In Milwaukee, the Polish Flat was the quintessential "missing middle" housing

This is an installation of The UpZone’s ongoing series, Where Did the Missing Middle Go? We’ll go back in time to look at historical examples of housing that was simple, affordable, and modifiable, in cities all across the United States. Our last entry was on Sears homes, if you want to check it out.

Milwaukee joined the Rust Belt cohort as an industrial powerhouse in the middle of the 19th century, alongside its midwestern brethren of Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit. Starting around 1850, waves of immigrants primarily from Eastern Europe came to the city looking for work in factories, tanneries, and mills — and, of course, needed places to live.

The  “raised cottage”, also sometimes referred to in Milwaukee as a “Polish Flat” was a house that would let families expand their homes as they grew. The classic form is a simple four-room cottage on a long, narrow lot, which could be hoisted up to build a raised basement or a full first floor, and rooms or entire second cottages could be added onto its rear. These were homes for the upwardly mobile working class, who had saved enough money to leave slums or tenements and buy property.

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Scholars Thomas Hubka and Judith Kenny, when researching the significance of this style of home to Polish immigrants’ integration into American society, tracked down and analyzed an example of one such cottage and its transformation over time. The original, three-room unit, with an external kitchen in a shed in the backyard, was purchased for $800 in 1894 — that’s about $28,000 today. As the family grew, rather than buying and moving elsewhere, they modified their home to accommodate multiple generations on one property. In 1911, additional income from their working children allowed the family to acquire a second cottage from a neighbor, which was lifted off its original lot, moved to their property, and attached to their existing structure. The three-bedroom cottage was converted into a longer, raised bungalow, with the lower level converted into its own unit.

This type of creative expansion was not uncommon in Milwaukee. In another documented example, one family lifted their cottage and constructed an entirely new unit underneath, which could then be rented out to help cover the owner’s mortgage. These additional units of housing —built underneath, beside, and on top of — was crucial for the Eastern European immigrant worker population, which ballooned in Milwaukee from 7,000 in 1870 to 70,000 in 1910. 

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An interesting detail in the history of the Polish flat is the development of a mini-economy of, builders, lenders, and landlords who worked exclusively within the growing immigrant communities, as Kenny describes in another paper:

This second, informal market also operated in Milwaukee’s ethnic communities and produced the owner-occupied cottages and rental multi-family structures of the working class. From the 1880s and ‘90s through the continuing period of significant Polish immigration during the first decade of the twentieth century, small contractors and builders within the Polish community contributed to the neighborhood’s local economy as well as its ongoing growth.

The creative modification of these cottages allowed new immigrant communities to grow in place and thrive. When new housing could be easily added to existing land, strong familial networks were preserved and multi-generational families were able to stay in place as they grew, providing a network of caretaking and support.

By 1920, Polish flats made up about half the housing stock in Milwaukee’s South Side. They can still be found all across the city today — at pretty affordable prices, even in 2023. 

Note: Featured image for this post was provided courtesy of the Archives Department, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries.