West Allis: From Industrial Collapse to Strong Town Comeback

For West Allis, a small Wisconsin city about eight miles west of Milwaukee, becoming a strong town has required facing difficult realities head on and reaching for creative solutions. 

After Allis-Chalmers, the city’s largest manufacturer, closed shop in 1999, the city’s economy nosedived. Thousands of people were laid off and many moved away. West Allis became a place people avoided. Being landlocked and completely built out, typical options for “recovery” were off the table. There was no big development to subsidize, no big employer coming in to save the day with thousands of jobs, no budget to pay a consultant. 

But maybe that’s a good thing. After all, most of these typical “solutions” often only serve to drive cities into greater fiscal troubles down the line. Instead, city staff and leaders began reaching for a series of simpler but smarter actions they could take to make their town a more resilient place using the resources they already had. 

“Without knowing it, they were reaching for Strong Towns solutions,” said staff planner Emily Wagner, who nominated West Allis for this year's Strongest Town Contest.  

So what were the creative solutions they embraced? In 2022, they removed parking minimums and adopted maximums citywide. The reasoning was simple: “Density translates into value,” Economic Development Director Steve Schaer explained in an interview with me. “More brick and mortar rather than more parking lots [strengthens] our city’s tax base.”

They also reformed zoning to allow for more diverse types of housing. Since COVID, they’ve added 2,000 units of missing middle housing and in 2025, they legalized ADUs. These decisions have made West Allis attractive to more young people and also more affordable: they currently boast a 1.8% vacancy rate.

They’ve also intentionally come alongside small businesses, finding ways to help them grow and scale. From 2019 to 2022, they became a Kiva city, earmarking $100,000 as matching funds for entrepreneurs who secured Kiva funding. They’ve streamlined permitting processes and, through various financing programs, have helped business owners bridge various funding gaps, whether that’s their grant facade program or the Economic Development Loan Program, which exists to provide the capital that banks won’t. Red tape still exists, but by providing comprehensive roadmaps and a variety of resources, they hope to make it easier for business owners to jump through the hoops.  

Seeking to become fiscally resilient, they’ve merged various city services with nearby communities to save money. In 2024, they merged health departments with the nearby city of Greenfield and earlier this year, they merged fire services with the city of Wauwatosa, a move that will save them $7 million over five years and allow them to qualify for State Innovation Fund grants, which could bring in $16–21 million each over the same time period. 

Like many post-industrial cities, West Allis has its challenges. They have to work hard to compete for developers willing to work on brownfield sites without the typical incentives (Wagner told me they try to be very careful about how they use TIF funding schemes). Downtown’s main street is a state-owned trucking route, making it a tough place to foster the level of foot traffic needed to support local businesses. They’ve received some resistance from business owners and other residents who chafe against the idea of change. 

But for a city like West Allis, there is no other option: “It’s 'grow or die,'” as Schaer put it in his conversation with Norm Van Eeden Petersman on the "Bottom-Up Shorts" podcast. Surviving into the future requires them to do things differently. Relying on one large employer, prioritizing suburban-style development and accepting car-oriented downtowns aren’t viable options anymore. 

For West Allis, it’s all about appreciating what it already has and finding ways to build upon that. “The city is very resilient,” Schaer said. “We’ve got great amenities to work with: sidewalks throughout most of the community, a grid network of streets, public transportation, a farmer’s market … we’re really trying to build upon those amenities and overcome some of the stigma from the past.”