The Social Development Commission’s property corporation faces a foreclosure lawsuit for owing nearly $3 million in mortgage payments on its North Avenue buildings in Milwaukee, according to court records.

SD Properties Inc. is the tax-exempt corporation that owns the buildings of the Social Development Commission, or SDC.

Forward Community Investments Inc., a community development financial institution with Madison and Milwaukee offices, filed a complaint March 27 against SD Properties and SDC with the Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

SD Properties owes Forward Community Investments approximately $2.3 million in principal and interest for a 2020 construction mortgage and about $679,000 for a 2023 mortgage, for a total of just under $2.98 million, according to the complaint.

“FCI would be thrilled to see the critical services provided by CR-SDC return to the community,” said Ryan Zerwer, president & CEO of Forward Community Investments, in a statement. “However, the past 12 months, communication from SD Properties, Inc. has failed to provide sufficient information on actionable plans to fully resume operations and start meeting their financial obligations.”

SDC has been in turmoil since last April after it abruptly stopped operations and laid off staff. The agency reopened in December and is now preparing for a public hearing on its community action agency status.

William Sulton, SDC’s attorney, confirmed that SD Properties is in default on its mortgage payments.

“SDC has been in discussions with FCI about what kind of remedies they intend to pursue, so I guess it’s not a complete surprise,” Sulton said.

“I think the impact of the foreclosure case is it puts the North Avenue building at risk, and if there is no North Avenue building, then that is the majority of programs that SDC had in ’23.”

SDC also is listed on the lawsuit as a defendant as a guarantor for SD Properties.

Background and timeline

Forward Community Investments has been a lender to SD Properties since 2015 through its Community Development Loan Fund, which provides “financing to nonprofit organizations and community organizations for mission-focused projects that will work to reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities across the state of Wisconsin,” according to the complaint.

SD Properties entered into a construction mortgage on Jan. 22, 2020, of approximately $1.98 million plus interest, and then modified the agreement on July 22, 2020, to increase the total amount to $2.36 million.

In March 2023, SD Properties entered into a separate agreement in which it would owe about $665,000 and interest for a mortgage of five property parcels, which include the main office at 1730 North Ave., a warehouse at 1810 North Ave. and parking lots, according to court documents.

SD Properties defaulted on a “significant loan” in April 2024, according to Zerwer.

SD Properties also defaulted because it did not pay the entire amount of debt and interest owed for 2020 mortgage by the end date, or maturity date, of Dec. 22, 2024, according to the complaint.

Forbearance action stalled

Before the legal filing, Forward Community Investments presented SD Properties in the fall with a forbearance agreement, in which it would refrain from immediately collecting the obligations due from SD Properties, and revised it several times. 

However, Zerwer said revisions on the agreement reached an impasse in March.

SDC board members discussed a “time-sensitive” resolution related to SD Properties at an emergency meeting on March 24 and decided to postpone taking action.

“We’ve been doing many strategic moves to prevent the foreclosure of this building and possibly a deficiency judgment against our Teutonia (location),” said Vincent Bobot, an SDC commissioner and chair of the SD Properties board, at the meeting.

“If there’s not a foreclosure, it means it’s still going to be drawn out and still take quite some time, but nevertheless, we want that time,” he said.

Board members planned to return to the item at a later meeting so they could discuss it directly with Sulton, who was not at the meeting.

The forbearance agreement would allow SD Properties to keep the North Avenue main office and the 18th Street warehouse, Sulton said, but SDC’s main issue now is having no funding.

“Even if we win the lawsuit, without any funding, we’ll just end up with another lawsuit down the road,” Sulton said.

Legal proceedings

SD Properties has retained attorneys from Kerkman & Dunn to represent it in the foreclosure case, Sulton said.

SDC and SD Properties have 20 days to respond to the summons and complaint before the case proceeds in court.

“We feel we have been patient and extended every opportunity to the leadership of SD Properties, Inc. to work in partnership with us to resolve the loan default,” Zerwer said. “In fact, we call upon SD Properties, Inc. to once again work with us on a forbearance plan.”

Public hearing Friday on SDC

The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families is hosting a public hearing on SDC’s designation as a community action agency from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Friday, April 4.

The hearing will be held in the Milwaukee State Office Building, 819 N. 6th St., in Conference Rooms 40 and 45 on the first floor.

Milwaukee Social Development Commission buildings face foreclosure risk is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In Milwaukee, lead poisoning is one of the most serious health threats facing young children, according to the City of Milwaukee Health Department.

From 2018 to 2021, nearly 6.25% of children younger than 6 in Milwaukee County tested for lead were considered lead-poisoned, with percentages of children poisoned in some Milwaukee neighborhoods nearing 25%, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

Lead hazards in paint, water and soil are common throughout many of Milwaukee’s older homes and buildings, contributing to the widespread issue of lead poisoning. Here are some ways that you can identify and manage lead hazards.

Lead hazards in buildings

After lead poisoning cases were linked to an abundance of lead hazards in two Milwaukee Public Schools facilities, Sean Kane, senior director for facilities and maintenance services at Milwaukee Public Schools, said that the district “assumes that there is lead in a building that’s been constructed before 1978.”

One reason why is because lead paint, identified as a leading cause of lead poisoning by the health department, was used often in homes and buildings before it was outlawed in 1978.

“You should always assume that a building has lead paint if it’s older than 1978,” said Michael Mannan, home environmental health director at the health department.

Lead also can be found in a building’s water – Milwaukee mandated the use of lead service lines in 1872 and outlawed the practice in 1962. A citywide lead service line replacement program seeks to replace an estimated 65,000 lead service lines. (You can check to see if your building has lead pipes here.)

But lead contamination in water can extend beyond the city’s water mains and service lines. Plumbing materials like pipes and faucets inside the building can still contain lead.

Before 1986, interior plumbing materials like pipes and faucets could be made entirely of lead, and plumbing materials made before 2014 may contain higher levels of lead.

Soil is another common source of lead contamination. Paint chips and dust from the exterior of homes built before 1978 can result in high lead levels in soil, and deposits from leaded gasoline and industrial activity also can contaminate soil.

What can you do?

“Make sure that your child gets screened for lead,” Mannan said.

The health department recommends testing all children for lead poisoning at the ages of 12, 18 and 24 months and then once every year until the age of 6.

More information about lead poisoning and free testing resources is available here.

The health department Lead-Safe Registry also lists properties that have been inspected and verified to be lead-safe. However, at the time of this story, only 18 properties in the city have participated in the registry program.

Milwaukee’s land management system also lists important information about a property, such as past lead orders or permits that would indicate that lead abatement has been completed.

But this only provides information for one point in time, Mannan said. Even if a home has undergone lead abatement in the past, new renovations and construction or further deterioration may introduce lead hazards.

Property owners also are required to disclose any past lead abatement to a tenant at the time of lease. A lead disclosure is also required to be provided to tenants at any building built before 1978.

“If you’re not receiving those documents, that should be a concern,” Mannan said.

Lead-safe practices

It is also important to maintain lead-safe practices, especially if you live in a building built before 1978.

