units were built in the 21st century! Things are probably quite creaky for the renters in that city.

In the plot above, I decompose some of the structural characteristics to get a somewhat deeper insight into the landspace. We already know that 2 bedrooms are the most commmon but we see that regardless of unit type, almost all units are either 1-2 bedroom units. The only buildings among which 3 bedrooms are more available are the 2 apartment and detached family units. What is perhaps most striking is that the majority of units in large apartment complexes (20+ units) are one-bedroom units. In the last plots, we observe the age of occupied building types vary. In this pictures, we see some evidence of filtering of single-family detached units since the vast majority of single family units occupied by renters are over 40 years old. I guess new single family residences are not really on the rental market in Milwaukee. Of course, this also suggets that among more modern (<15 year old) units being rented, most are units in 20+ apartment complexes.

We also observe that the share of units sized 1000-2000sqft has grown to dominate over half of rental stock over the past 3 decades. The absence of 3k+ sqft units is most likely due to the fact that those are likely single-family detached homes that are simply not being built for renters and hence not available for rent. The absence of <500sqft units in more recent years is perhaps due to both taste for larger units and minimum size regulations for new developments.