The 10 Most Dangerous And Worst Neighborhoods In Milwaukee, WI

The 10 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods In Milwaukee For 2025

Sitting northwest of downtown, Metcalfe Park is a small, square area. Despite its name, it doesn’t have that much in the way of green space. You’ll find the namesake park and Butterfly Park in the southwest corner of the neighborhood.

Meanwhile, there’s a string of shops and restaurants along North Ave. Otherwise, the rest of the section is largely residential.

The strike against Metcalfe Park comes down to economics. Finding a job is extremely difficult, with an unemployment rate hitting 5.7%. At the same time, the available jobs don’t pay very well. The median income stands at $29,211.

You’ve got the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. You’ve also got Williamsburg, Virginia, a place where people dress like it’s the 18th century and give demonstrations of old-timey technology, like how to shoe a horse or how to make candles.

Now we’ve got the Milwaukee version. How does it hold up? Well, no people in hoop skirts or knee britches. Also, there isn’t even that much cause to demonstrate modern technology. Work in general is hard to find. And you don’t just have to be a candle maker or horse-shoer to find yourself without a gig.

The overall unemployment rate comes in at 4.3%. At the same time, wages are low. The median income sits at $32,298.

Want to buy an apartment in New York City’s Central Park West? It might cost you a few million dollars. Want a house in Milwaukee’s Park West? A little more affordable. The median home value equals $59,512.

So that’s one for Park West vs. one of the nicest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Anything else in its favor? Um…well…honestly, it gets a little hard from there. This neighborhood in the northwest part of Milwaukee gets ground down by a jagged economic situation. It only supports a median income of $25,892, while the unemployment rate comes in at 6.5%.

Predictably, North Division stands north of downtown. So north, in fact, that North Ave. represents its southern border. The square neighborhood is otherwise bounded by 20th St. on the west, I-43 on the east and Burleigh St. on the north.

Part of the northern boundary is also taken up by Union Cemetery. It features “residents” going back to the 1850s, as well as at least one U.S. Congressman, who died in the early 20th century.

Besides hundred-year-old corpses, what can you find in the North Division? Well, not good-paying jobs, that’s for sure. In fact, the median income comes in at a paltry $31,014.

There are a lot of cultural associations related to clock towers. In 1966, a guy named Charles Whitman went up a tower in Texas and shot a bunch of people with a rifle. So there’s that image to contend with. Meanwhile, you’ve got the clock tower in Back to the Future, which gets struck by lightning as part of the movie’s climax. Another less-than-stellar mental connection that jumps to mind when you hear the term “clock tower.”

Well, Clock Tower Acres isn’t likely to erase those memories. In fact, it will probably add to those negative affiliations. Located in the southern part of the city, along I-94, it struggles to provide enough jobs for its residents. As a result, the area ends up with a median income of $24,090 and an unemployment rate of 5.3%.

Methodology: How we determined the most dangerous Milwaukee neighborhoods in 2025

To figure out how bad a place is to live in, we only needed to know what kinds of things people like and then decide what places have the least amount of those things. We plugged the following criteria into Saturday Night Science to get the worst neighborhoods in Milwaukee:

• High crime (Estimated)
• High unemployment (Less jobs)
• Low median income (Less pay)
• Low population density (No things to do)
• Low home values (No one’s willing to pay to live here)

Then, we ranked each neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for each of these criteria from worst to best.

Next, we averaged the individual rankings for each criterion into a “Worst Score.”

The neighborhood with the lowest “Worst Score” ranks as the most dangerous neighborhood of Milwaukee.

The article is an opinion based on facts and is meant as infotainment. We updated this article for 2025. This report is our time ranking the worst neighborhoods to live in Milwaukee.

Skip to the end to see the list of all 178 neighborhoods ranked from worst to best.