The twin crises plaguing Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are racial and economic inequality, according to labor organizer Peter Rickman.
"Milwaukee is a city that once had tens of thousands of good union jobs in factories and foundries," Rickman, the president of the Milwaukee Area Service & Hospitality Workers Union, said in a phone interview. "They're gone. They're not coming back. They've been replaced by an explosion of low-wage service sector work."
Service and hospitality jobs employ one in five Milwaukee residents, Rickman said, which he said disproportionately includes Black and brown people.
(READ MORE: Coalition wants benefits from Chattanooga's South Broad stadium deal)
More than 500 miles away, the biggest factor changing the face of Nashville is gentrification, said Stand Up Nashville Executive Director Odessa Kelly.
Years ago, the city was a blue-collar town, she said, meaning residents could have a high quality of life with a low- to middle-wage income. Kelly's father was a custodian for 30 years. He bought a home with his earnings and put her cousins through college, she said.
Nashville became an "it city" where everyone wanted to move, she said, and even as construction boomed, residents weren't at the table when developers were eyeing projects in their community.
"Our infrastructure was not keeping up with the growth," Kelly said. "That development was not intentional of thinking about everyone. It seemed like it was just intentional about making money."
When professional sports teams proposed plans to build new stadiums in their cities, residents of Milwaukee and Nashville said they had the leverage they needed to push through tangible boons through contracts with developers -- something local groups are now trying to do for a new minor league Lookouts stadium in Chattanooga.
"I don't know what's going on in Chattanooga these days, but I suspect it's not all that dissimilar to the kinds of the things that animated the moment that led to securing a community benefits agreement for the Bucks arena and surrounding development," Rickman said.
In May 2016, the Milwaukee Bucks signed a community benefits agreement for the construction of a new downtown NBA arena, Fiserv Forum, which was funded through a combination of public and private dollars. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed a state law in 2015 committing $250 million in public money for the arena, which would cover approximately half of the project cost, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
(READ MORE: Hamilton County Commission pushes back Chattanooga Lookouts stadium vote)
A community benefits agreement signed by the Bucks and the Alliance for Good Jobs required ushers, custodians, food service employees and other workers to receive a minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2023. That will continue to grow annually at a rate tied to inflation.
Additionally, the contract protected workers' rights to unionize and mandated half of all jobs in the arena and surrounding development would come from specified ZIP codes with high rates of poverty or unemployment.
Rickman, who was involved in negotiating the agreement for the Bucks development, has been working with other cities on similar campaigns. At the time, Wisconsin had a Republican governor and conservative majority in both houses of the state legislature, he said. However, Republicans from other parts of the state had a "high resentment quotient" against Milwaukee, Rickman said, which required buy-in from Democrats to get approval for the project. Democrats wanted a community benefits agreement.
"It created this moment at the state legislative level where the proponents of this, the Bucks, essentially came to us and said, 'It turns out we need folks who are pledged to you on the basis of whether there's a community benefits agreement,'" Rickman said. "'Let's figure it out.' Things came together fairly quickly at that point."
In 2018, as they were weighing a critical vote for the construction of a Major League Soccer stadium in their city, three-fourth of Nashville's 40 Metro Council members signed a letter urging team ownership to sign a community benefits agreement with residents, according to The Tennessean.
"That was very helpful for us," Kelly said.
Organizers acted as if the community benefits agreement was running for elected office, she said.
"We literally spent seven to nine months knocking on doors and getting everyone's input," Kelly said.
The final document, which was Tennessee's first community benefits agreement, states Nashville Stadium Holdings must pay workers at least $15.50 an hour and reserve 20% of all residential units in the surrounding development as affordable or workforce housing. Additionally, developers must set aside a certain amount of square footage for child care, local artisans and small businesses. A six-person committee will monitor compliance with the agreement, the deal states.
Michael Callahan-Kapoor, deputy director of Stand Up Nashville, said in a phone call community groups are oftentimes at the forefront of pushing for benefits in these projects, but public officials need to be on the front lines, too -- especially if developers are receiving public aid.
"If this is important for the city to build, it should be important to have good jobs to have affordable housing and pipelines to careers," he said. "It shouldn't be this hard. It wouldn't be that hard if public officials asked for that stuff."
Contact David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.