The first step, Mannan said, is to check for flaking or chipping paint, especially around high-movement areas such as windowsills, which can cause toxic lead dust to gather. Areas with deteriorated paint can be a risk and will require professional remediation and repair efforts, such as repainting or sealing an area.

If you see any serious paint hazards, there are a few interim controls you can make to an area before completing more permanent repairs. Before cleaning lead dust, make sure that children are not present.

Mannan recommends using wet cleaning methods, like wiping or mopping, to clean off lead dust, and to make sure to dispose of a mophead or paper towel after wiping an area clean. A HEPA vacuum, which has additional filtration over a typical vacuum, also can be used to clean up lead dust. Free HEPA vacuum rentals from the health department are available to property owners during cleaning or renovation projects.

Covering a paint hazard with tape can help in especially deteriorated areas, but removing the tape afterward can cause more damage to the paint.

While these practices are helpful, “these are just intermediate controls until you can really rectify the paint hazard,” Mannan said.

It also is important to use cold filtered water for drinking and cooking. Using hot water from the tap can cause lead to dissolve more quickly, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Not all filters remove lead, however. Look for a point-of-use filter, such as a pitcher or faucet-mounted filter with the NSF/ANSI 42 and 53 designations, for lead certification. More information is available here.

In some situations, Milwaukee Water Works will provide a voucher for a free water filter at properties when a lead service line replacement is scheduled.

The health department also recommends maintaining other clean practices to help lower lead risks. These recommendations include washing hands regularly, washing children’s toys and removing shoes at the door to prevent tracking in soil with lead dust.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Lead hazards are everywhere in Milwaukee. Here’s what you can do to mitigate them. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation through the Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

On Feb. 24, 2022, Katya Babych’s life changed in a moment. Russian jets flew overhead, tanks advanced and enemy troops slaughtered civilians in the suburbs surrounding her home city of Kyiv. 

“When it happened, we just woke up, grabbed our kids, a couple suitcases and ran,” Babych said. 

Babych and her husband, Yevhenii, have a daughter, Diana, who was 5 at the time, and a son, Nazar, who was 11. The decision to flee was simple, but not easy. She wanted to keep her children safe, but leaving their homeland still pains her three years later. 

The Babych family is among millions whose lives were upended by Russia’s invasion. The Cap Times met with some of those families in Ukraine in February, as well as loved ones and friends who now live in Wisconsin. 

One father, wounded in battle, hasn’t seen his wife and sons in more than three years. A mother works to comfort her daughters through nightly air raids. An aunt in Wisconsin fears for her nephew in Kyiv. 

Their lives have taken different paths but their goal remains the same, to keep their families safe and someday see an end to the brutal war destroying their homeland.

The night of the invasion, Babych and her husband packed what belongings they could, buckled their children into the family car and began to drive toward Poland. The drive from Kyiv to the Polish border typically takes about seven hours. This time, as thousands of other Ukrainians also fled, the journey took two days. 

They first crossed into Poland and then the Czech Republic, unsure how long the war would last. 

“But in May (2022) we understood it would not be a short story, but a very long story,” Babych said of the ongoing war.

The story of the Russian invasion has lasted over 1,100 days, and the family now lives in Stoughton. Babych works as a nurse at Stoughton Hospital, and their two children attend public school.

In Poland and the Czech Republic, her kids thought the family was on a vacation. But after arriving in Wisconsin and realizing their displacement was more permanent, they began to miss home and friends.

At first, they cried every day.

“It’s really hard because we didn’t have a plan to move, to start a new life across the ocean,” Babych said. 

At a cafe outside Madison, Babych sipped a cappuccino and gingerly held her pregnant belly as she recalled fleeing her Kyiv home. She and her husband are expecting their third child in April. 

“We’re lucky, because around us are really kind, nice people and they really support us,” Babych said. 

Her family received help from the Stoughton Resettlement Agency. The local nonprofit has helped more than a dozen immigrant families from Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere who fled war-torn countries and arrived in the southeast Dane County city of 13,000.

“For now, I have a job, my kids go to school. I mean, it’s kind of like normal life. Now my brother and sister-in-law and my parents are here,” Babych said. 

Babych doesn’t know how long she and her family will be allowed to stay in Stoughton now that President Donald Trump has ended humanitarian parole — the immigration channel that tens of thousands of Ukrainians have used since the beginning of the invasion to flee to the United States. 

“Every day you wake up and check like ‘OK, what about today,’” Babych said of the uncertainty. “Right now, I can’t imagine how we can go back to Ukraine.”

‘Because life stopped, our family got closer’ 

When Babych and her family fled the invasion, their apartment in Kyiv lay empty. 

Meanwhile, in the village of Troieshchyna on the outskirts of Kyiv, Babych’s friend Marta Jarrell constantly feared for the safety of her family. 

“We have four children. It was important for us to keep them safe, but we never wanted to panic,” Jarrell said, reflecting on why she and her husband chose not to evacuate Ukraine.

Jarrell and her family moved back to the Kyiv area from the United States just six months before the invasion began. She and her husband met in America; they and their four daughters have dual citizenship. She wanted to bring her family back to Ukraine to show them her homeland. Then the war started. 

Jarrell remembers the sounds of artillery shells as Russian troops surrounded the capital city. 

“It was very loud,” she said. “We could hear gunshots. It was getting really close.”

Before the war, Babych and Jarrell worked together at a private Christian school in Kyiv. Babych offered for her friend to move her family into the empty apartment closer to the city, farther from the violence that ravaged suburbs like Irpin and Bucha.

In the beginning, Jarrell’s youngest daughter — who was 3 at the time — slept through the air alarms. Jarrell used fans at night to mask the noise of the war.

“She’s 7 now, she starts waking up from explosions. It’s really taking a toll on her,” Jarrell said. 

After three years of war, your nervous system gets worn out. But Jarrell and her husband work to stay calm as an example for their daughters. They made the choice to stay, and even though daily life is hard and she is constantly afraid for her family’s safety, she doesn’t regret the choice to remain in Kyiv.

The war has been hard in so many ways, but Jarrell has tried to find unexpected benefits to stay positive.

“Because life stopped, our family got even closer,” she remembered. 

In the early days of the invasion, Jarrell set her daily routine around what would help her daughters cope with the uncertainty and fear.

“We did what the girls wanted to do. We baked a lot because stores were closed; there wasn’t much food at first,” she said. “We colored. We read. We danced. We spent a lot of quality time together, and that’s really helped.”

The three-bedroom apartment is a tight fit, and the four girls have to share rooms. 

“It’s challenging, but it’s cozy,” she said.

When asked how it feels to live in someone else’s home, Jarrell smiled softly. 

“My home is where my husband and my kids are,” she said.

‘The flowers have already died’

Before the war, Oleksandr Turchanov and his wife, Galyna Turchanova, took family vacations with their two sons by the sea in Odesa and in the Carpathian Mountains in southwestern Ukraine.

They began to build a house in the countryside outside of their hometown of Kropyvnytskyi on family land that belonged to Oleksandr’s grandparents. Galyna planted trees and flowers and strawberries. 

