Oak Creek's Visionary Makeover: Crafting a Downtown from Scratch
From industrial site to urban oasis, see how Oak Creek's commitment to growth and governance forged a new heart for the city
Note: Today’s newsletter runs long due to lots of fabulous pictures. Click on “View entire message” to view the entire post in your email app.
We’re back to our series on successful downtown redevelopment.
Kinda.
The City of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, pop. 36,661, didn’t actually redevelop its downtown. It flat out developed one from scratch. And it is magnificent.
What was an 85-acre brownfield site — home of a former auto parts plant — is where Drexel Town Square blossoms today as a mixed-use development. It’s home to City Hall and the Public Library, as well as a grocery store, hotel, apartments, splash pad, nature trail, a clock tower overlooking a town green, retailers and more. Did I say it was magnificent? Forgive the many pictures, but they really do tell a story.
How it started
How it’s going
Again, this was a place where they used to make catalytic converters. The plant closed in 2008. That kind of shutdown can be devastating to a small community. At least, in a community where there isn’t visionary leadership.
Enter Steve Scaffidi (rhymes with graffiti), who was mayor of Oak Creek from 2012 to 2017 and an alderman on the Common Council from 2009 to 2012. Steve’s lived in Oak Creek since his teen years. He has seen first-hand how it has transformed over the decades. He’s now one of the city’s biggest cheerleaders. And most heard. He’s a co-host on the morning talk show on “Wisconsin’s Radio Station,” WTMJ.
Yet, when his dad moved the family from a nearby community to Oak Creek when Steve was in high school, he wasn’t thrilled.
“It was a drive-by city I hated,” he said.
Oak Creek is cleaved by the interstate that runs from adjacent Milwaukee south to Chicago and northwest to Minneapolis-St. Paul.
On the other hand, it sits on Lake Michigan. The Milwaukee airport is on its northern border. As Steve got older/wiser, he began to see the community differently.
“I fell in love with the city because it had so much potential,” Steve says. “We’re right next to the airport. We have lakefront that looks like oceanfront, basically. ... And my vision was, let’s do something with this stuff.”
The stuff included the shuttered Delhi auto parts plant. Something else Oak Creek had was a We Energies power plant that generates millions of dollars in annual revenue to the city. What Steve brought to the mix was vision and a passion to get things done.
Ironically, he was at first against to the idea of moving City Hall to the brownfield site. He wanted to keep it where it was, “which was about three-quarters of a mile down the road.”
“Instead, we ended up selling that property, moving everything to the Drexel Town Square site,” he said. “But people forget that. They forget that part of the story and give me credit for something that I initially opposed.”
That kind of humility and honesty from elected leaders, even retired ones, is in short supply these days. The fact Steve was open to have his mind changed speaks volumes to his effectiveness as a politician.
“I came around (to the town square project) as mayor, which was in 2012,” he said. “I could see the writing on the wall. We had a consensus that this is something that really made sense. I’m a big fan of subject matter experts, whether they’re architects, urban planners. And we started soliciting all these opinions and they said, basically, you know what? This makes sense. You should do this.”
Working in partnership with Jerry Franke of Wispark, the real estate development subsidiary of We Energies, the city assembled a team that included architect Matt Rinka and developer Rick Barrett. They turned them loose to design a mixed-use town center at the Delhi site.
“So we had all these players, we assembled them, we had community meetings that (asked), ‘What makes sense?’ What would you like to see?’” Steve said. “And it sort of came together over a couple of years to be this plan that we fortunately had a really strong public acceptance of.”
Steve recalls the first time Rinka presented a 3D flyover of his design for the town center.
“It blew us away,” Steve said. “And it essentially looks today like that 3D image. It’s not that much different.”
Steve credits Rinka, whose firm is based in Milwaukee, for the beauty and functionality of Drexel Town Square.
“He designed it. The whole thing, not just the square part, the whole thing, how it’s going to look (to) where stuff went,” he says, referring to the mix of land uses. “And they paid attention to sight lines. So, when you’re looking at it from a certain direction, nothing gets in the way of the clock tower, nothing gets in the way of the square. It’s pretty well orchestrated, how we put this together.”
The city makes sure the project is well maintained, Steve said.
“They do a lot of interesting things with the landscaping and such great city employees,” he said. “It’s not private firms that do the flower planting and the shrubbery and all. It just looks spectacular in the spring.”
