Marquette Paves Way for Urban Renewal : Milwaukee: As crime increased, enrollment plummeted, especially after Jeffrey Dahmer was charged with 17 murders. The school decided to do something about the blight. But the project is not without critics.

Patrick LeSage brought his guided tour to a halt outside a three-story brick apartment building only blocks from the campus of Marquette University.

“It was called Drug Plaza. It was like a supermarket for drugs,” LeSage said. “We finally had to call the sheriff and evict everyone in the place.”

Now the vacant, boarded-up building is on the list for total renovation as part of an effort led by Marquette to revitalize a 90-block neighborhood that had been declining for years as buildings decayed and crime increased.

Though not without its critics, the project is drawing nationwide attention to the Jesuit university of 11,000 students as an example of an institution fighting inner-city blight through urban renewal rather than fleeing from it.

“I don’t use the word ‘unique.’ I respect what it means--but I do think this is unique without a doubt,” said LeSage, who heads the redevelopment effort as president of Campus Circle Project, a nonprofit corporation formed by Marquette in December, 1991.

Aided by $9 million in reserve funds from Marquette and almost that much from an anonymous donor, Campus Circle purchased homes, duplexes and apartments throughout the neighborhood. About 30 buildings considered beyond repair were demolished. Others have either been renovated or are on a list to be redone.

As of early this year, Campus Circle owned more than 900 living units in 92 buildings. It listed the vacancy rate as 50%, due primarily to the waiting list for renovation or major repairs.

Centerpieces include Campus Town, a new $30-million, 152-unit apartment complex with retail space on the ground floors; the Gilman Building, a restored four-story apartment and commercial structure built in 1912; and the Trimborn Mansion, an 1880 building renovated from the dilapidated home of two fraternities into 20 apartments especially suited to graduate students with families.

“I used to think that there must be someone out there who’s doing what we’re doing,” LeSage said, “but once we got the parade of other universities coming in here, it became apparent that nobody was doing this.”

The visitors have included representatives of Loyola University in Chicago, the University of Southern California, Providence College and the University of Cincinnati, among others.

Campus Circle has “set the tone” for the type of revitalization the Illinois Institute of Technology is working to achieve in its Chicago neighborhood, said Leroy Kennedy, IIT community relations director.

“There’s no model for it; we would say this is the model,” said the Rev. Albert DiUlio, president of Marquette.

The area targeted for renewal is generally west and north of the Marquette campus, which is immediately west of Milwaukee’s downtown business district. DiUlio said a gradual shift from owner-occupied dwellings to absentee landlords contributed to the drop in housing quality.

Campus Circle, which pours the rent it collects back into renovation projects, has no policy restricting its rental units to Marquette students or faculty. About 3,500 students live in the immediate off-campus area, while others commute from home or live in Marquette’s on-campus residence halls.

In addition to duties as one of the city’s biggest landlords, Campus Circle is involved in wide-ranging projects with community groups.

Last summer, it worked with the Mid-Town Neighborhood Assn. to hire youths for lawn-mowing and other maintenance jobs at Campus Circle properties.

Another local group, Career Youth Development, plans to start a program for homeless young men in space to be provided rent-free by Campus Circle.

Robert Byrd, a former Marquette basketball star, runs an inner-city youth development program out of a Campus Circle building.

Safety was a key concern three years ago throughout the 90-block area stretching west from the Marquette campus. Five students died in slayings or fires over a six-year period. Then, in July, 1991, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested at his apartment 10 blocks from the campus.

Though none of Dahmer’s 17 victims was linked with Marquette, the fact that he roamed the neighborhood heightened awareness of its decline.

“Our entering freshmen declined from a high of 2,113 in 1988 to 1,600 in 1991,” DiUlio said. “That’s a pretty stark figure.

“We felt there was no way to reverse that trend without some of our involvement in the neighborhood.”

DiUlio called on LeSage, whose expertise included years of work in business development and high-stakes real estate ventures.

LeSage said one of the first steps was to appeal to businesses and groups with a stake in the neighborhood to join the effort.

Among the partners he recruited were Aurora Health Care System, operator of the Sinai Samaritan Medical Center near Marquette, and Ameritech of Wisconsin, with more than 300 employees in the area.

Plans called for announcing the creation of Campus Circle in the spring of 1992, but when a knifing incident hit the headlines around Thanksgiving, 1991, the plans accelerated.

“After the Dahmer thing and everything else, enrollments were hurting--we had to do something before the students went home for the Christmas holidays,” LeSage said.

The hastily produced proposal went to the Marquette Board of Trustees on Dec. 11, 1991, and the board immediately approved using $9 million for the project.

As word of the project spread, DiUlio was contacted by a wealthy widow who contributed $8.2 million, anonymously.

Campus Circle quietly began buying property, and that soon began attracting attention--and resistance--from community activists concerned that the project would crowd out low-income and other non-university residents.

Campus Circle has vowed not to raise rents of properties it renovates as a way of maintaining neighborhood diversity. But a critic of the project, MacCanon Brown, said it has displaced poor people and minorities in favor of providing better housing for students.

Brown’s homeless advocacy group, Repairers of the Breach, recently announced it is launching a study to monitor Campus Circle’s impact on housing and living patterns in the neighborhood.

June Moberly, executive director of the Avenues West Assn., another community organization concerned with social and housing needs, said she hears few complaints about Campus Circle.

“I do not hear a lot of in-depth dissatisfaction today,” she said. “I think they have tried very hard to address the concerns.”

Moberly said the project’s success in winning a storefront police station, with the aid of a government grant, helped reduce neighborhood crime.

Some complained of evictions as part of Campus Circle’s strict policy of allowing no drug activity.

“They did put those people out,” Moberly said. “I don’t think they should have to apologize for that.”

Some students are angry about the taverns ousted from the area by Campus Circle, said Bridget Cavanaugh, 20, a junior from Cleveland.

“I think a lot of the people feel that it’s just to Marquette’s advantage so they’ll have a better image,” she said.

DiUlio acknowledged that changing the neighborhood’s negative image was critical to Marquette’s future, but the project was never meant to change the area’s makeup, he said.

“This was not a slash-and-burn, scorched-earth type of thing,” he said. “This was taking care of the people who were here. We have to maintain the diversity that we have, which is white and black and Hispanic and Indian and students and elderly.”

That goal is reflected in a plan to renovate one building with full participation of low-income people who had expressed worries about the project at a neighborhood meeting, said Sandy Hintz, Campus Circle vice president.

DiUlio said the Campus Circle project fits in with the university’s status as a Jesuit institution, part of the order founded more than four centuries ago by St. Ignatius of Loyola.

“He was an urban man. He really felt that we belonged in the cities,” DiUlio said. “Of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States, you’ll find most of them, like Marquette, started downtown. You’ll also find many that left.”

But he said Marquette never seriously considered moving, and he now sees obvious signs of success.

By last summer, “I’d be walking in the neighborhood and these little old ladies would come out and say, ‘I wasn’t sure, father, but you’re doing the right thing.’

“The most vulnerable people in our neighborhood were the elderly, not the students. I think they feel better about the neighborhood. They can walk. They feel much safer.”