Now, it has been three years since the couple have seen each other. When asked what he misses most about his wife and sons, Oleksandr simply says being together.

“When there was a family, and everyone was together,” he said.

Galyna lives in Madison with their sons while her husband remains in Kropyvnytskyi. She works in the floral department of Metcalfe’s Market. Their younger son, Tymofii, is 15. He attends Memorial High School and plays volleyball.

Their 28-year-old son, Mykhailo, lived in Madison before the invasion began. He came here through a work study program with a university in Poland where he attended. In 2016, he became gravely ill with meningitis, and Galyna traveled to Madison to help him. 

“For two years we were fighting for his life here,” she said. After his recovery, she returned home.

Mykhailo has since graduated from a software engineering program at Madison Area Technical College and works as a programmer for the Madison Metropolitan School District. 

Oleksandr said he is proud of his sons for pursuing education and supporting their mother.

In Ukraine, Galyna worked as an insurance broker, but transferring professional licenses to the United States remains difficult, so she was unable to continue that work after settling in Madison. Working with plants at Metcalfe’s soothes her, though. 

“I like flowers and plants, and in Ukraine we have a big garden, so for me, it’s also like relaxation maybe,” Galyna said. 

These days Oleksandr lives in the countryside outside of Kropyvnytskyi with his elderly father, who suffers from dementia. Oleksandr said he is trying to keep his wife’s garden alive but it’s difficult on his own.

“The flowers have already died,” he said. “The ones that are alive, I somehow take care of them, chrysanthemums, I trim those. The ones that grow like weeds and do not need much care.”

Oleksandr is a serious man with clear blue eyes and a kind, but somber, demeanor. He sipped strong black coffee with sugar as he gazed out the kitchen window of an apartment he used to share with his family. In the living room, a bare wall held framed photos of his wife and sons when they were young boys. Boxed board games were stacked in the corner. 

Before the invasion in 2022, he and his family were nearly ready to install gas and water lines for the home they were building on the property. But when Russia’s invasion forced Galyna and their younger son to flee the country, the project came to a heartbreaking halt. 

“There is no longer a desire to build, just no desire,” Oleksandr said. Not without his family to share it with.

Oleksandr, a lawyer, was unable to flee with his family. The Ukrainian government banned men ages 18-60 from leaving the country in an effort to bolster its limited military reserves. On Feb. 26, 2022 — two days after the invasion began — Oleksandr drove to the conscription office to file his paperwork. On March 8, he was called to war. 

In the early days of the war, Galyna and her son lived in the countryside with her father-in-law. They would hide in the root cellar during air raids.

“It was just terrible. And my son, he was 12 at this time. He cried and he asked, ‘Can we please leave?’ Because it was so scary,” she said.

They soon left with friends to Hungary — five people in one car with only enough space for one backpack each.

After suffering a shrapnel injury to his stomach while fighting, Oleksandr was released from the military. Galyna learned her husband had been injured as she and her youngest son awaited a plane to travel from Hungary to Wisconsin. 

“We were ready for the flight to Madison, but I couldn’t leave my son and help my husband,” she said. 

Galyna feels welcome in Madison and said the Ukrainian community has become tightly knit during the war. She speaks with her husband on the phone as often as possible. 

“I try to speak every day with my husband and my parents, and every morning I call them and I’m afraid if they will answer or not because every day I read the news from Ukraine,” Galyna said.

Oleksandr speaks with his sons on the weekends. He said he doesn’t want his calls to interrupt their school and work. The family does not know when they will be together next. 

“In Ukraine, it’s still dangerous,” Galyna said. “Just the other day I was thinking, what country I can move to if, for example, (Trump) decided to deport all Ukrainians. I don’t know if I am ready for that. I just know that we can’t go back to Ukraine right now.”

‘Our new reality has become just war’

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dmytro Komar spoke to his aunt at a frequency typical of relatives who live in different countries — on birthdays and holidays, like Christmas and Easter. 

“From the beginning of the war, we started to text each other and call, I think, almost every day,” he said. “After every rocket or drone attack, she would check in.”

Komar, 33, lives in Kyiv. His aunt, Ruslana Westerlund, lives in Mazomanie, a small Wisconsin town about 23 miles west of Madison. 

Westerlund is president of the nonprofit Friends of Ukraine, Madison, a group that works to help Ukrainians feel a sense of community and welcoming in Dane County. 

The organization holds educational events, cultural workshops, gatherings with traditional Ukrainian food, informational sessions on immigration and, last month, a rally at the Capitol to mark the third anniversary of the invasion.

Beyond welcoming Ukrainians now living in the Madison area, Westerlund said the nonprofit educates Americans who may have misunderstandings about Ukraine’s culture and independence. The work helps her feel connected to her home.

“I hear so often ‘Oh, you must be Russian. Tell me about the Russian language.’ No, we speak Ukrainian and we have Ukrainian culture,” Westerlund said. “We’re not Russians or former Russians or former Soviets. We’re just Ukrainians.” 

Westerlund was born in Buzhanka, in the Cherkasy region of central Ukraine. After graduating from Cherkasy State Pedagogical University, she moved to the United States. First to Minnesota and later to Wisconsin. 

It has been many years since she has been able to visit her home. Travel in and out of Ukraine is dangerous and limited because of Russia’s invasion. Komar hasn’t seen his aunt since 2017.

Westerlund is the sister of Komar’s mother, who died when he was 9. His father died just three years ago. “So I’m his kind of second mom,” Westerlund said, fondly. 

She is proud of her nephew but concerned for his safety. As a man in his 30s, he is not allowed to leave the country and could be conscripted into the army at any moment.This scares Westerlund. She affectionately calls him by his nickname, Dima. He is an artist and knows nothing of fighting, she worries. 

“I have his art in my house,” Westerlund said. 

His paintings hang on the walls of her home as a stained glass Ukrainian flag glows from sunlight in the window nearby.

“She is my main buyer,” Komar joked back in Kyiv. His art hangs on the walls of his own living room also.

Komar’s apartment — where he lives with his girlfriend, Tetiana Vazhka, and their cat, Maya — is bright with large windows that look out over the rest of the apartment complex and a nearby park. 

At the beginning of the war, the two rented a different flat in a nearby high-rise. It was through those windows the couple watched Russia attack their city. 

“We were sleeping,” Komar said. As the assault began, he and Vazhka watched out the window, unsure of what to do. 

“We saw people starting to run with their stuff, their pets, kids and cars,” Komar remembered. 

Between bombings, the couple went to a supermarket to buy food. 

Shelves were already beginning to empty. On the way home, another big explosion scared the couple, and they decided to flee to Zgurivka, where Vazhka’s mother lived. The village is closer to Russia but farther from main cities they thought would be the target of Russian attacks.

Instead, they lived for two and a half months through regular artillery shelling before returning to Kyiv that April.

While many others fled the country, the couple remained. 

“Today, sometimes I regret it,” Komar said of their decision to stay. 

Like many others, he thought the war would be over by now.