The $162 million project was paid for with $38 million in city cash and bonds backed by tax increment financing (TIF), a vehicle for capturing the future tax benefits of real estate improvements, in order to pay for the present cost of those improvements.
“TIF is generally used to channel funding toward improvements in distressed or underdeveloped areas where development would not otherwise occur,” according to the Council of Development Finance Agencies.
Steve estimates there’s more than half a billion dollars in property valuation in Drexel Town Square now.
Clearly, the city’s investment has paid off. And not for the first time. The wise but of course controversial use of $10 million in We Energies revenue to improve an interchange on I-41 kickstarted a lot of future development, Steve said.
“The willingness to build a new interchange, the first in Milwaukee County in like 45 years or whatever, that was a big deal as well,” he said. “I still remember that fight, and it was a fight because previous councils, before I got on, they voted that down. Who wants to spend upwards of $10 million for an interchange? But if that interchange isn’t built, we don’t have a Drexel Town Square. We don't have an IKEA. We don’t have most of the other things that have changed Oak Creek.”
The We Energies revenue stream gave Oak Creek “the flexibility financially to make some big, bold decisions,” he said.
The Common Council — comprised of aldermen from six single-member districts and an at-large mayor who votes only in case of tie — was unified in its support of the Drexel Town Square project.
“We had a tremendous city council,” Steve said. “It’s rare for a mayor — and I was a first time mayor in 2012 — to have a united council. It’s so rare in Wisconsin, (to have) everybody sort of on the same page. They saw this as a project that, ‘Wow, this is transformational.’ We didn't have the infighting that some other cities had.”
Let’s review the potent mix that brought Drexel Town Square (named for the east-west road that runs through it) from intriguing idea to community gathering space and magnet for economic development.
✔️ Visionary leadership
✔️ Financial resources and a willingness to make smart, long-term investments
✔️ Experts in architecture and urban planning
✔️ Community engagement that truly listened to residents and built support for the project over time
I hasten to add that even with all those elements of success, there were still major obstacles to be overcome. Because of course there were. In the case of Drexel Town Square, one of the largest literal obstacles was the presence of an underground road network at the Delhi site. Unbeknownst to the project partners, Delhi was a major contractor for NASA and built these massive tunnels underneath the buildings so 18-wheelers could load up out of sight. There were no maps or drawings, so it was a bit of whack-a-mole during the construction process.
Can you imagine the kind of support beams needed for such an underground space? No need to. Here’s a picture.
Another perspective
Let’s turn to the point of view of someone who grew up in Oak Creek and now works for the city as its communications coordinator. Leslie Flynn, CPC, has a slightly different recollection of how things played out from Mayor Scaffidi, and that’s OK. More on that below, but let’s start on what Oak Creek had to offer residents when Leslie was a kid.
“I remember growing up here. We had a McDonald’s. That was it,” she said. “That was the place in town. And if we wanted to go anywhere else or do anything else, it was not in Oak Creek.”
Since its incorporation in 1955 (to fend off an annexation attempt by Milwaukee, which coveted that power plant revenue), most of Oak Creek’s growth had been residential. It was a bedroom community. That began to change 20 years ago, Leslie says.
Today, Oak Creek touts its “access to a world-class multi-modal transportation infrastructure, an experienced, skilled workforce, and a commitment to continued development,” according to the city website.
That website is very well-designed, I might add — thanks to Leslie’s tech savvy leadership. But I digress. Here’s more from the website regarding Oak Creek’s maturation over the past 20 years.
From 2000 to 2010, our population grew from 28,456 to 34,451 people, an increase of over 20%. The city of Oak Creek has experienced a significant light industrial boom over the last 10 years as well. To support our continued growth, Oak Creek has outlined aggressive redevelopment plans to make space for high-end apartments, retail shops, restaurants, and manufacturing.
Still, a dozen years ago it wasn’t obvious what to do with the site of the closed Delhi plant, which during its peak years employed 8,500.
“We didn’t really know what to do with it,” Leslie said. “But it is literally in the heart of the city. It’s right in the middle. It’s on the main drag. And it was huge. When it was a factory, it employed a lot of people. And so, when it (closed), the public was very sensitive about what was going to happen here. So, when we started proposing this development, a lot of people were not in favor of it, because it wasn’t a factory.”
Leslie credits “very courageous leadership” from both elected officials and city officials (Scaffidi counts former city attorney Larry Haskin among them) to push forward with something completely different.