“I thought like, ‘OK, three days, a few weeks, maybe a month, and somehow it will end, and we will see a new reality,’” Komar said. “But our new reality has become just war.”

Before the invasion, Komar thought of war like it is depicted in movies — constant action, terrifying but predictable. 

“But the reality is that is 1% of war, and the rest of time is just a silent time when you know that war is going on and you see the impact, but it’s so slow. It’s so, so slow. Like slowly dying.”

At least the first few months of the invasion, when Kyiv underwent more intense bombardment from Russia, the war felt real, he said. 

“It was a period of real feeling of danger like in a movie,” Komar said. “But now for three years, it’s danger like cancer.”

Ukrainians at home and in Madison reflect on separation and war is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This reporting was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation through its initiative Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines, in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.

The entrance to the Ukrainian city of Irpin holds a harsh reminder of the trauma suffered just three years ago.

Next to a newly built structure crossing the icy Irpin River lies the mangled remains of the Romanovsky Bridge that Ukrainian forces intentionally destroyed to block Russian soldiers from advancing to the capital of Kyiv. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began Feb. 24, 2022. Oleksandr Markushyn remembers the moment clearly. 

The mayor of Irpin, a Milwaukee sister city, says he received a text on the messaging platform WhatsApp from the Russian military, informing him it would soon invade his town. Markushyn had two choices, according to the text: He could either surrender his city to Russia and remain mayor, or the Russian military would take Irpin by force. 

He hugged his 4-year-old son, Mark, close to him during an interview with the Cap Times as he recalled the Russian military threatening to harm his child if he did not surrender.

Markushyn refused their menacing proposal. 

“And I wrote, ‘Try to destroy (us),’” he said, proudly. 

Russian forces occupied the city for one horrifying month, during which close to 300 civilians were killed, thousands of homes were demolished and 70% of the city’s infrastructure was destroyed.

“Why was Irpin such a key city for the Russians? Because Irpin is only 5 kilometers from Kyiv,” Markushyn said.

If Russian troops had advanced to Kyiv, the country likely would have fallen into Russian control altogether. To keep that from happening, Ukrainian troops blew up the only bridge out of Irpin. 

The self-destruction might have saved the country, but it meant thousands of civilians had to evacuate through winter mud and the frigid river. Some were able to evacuate by train in the first days of the invasion, but Russia quickly bombed the railways civilians were using to flee and continued to shell the area of the river while civilians escaped on foot.

Markushyn evacuated his own son and thousands of others but stayed back to defend Irpin. In addition to serving as the city’s mayor, he also led the area’s territorial defense squadron. 

“When I was appointed as the head of our territorial defense, I had two main decisions,” he said. “The first was to build defensive lines, defensive fortifications for our city, and the second was the evacuation of the population.”

Down the road from Irpin, the neighboring town of Bucha suffered what much of the world considers war crimes. Unarmed civilians were raped and murdered in cold blood. Images of their bodies lining the streets were broadcast around the globe.

Exploding teddy bears

In Irpin, as they retreated at the end of March 2022, occupying Russian soldiers rigged land mines in the rubble of decimated homes and nearby playgrounds. They planted children’s teddy bears with grenades hidden inside, Markushyn said. 

“As soon as a child picked up the toy, it would explode,” he said.

Residents of Irpin wanted to return home as soon as the city was liberated, the mayor recalled, but the entire community first had to be carefully de-mined. Some homes could be repaired. Many required complete demolition before they could be rebuilt.

Irpin’s cultural center building still stands in ruin. Markushyn said the city hopes to rebuild it this year.

“It was, of course, very hard to see. It was burning, and you couldn’t do anything,” Markushyn said. “Because there was no electricity, no water, no firefighters, no services at all, nothing was working, and there were battles in the city.”

Lidiia Rodchenko, 72, and her husband, Viktor, had already experienced evacuation before they settled in Irpin.

They were forced to flee their hometown of Avdiivka near the Russian border in 2015, amid fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.

They returned to Avdiivka in 2016, then fled again when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.

But the war followed them to Irpin. They had to escape once more. 

“We had already gone through this in 2015. We knew what it was like,” Lidiia said.

The apartment they rented in Irpin was destroyed.

Once Irpin’s occupation had ended, they moved into a tiny home with their cat, Tomas. The group of homes had been donated by Poland as part of the country’s humanitarian aid to neighboring Ukraine. 

The home is small but it’s on the ground floor, so Lidiia is able to easily move Viktor’s wheelchair from room to room and take him on walks outside. Viktor, 70, lost both his legs to complications from advanced diabetes, leaving many of the chores to Lidiia.

“I planted 22 rose bushes here. We have a drive for life now,” Lidiia said. “We will wait for victory. We need victory. We want to live in a free Ukraine and think for ourselves.”

Inside a kindergarten bomb shelter

Down the street from the destroyed cultural center, a drive for life is overflowing among some of the city’s youngest residents. At the Ruta Kindergarten School, children ages 2-6 enjoy a newly rebuilt school after the original building was destroyed by Russian shelling three years prior. 

At recess time on a February school day, the children, donned in colorful snowsuits, hats and mittens, played in fresh snow.

Kseniia Katrych is the headmistress of the school. She proudly showed the bright classrooms — with large windows to let in natural sunlight — the kitchen where chefs prepare the students’ lunch of borscht and bread, and the school’s basement bomb shelter.

The school was rebuilt with donations from Lithuania. In front of the school, the Lithuanian flag flies next to the Ukrainian flag. 

“As a symbol of our friendship,” Katrych said.

The multi-room shelter has play areas with toys, books, tables and chairs.

“We are really proud of our shelter. It is about 800 square meters (more than 8,000 square feet), and we’ve got everything children need,” Katrych said.

The shelter has bathrooms, a kitchen area and small beds for children to nap. Some of the youngest children nap in the bunker each day so that teachers don’t have to wake them mid-sleep if the city is advised to shelter from a potential air strike.

The entire school — 300 students along with teachers and other staff — goes to the shelter each time the air raid sirens sound in the city. 

“It could be five times a day. It could be three hours,” Katrych said of the sirens. “There are some days without alerts. But we come every time, quickly.”

Many of the children are young enough that war is all they know. Most find the air raid sirens a normal part of life. 

Katrych was not in Irpin when the school was destroyed. She evacuated with her family the first day of the war. 

“I even crossed the bridge,” she said. “It was not destroyed (yet).”

She worked in a kindergarten in Poland for a year before returning to help run Ruta. 

“I love it. Kindergarten is my life,” she said. “You know children give you special energy. They are our hope.”

Markushyn feels that same sense of hope and pride with how the community has rebuilt and recovered with the help of sister cities like Milwaukee, which donated vehicles and humanitarian aid.  

“When the city was in ruins, completely destroyed, and there was only one street passable for cars, it was fear, it was horror, and it seemed to me that rebuilding the city would be almost impossible,” he said. “But there is a saying: ‘The eyes fear, but the hands do the work.’”

Milwaukee sister city in Ukraine works to rebuild from war with Russia is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Since 1954, women in Waupaca and the surrounding areas could give birth at the local hospital.

No longer.

Last year, the health care system Thedacare that runs the hospital merged with another system, Froedtert Health. Last month, that newly formed health care system closed the delivery unit there.

The closest birthing center to Waupaca is now more than 30 miles to the northwest in Stevens Point. But many pregnant women will have to go even farther — to the Fox Valley to the east — to reach a hospital that accepts their insurance, said Dr. Russell Butkiewicz, who worked as a family physician at the Waupaca hospital for more than 30 years, including over a decade of delivering babies in the now-closed birthing center, before retiring from medicine last year.

“There’s going to be a delay in care,” he said. “And that delay in care could result in an adverse outcome. It could mean harm to the mother. It could mean harm to the fetus.”

Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.

“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.

In Waupaca, that means goodbye to the delivery unit. And that’s a problem for folks in the area. One that has repeated itself across the state and country.

The community tried to offer solutions to the health care system and keep the birthing center open, Butkiewicz said. The Waupaca City Council asked the health care system in December to reconsider the closure.

The health care system told the press it was struggling to recruit physicians and other specialists for the unit and said that most women in Waupaca were already delivering their babies in urban hospitals. But they also did not show data to back up those assertions, according to news reports.

The health care system did not respond to messages from The Badger Project seeking comment.

The past and the future

For more than 70 years, the community’s babies were born at the hospital in Waupaca. Thedacare took control of the hospital in 2006, but kept on delivering. Until the merger.

While the newly formed health care system is technically nonprofit, it is still driven by making money, Carstensen said. High-level employees must still be compensated competitively by nonprofit organizations.

“They’re really run in the interest of the executives and doctors, who are the managers, the owners of the not-for-profit,” he continued. “The goal is to increase your profits and lower your costs.”

Butkiewicz and others worry the Thedacare delivery unit in Waupaca won’t be the only casualty of the merger.

They also fear the closing of the birthing center at the Thedacare medical center in nearby small-town Berlin, with its relative proximity to larger hospitals in Oshkosh and Fond du Lac, could be next.

A closure there would again increase the size of the territory in central Wisconsin without a birthing center, Butkiewicz noted, further extending drive times and escalating the dangers of problematic deliveries.

The health care system did not respond to questions about Berlin or anything else.

The problem of profit-centered health care, the dominant model in the U.S., not wanting to serve less-profitable areas is a consistent problem; solutions do exist.

When the free market does not fill a need, the government can step in to help, Carstensen said.

That can take the form of direct payments to a health care system to help provide the needed care, or a government promise that the organization will have a monopoly in the area as long as they offer certain services to the public.

Something similar is happening in the state regarding high-speed internet. Across rural Wisconsin and also much of the rural United States, for-profit telecommunications providers mostly have been uninterested in making the necessary investments to bring fast internet access to the thinly populated customers here. Republicans controlling Wisconsin state government initially gave very little funding toward the problem. But after Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, was elected in 2018, he and the GOP-controlled state Legislature massively increased the amount of grants for internet providers to rural areas in the state.

The idea of government stepping in to subsidize the free market is generally one more appealing to Democrats than the GOP.

State Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican from Appleton who represents Waupaca and also runs her own health care practice as a nurse practitioner, has some other ideas for helping health care thrive, or at least survive, in rural areas.

“Patients deserve access, but first we need to make sure providers — particularly in high-demand areas like nursing — are incentivized to provide these critical services in needed areas,” she said via email. “This includes cutting unneeded red tape in the health care industry, especially for primary care providers.”

To specifically tackle this shortage of health care providers, particularly in rural areas, she argued for allowing them more independence to offer more services, enhancing investments in nursing student recruitment and retention, and supporting a tax credit for nurse educators.

State Rep. Kevin Petersen, a Republican who also represents the area, did not respond to messages seeking solutions.

Whatever happens, rural health care will need some help from somewhere, or much of it might go away, experts say.

“It’s going to involve a lot more regulatory oversight,” Carstensen said. “It’s the only way we’re going to get the results I think are essential.”

Former President Joe Biden’s administration had been very aggressive on business competition issues for the past four years, including challenging many attempts by large companies and nonprofits to merge, often arguing the results would be worse for consumers. It remains to be seen how strongly President Donald Trump’s administration will enforce antitrust law in his second term, though early moves have been promising, Carstenen noted.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Two health care systems merged, then closed the only birthing center for miles is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Two women incarcerated at Taycheedah Correctional Institution have died following hospital stays that began Feb. 22. The Wisconsin Department of Corrections has shared limited information about their deaths, frustrating family members and those locked up at the maximum- and medium-security women’s prison. 

Shawnee Reed, 36, died Feb. 23, a day after arriving at an area hospital. Brittany Doescher, 33, died Thursday after spending nearly two weeks on life support, according to an online corrections database and family members. 

Both women were mothers, family members said. 

Two prisoners at Taycheedah told Wisconsin Watch and WPR that a third incarcerated woman was hospitalized around the same time as Reed and Doescher. The online corrections  database shows the woman they identified was “out to facility” on Feb. 23. She returned to Taycheedah in the same week.

Reed and Doescher’s official causes of death are pending, said Dr. Adam Covach, Fond du Lac County’s chief medical examiner. Family members of both women say hospital staff linked the deaths to pneumonia. Reed and Doescher’s relatives asked not to be identified to avoid drawing more attention to their families. 

Doescher’s relative said she learned of Doescher’s hospitalization two days after it began. She arrived to find Doescher chained to a bed with blisters around her ankles. 

Following discussions with doctors, Doescher’s family member believes earlier treatment could have prevented the death, particularly because she was so young. 

Asked about the deaths, department spokesperson Beth Hardtke wrote in an email to WPR and Wisconsin Watch: “The federal Centers for Disease Control is seeing ‘high’ numbers of respiratory illness cases in Wisconsin, and the Department of Corrections (DOC) is taking a number of steps to prevent the spread of respiratory illnesses to staff and persons in our care.”

People incarcerated at Wisconsin prisons, including Taycheedah, were recently tested and treated for Influenza A, Hardtke added.

Relatives said both women started mentioning health issues over the phone around a month ago.

Questions about the illnesses are swirling within the prison. Three incarcerated women told WPR and Wisconsin Watch they learned Reed had died but heard different versions of the cause. 

Corrections officials locked down part of Taycheedah — limiting prisoner movement — on Feb. 28. That was due to an increase in respiratory illnesses, according to an internal memo from Warden Michael Gierach. The department lifted the lockdown Thursday. 

Wisconsin typically charges prisoners a $7.50 copay for each face-to-face medical visit, among the highest in the country. Citing the surge of respiratory visits, the department lifted copays for visits beginning Feb. 28, five days after Reed died.

“DOC health care staff recently reminded employees and those in our care of ways to protect themselves as influenza, COVID-19, pneumonia and RSV continue to circulate,” Hardtke wrote.  

The prisons are providing vaccines, masks and soap for regular hand washing, Hardtke added. Anyone who tests positive for a respiratory illness is quarantined for at least seven days.

While women at Taycheedah did receive information about respiratory illness precautions, the department shared no details about the hospitalizations and deaths, said Kady Mehaffey, who is incarcerated.