“So, the leadership, they started toying with ideas, they started looking at different ways of, you know, do we sell it, do we buy it? What do we do with it?” Leslie recalled. “Because it’s like this golden opportunity. Oak Creek did not have a downtown. Our City Hall was at a crossroads next to the high school. It was kind of by a shopping area, but there was no place to go. There were no gathering spots. Everything was very scattered. So, the idea of building a downtown (was) kind of unheard of, really. We didn’t have one. We wanted to build one. So, our leadership kind of went to the mat and said, not only are we going to do this mixed-use development, we’re going to put our city hall, our civic center there as sort of the centerpiece for this.”
It took some convincing to get longtime residents, many of them “very frugal” older farmers, Leslie says, to buy into the vision. Their attitude was, “We don’t need that.”
“Why are we going to build a new library? Nobody reads books anymore,” she recalls.
(FWIW, we got some of that same pushback in Round Rock when proposing our new library as a centerpiece of our downtown redevelopment. When it opened last year, an estimated 7,400 attended the grand opening. The line wrapped around the block. This just in: People still read books and love libraries.)
When the town center was being proposed, no one could have foreseen the city’s need to have a space for the community to gather in time of crisis. On Aug. 5, 2012, a white supremacist murdered six people at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. Mayor Scaffidi’s and the city’s response is considered textbook by the federal agencies called on to handle the aftermath of these horrific events, Leslie says. Steve said he still gets interview requests to talk about the tragedy.
To Leslie, the murder of their fellow citizens galvanized the entire community.
“After the Sikh temple shooting, our community came out in ways that it was so humbling to me, you know,” she said. “I grew up here. I knew it was a great place, but to see the outpouring and the need, I think, for people to gather after that was really profound.”
Fortunately, the gatherings since Drexel Town Square opened have been fun-filled events. Leslie said Mayor Scaffidi “did a fitness challenge, and we got out there and we did all these crazy events, and there was just such a thirst for it. I feel like people really just wanted to belong.”
The Farmers Market is super popular, she said. They have more than 60 vendors, live music, a children’s area and more. It draws thousands of visitors and has become a destination farmers market. Have a look.
Of course, lots of people want to live at Drexel Town Square, too, Leslie said. The first two phases of Emerald Row apartments are complete and leased up. There’s a waiting list for people who want to live in the more upscale Forge and Flair Apartments, which feature retail at street level with living units above.
“There’s still demand for these apartments, which is crazy,” she said. “I mean, people want to be here. And why wouldn’t they? Because, again, there’s everything you need here. We have our yoga studio. We have the hair salon. I mean, the dentist office. You can literally live here and not leave this square if you so wished. So, it’s kind of fun. And people really want to be here. And if they don't live here, they spend a lot of time here.”
‘A work in progress’
While there’s all kinds of great things about Drexel Town Square, it ain’t perfect. Steve says “the restaurant piece has a lot of work to do. They have a vacancy right now that’s been there for a while.”
There were accommodations made to lure some businesses, such as the grocery store, Steve said. A distillery wanted to move in next door, but the grocery folks nixed it.
“And because of that, (the space) still sits empty today,” Steve says. “So, it’s not perfect.”
That’s fine. But folks need regular reminding the space will develop and change and grow over time, Steve said.
“The challenge, I think, is to inform the public that this is always going to be a work in progress,” he said. “I think the valuation of that thing is like half a billion now or something. It’s crazy with all the different pieces. It’s not just Drexel Town Square, it’s land adjacent. Right? We have businesses that are around us that weren’t going to be there until Drexel Town Square came. We have medical facilities. We have a hospital there now that was just a clinic. Now it’s a hospital. So, all of those things evolve.”
The payoff for the decisions made by elected leaders and implemented by staff and the public sector prove the Good Government Files Truism that success breeds success. Taking calculated risks, with eyes wide open after doing your due diligence, usually pays major dividends. Often, they pay off big time. That certainly seems to be the story in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
And just as certain is the reputation that Mayor Scaffidi aspires to for Oak Creek.
“We want to be known as a city that’s forward thinking and visionary,” he said.
Mission accomplished, I’d say.
Onward and Upward.
Will,
I love learning from you what is possible
for city government to do!
I had no idea.
Yes, I have read all your amazing stories
but continue to be astonished by each one.
The photo here of the farmer's markets, alone,
was enough to take my breath away.
You mean to tell me
that city leaders working closely with citizens
dreamed this up...
then made it HAPPEN?
Holy.