“Which is kind of maddening because of the amount of people that are filling in the blanks about what happened,” Mehaffey said.

The department did not publicly announce the women’s deaths, which WPR and Wisconsin Watch learned about from women incarcerated at the facility.  

Online records showed the women had died but little other information. The department has since provided basic information, including the women’s names, ages, death dates, and that they died in an “area hospital.”

States including Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska publicly announce prisoner deaths, sharing the person’s name, prison, where they died, and in some cases, details related to their cause of death. 

Wisconsin is not the only state to limit the release of such details, but doing so is problematic, said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There’s no greater responsibility that prisons have than keeping the people inside safe and alive and when there’s a failure to do that the public has a right to know,” Deitch said.

Hardtke wrote that her department follows best practices to protect the privacy of people who are incarcerated and their families. What’s more, it’s up to county coroners or medical examiners to investigate causes of deaths.

The Department of Corrections does confirm deaths and release names after family is notified, but the department can’t release other details, including cause of death, because of privacy laws, Hardtke said.

Deitch said prison systems often interpret privacy laws broadly and then point to such protections to justify withholding information. 

While the department updates its online database to note prisoner deaths, someone seeking information about a death would first need to know the prisoner’s name. That database was used to confirm the March 4 death of a prisoner at Waupun Correctional Institution — Damien Evans, the seventh Waupun prisoner to die in custody since June 2023. 

Fourteen prisoners residing at Wisconsin’s adult institutions have died this year, Hardtke wrote. The prisons saw 61 deaths in all of 2024 and 54 deaths in 2023.  

Reed and Doescher both participated in a program to help with substance abuse and facilitate an early release, according to relatives and court documents. Doescher expected her release within months, her relative said.

“She was hoping to come home and start her own business,” the relative said. “She wanted to counsel other girls in situations like her.”

Both Reed and Doescher enjoyed jewelry making while at Taycheedah.

“I don’t know how (Reed) did it, but she would get like thread and threaded around like a plastic piece or something like that and she could make these really cool designs,” Mehaffey said. “She was good with the small intricate things.”

Both women have children.

“We’re going to miss her and I certainly hope the prison system can be reformed because there’s no call for this,” Doescher’s family member said. “I feel for any other parent that has to go through this.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Families seek answers after deaths of two women incarcerated at Taycheedah prison is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s Madison office Tuesday to voice their concerns over potential cuts to Medicaid.

The Republican-led Congress is considering significant cuts to Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income households. In Wisconsin that includes programs like BadgerCare Plus, which serves children, pregnant people and non-disabled adults, and long-term care programs for people with disabilities and seniors.  

The House budget proposal could cut more than $880 billion in mandatory spending from the committee that oversees Medicaid, according to reporting by KFF Health News. While the Senate’s proposal doesn’t specify exact cuts, they plan to offset over $300 billion in new spending, according to NPR.

Dane County resident Laurine Lusk organized the protest because her daughter Megan is disabled and relies on the government program.

“She’s not safe without this care,” Lusk said.

She wanted to voice her concerns over any cuts to her daughter’s care, but she says she struggled to get in touch with Johnson’s office. 

In a response to questions from WPR and Wisconsin Watch about the protest and complaints that constituents were having trouble reaching him, Sen. Johnson provided a statement. He wrote: “It is difficult to respond to complaints and protests that have no basis in truth or fact. It is unfortunate that Democrat elected officials are lying to their supporters regarding the Senate Budget Resolution and encouraging them to take to the “streets.” I sincerely hope their actions do not result in violence. My primary goal is to keep my Wisconsin staff safe while enabling them to continue dedicating their efforts to help constituents.” 

The Republican senator’s office was closed to visitors Tuesday due to “previously scheduled outside commitments,” according to a sign taped to the office door. 

Protesters chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho Ron Johnson has got to go.” One protester held up a sign that said, “Answer your phone, Ron.”

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman faced a hostile crowd last week at a town hall in Oshkosh. When asked about Medicaid, he said cutting the program “would be a mistake,” according to previous WPR reporting. Other Republican lawmakers have come out against cuts to Medicaid.

Dorothy Witzeling drove from Appleton to join the protest. “I am terrified of what I am seeing happening with our government,” she said.

Witzeling carried a sign with a photo of her brother who had Down syndrome and relied on Medicaid for care.

Former Madison alder and former Dane County Board member Barbara Vedder said she attended the protest because she has a disability and couldn’t live without Medicaid.

“This is what democracy looks like,” Vedder said. “It brings my spirits up to see so many people speaking up because this needs to change.”

‘Not safe without this care’: Wisconsin Medicaid recipients fear budget cuts is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Just before midnight, with a fresh layer of snow sticking to the ground, volunteers Sandy Hahn and Britanie Peaslee slowly drive through Jefferson County’s local parking lots, gas stations, truck stops, parks, trails and laundromats, keeping their eyes peeled.

They’re grateful for the snowfall, which makes it easier to see footprints, fogged windows and occupied vehicles. They have a long night ahead of them, and being in a rural area makes their job — finding those without shelter — even more challenging. 

“It’s a little bit easier when it is colder because you can see, OK this windshield is frosted from the inside, somebody’s been breathing in there for quite a while,” Peaslee said. 

In Johnson Creek, they find most of the homeless living in cars parked behind the Pine Cone Travel Plaza — a local restaurant, gas station and truck stop. The duo carefully approach each vehicle — one with a sleeping child in the back — with blankets and a four-page questionnaire. 

But that’s assuming the unhoused are willing to engage with the strangers at all, let alone at 3 a.m. while it’s 7 degrees and snowing outside. 

Jan. 22 marked Hahn and Peaslee’s fifth time participating in the annual “point in time” (PIT) count — a one-night snapshot of the number of people experiencing homelessness across the United States, including Wisconsin. The pair were among the eight volunteers conducting the counts in Jefferson County, a number Hahn considered to be low. Being in a small, rural area, they struggle to recruit volunteers. 

This one-night snapshot — first conducted in 2005 — is the only required count of all people experiencing homelessness each year in the United States. The volunteers must follow strict guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Peaslee said locating people is the biggest challenge in rural areas. Many are sleeping in abandoned buildings or other private property they can’t access. The volunteers do their best not to miss anyone, while also keeping their own safety in mind. 

“Depending on how treacherous it is outside, sometimes we’ll go into the woods,” Hahn said.

In addition to gas station parking lots, they’ve seen several third-shift workers parked at local factories who are living in their cars.

Each January count isn’t released until December, even though lawmakers will soon set housing and emergency shelter funding for the next two years in the upcoming state budget.

Last year there was an 18% increase in the homeless count nationwide based on the count taken in January 2024. In rural Wisconsin the increase was 9%. In Jefferson County the volunteers recorded three homeless people a year ago. This year the final tally was 13 — a number that likely still doesn’t come close to capturing the true population.

Why does the PIT count happen during the coldest month of the year? 

HUD determines that the yearly PIT count must be conducted on the same night in January in every state across the country. Each Continuum of Care — regional organizations operating under HUD that carry out the counts — may conduct a July count in addition to the mandated one in January.

“They want us to go out in the middle of the night because they feel that’s when people would be sleeping, and they would be hunkered down in their standard spots,” said Diane Sennholz, who leads the count in Lincoln, Marathon and Wood counties. “If we were to go out during the day, they might be at the library or the grocery store or walking around.” 

Wisconsin’s Balance of State CoC, which covers all 69 counties in Wisconsin besides Milwaukee, Dane and Racine, requires each county in its jurisdiction to carry out a summer count. Others, like Dane County, typically conduct only the required January count. 

Frigid temperatures tend to drive more people into emergency homeless shelters, making the count easier. That model might work in cities, but in rural areas like Jefferson County, there are no homeless shelters.

Out of necessity, those experiencing homelessness in a county with no shelters will do everything they can to stay on a friend’s couch or find somewhere warm, making them harder to find and impossible to include in the count. Those temporarily staying with a friend or family member don’t count.

Jefferson County’s summer PIT count has increased each year since 2021 — a trend that can be seen statewide. In 2022, the county’s January count was zero compared to seven recorded in the summer count.

“We definitely don’t find as many in January as we would in summer,” Hahn said. “People are more willing to open up their barns, their garages, their extra bedroom, especially on weeks like this when it’s negative 40.”

Peaslee and Hahn, who are both involved in the community’s poverty-fighting coalition, know the problem is worse than what the count portrays. 

“We’re not finding an eighth of how many are truly out there,” Peaslee said. 

The PIT count’s pitfalls 

On the night of the count, Hahn and Peaslee headed to a truck stop in Johnson Creek where people are known to sleep in their cars. The vehicles were lined up on the farthest end of the lot. One person refused to roll down the window and speak to them.  

It happens often, but Peaslee and Hahn can’t blame them. After all, it’s the middle of the night, and they are two strangers who come bearing a four-page survey. HUD requires the volunteers to gather as much information about the individual as possible. 

The pair spoke to someone in another car who knew the individual and confirmed they were unhoused, leading Hahn to fill out an observation form. Volunteers have seven days following the count to attempt to make contact with those individuals again to confirm whether they were homeless on the night of the count. Without that confirmation, they can’t be counted. 

The following week, Hahn had no luck tracking down the individual. The person was placed on an observation sheet, but not included in the official count.

Volunteers are not allowed to assume that someone is “literally homeless” in accordance with HUD definitions. But Hahn noted that the car was running in the middle of the night for warmth and there were blankets covering the windows for privacy. Unhoused people who could otherwise be counted are being missed in these instances.

“If somebody has all these personal belongings in their car, you can kind of tell at that point that they’re experiencing homelessness,” said Lyric Glynn, who leads the count in Kewaunee, Door, Manitowoc and Sheboygan counties. “But we can’t count them all the time because they’re sleeping and we haven’t been able to do a survey with them.”

This year, two individuals in Jefferson County ended up on the observation form instead of being recorded in the official count. In July, that number was 10. 

The day after the count, Hahn makes calls to determine how many hotel vouchers were distributed that night. Those who are unhoused and temporarily staying in a hotel are counted in the count, but only if they’ve received a voucher for their stay. HUD specifies that if they’re paying for the room themselves, or if someone else is paying for them, they cannot be included, excluding even more of the population from the count. 

In Jefferson County, Hahn said those motel vouchers are hard to come by due to minimal funding. People in hotels often pay through other means.

“There are so many barriers,” Peaslee said.

Counts tied to community’s level of need

While federal funding for housing and shelter programs isn’t directly tied to the results of the count, it is used in determining a community’s level of need, according to Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The federal McKinney-Vento Act also requires HUD to determine whether a community is reducing homelessness, and the count is one of multiple criteria scored in the evaluation. 

Despite its flaws, Wisconsin’s PIT count shows that statewide homelessness has been increasing. In the “balance” of the state, the mostly rural homeless population increased from 2,938 individuals in 2023 to 3,201 in 2024, the highest number recorded since 2017. 

In 2020, a federal moratorium established a temporary pause on evictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the federal government lifted that measure in August 2021. 

Glynn said she has concerns about lawmakers, agencies and other officials relying on more than year-old PIT count data. 

“When they’re using outdated numbers from years ago, especially early pandemic numbers, they’re not gauging what happened after the pandemic when the eviction moratorium ended and when individuals started getting evicted from units,” Glynn said.

The delayed release of these yearly counts is also a problem when applying for local grants, Glynn said. Application reviewers often look at counts from the previous year. The CoCs have the most recent totals, which sometimes don’t match HUD’s latest figures.

In a state budget year, it would help if officials could have earlier access to the latest counts, Glynn said. 

​​In the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget, the Legislature rejected Gov. Tony Evers’ recommendations to spend some $24 million on emergency shelter and housing grants, as well as homeless case management services and rental assistance for unhoused veterans.

The Legislature also rejected the $250 million Evers proposed for affordable workforce housing and home rehabilitation grants.

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez joined a group of volunteers in western Wisconsin on the night of the count this year, where she expressed concerns about rising housing costs and emergency shelter services. She said Evers’ budget “is going to have those types of investments.” 

Evers is set to announce his 2025-27 state budget proposal on Feb. 18.

Court ruling could affect counts

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that municipalities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping in public places. Oliva predicts this ruling will impact the count results this year. 

“I wonder what will happen in places that have been ticketing and fining people. Those people are going to hide,” Oliva told Wisconsin Watch. “Why would you want to be found, especially if you know that it’s possible that you’ll get ticketed or put in jail for being homeless?” 

Volunteers like Peaslee and Hahn, who work with the homeless population in their community, still see value in conducting the count. For them, it is an opportunity for outreach and allows them to offer resources to those with whom they haven’t previously made contact. They remind people they are more than a number.

“Yes, you need the gritty details to report to HUD, but really making them feel like they are human and that their story matters,” Peaslee said. “And we’re not just putting down a data point to have a data point. We want to know, how can we help you?”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin’s ‘point in time’ homeless count: Who gets counted, who doesn’t? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

A blender, still in its box, won at a grocery store raffle. Framed photos from a child’s birthday party. A rabbit-hair felt sombrero and a pair of brown leather boots that cost more than half a week’s pay.

Box by box, the Nicaraguans who milk the cows and clean the pens on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, who wash dishes at its restaurants and fill lines on its factory floors, are sending home their most prized possessions, bracing for the impact of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

In the contents of the boxes is a portrait of a community under pressure. The Nicaraguans are as consumed as everyone else by the unfolding of Trump 2.0, wondering whether the bluster about deporting millions of people, most of whom live quiet lives far from the southern border, is going to mean anything in the Wisconsin towns where they’ve settled. For now, many are staying in their homes, behind drawn curtains, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as they travel to and from work or pick up their kids from school. Few have given up on their lives in America, but they’re realistic about what may be coming. Methodically, they have begun packing their most cherished belongings into boxes and barrels and shipping them to relatives back in Nicaragua, ahead of their own anticipated deportations.

“We don’t have much, but what we do have is important,” said Joaquín, the man with the love of western boots and sombreros. He’s 35 years old and has worked over the last three years as a cook at the restaurant below his apartment. “We have worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to acquire these things,” he added.

The packing is happening all across Wisconsin, a state that in recent years has become a top destination for Nicaraguans who say they are fleeing poverty and government repression. And it is happening among immigrants of varying legal statuses. There are the undocumented dairy workers who came more than a decade ago and were the first from their rural communities to settle in Wisconsin. And there are the more recent arrivals, including asylum-seekers who have permission to live and work in the U.S. as they await their day in immigration court.

Nobody feels safe from Trump and his promises; in just his first week back in office, the president moved to end birthright citizenship, sent hundreds of military troops to the southern border and launched a flashy, multi-agency operation to find and detain immigrants in Chicago, only a few hundred miles away.

Yesenia Meza, a community health worker in central Wisconsin, began hearing from families soon after Trump’s election; they wanted help obtaining the documents they might need if they have to suddenly leave the country with their U.S.-born children, or have those children sent to them if they are deported. When she visited their apartments, Meza said, she was stunned to discover they had spent hundreds of dollars on refrigerator-sized boxes and blue plastic barrels that they’d stuffed with nearly “everything that they own, their most precious belongings” and were shipping to their home country.

At one home, she watched an immigrant mother climb into a half-packed box and announce, “I’m going to mail myself.” Meza knew she was joking. But some of the immigrants she knew had already left. And if more people go, she wonders what impact their departures — whether voluntary or forced — will have on the local economy. Immigrants in the area work on farms, in cheese-processing factories and in a chicken plant — the kind of jobs, she said, that nobody else wants. She’s talked to some of the employers before and knows “they’re always short-staffed,” Meza said. “They’re going to be more short-staffed now when people start going back home.”

Recently, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, I traveled to Wisconsin along with photographer Benjamin Rasmussen to capture what sounded like the beginning of a community coming undone. We talked to Nicaraguans in their kitchens and bedrooms, and in restaurants and grocery stores that have sprung up to cater to them. Many of the people we met either were packing themselves or knew someone else who was, or both.

Some were almost embarrassed to show us what they were packing — items that might have been considered frivolous or extravagant back home. Nicaragua was already one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere before its government took a turn toward authoritarianism and repression, further sinking the economy. But thanks to their working-class jobs at American factories and restaurants, they could afford these things, and they were determined to hold on to them. Some of their belongings carried memories of loved ones or of special occasions. Other items were more practical, tools that might help them get started again in Nicaragua.

From the stories these immigrants told about their belongings emerged others, stories about what had brought them to this country and what they have been able to achieve here. They spoke about the panic that now traps them in their homes and keeps them up at night. And they shared their hopes and fears about what it might mean to start over in a country they fled.

What’s in the boxes

Yaceth’s guilty pleasure is shoes. The 38-year-old left Nicaragua nearly three years ago and works in the same restaurant kitchen as Joaquín. Her wages allowed her to buy a pair or so a month on Amazon, mostly Keds lace-up sneakers, though she also owns glittery stilettos and knee-high red boots. The boxes fill the top half of her closet. Some pairs have never been worn.

We stood along the edge of her bed, admiring her collection. “I’m a bit of an aficionado,” she said sheepishly. Like the other immigrants we spoke with, Yaceth asked not to be identified by her full name to lessen the risk of deportation.

Yaceth said she stopped buying shoes after Trump’s election, uncertain how her life, not to mention her finances, might change once he took office. By the time we met, she had already packed one box of belongings and sent it to her mother in Estelí, a city in northwestern Nicaragua. In the corner of her already crowded bedroom, she kept a blue plastic barrel, which is where she’d planned to put the shoes, hoping it would keep them dry and undamaged during the shipping. If she goes, they’re going, too.

She rents a room in the apartment of another family. They, too, are thinking about what it might look like to return to Nicaragua. Hugo, 33, is setting aside items that might help him make a living back in his hometown of Somoto, about an hour and a half north of Estelí. This includes a Cuisinart digital air fryer he bought with his wages from a sheet-metal factory. Hugo used to sell hot dogs and hamburgers at a fast food stand in Somoto. If he has to return, he envisions starting another food business. The air fryer would help.

We visited a new Nicaraguan restaurant in Waunakee, a village in Dane County that’s seen significant numbers of Nicaraguan arrivals in recent years. One diner, a 49-year-old undocumented dairy worker, told me he plans to send barber trimmers and other supplies for the barbershop he’d like to open up if he’s deported. As we spoke, his dinner companion called a friend who lives a few towns away and handed me the phone; that man, also a dairy worker, told me he is sending back power tools he bought on Facebook Marketplace that are expensive and difficult to find in Nicaragua.

Other immigrants expressed deep uncertainty about whether they might face jail time or worse if they are deported, due to their previous involvement in political activities against the Nicaraguan government. If you don’t toe the party line, said Uriel, a former high school teacher, “they turn you into an enemy of the state.”

Uriel, 36, said he never participated in any anti-government marches. But he worried that local party leaders had been watching him, that they knew how he spoke about democracy and free speech in the classroom.

He said he left Nicaragua almost four years ago both because of the political situation and because he knew he could make more money in the U.S. He has an ongoing asylum case, a work permit and a job at a bread factory. His wages have allowed him to buy a plot of land for his wife and two children, still in Nicaragua, and begin construction on a house there.

He’d hoped to stay in Wisconsin long enough to pay to finish it. But bracing for the inevitable, he’s got a barrel too. Soon, he plans to pack and send a used Yamaha guitar he was given as a gift a few years earlier. Uriel learned to play the instrument by watching YouTube videos and now plays Christian hymns that he said make him feel good inside.

This summer, he plans to return as well. His children have been growing up without him. He has been told his 6-year-old daughter points to planes in the sky and wonders whether her father is inside. He worries that his son, 11, will grow up believing he has been abandoned.

It has been hard to be separated from his children, he said. But he left in order to provide them a life he didn’t believe he could have if he had stayed — a reality he thought was missing from so much of the new president’s rhetoric on immigration. “We are not anybody’s enemy,” Uriel said. “We simply are looking for a way to make a living, to help our families.”

A life in hiding

It used to be that on Sundays, his day off, Joaquín would pull on his favorite boots and sombrero to drive somewhere — to a restaurant or to visit family and friends who had settled in south-central Wisconsin. But ever since Trump’s election, he doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to. Some days, he says, he feels like a mouse, scurrying downstairs to work and upstairs to sleep and back downstairs again to work, always alert and full of dread.

The gray 2016 Toyota 4Runner that he bought last year, his pride and joy, sits mostly unused behind his apartment building. He’s too afraid of driving and getting pulled over by police officers who, by randomly checking his vehicle’s plates, could discover he doesn’t have a driver’s license. Joaquín doesn’t have the documents he needs to qualify for one. He worries that drawing the attention of police, even for the smallest of infractions, could get him swept into the immigration detention system and deported. “What’s happening now is a persecution,” he said.

On a recent Sunday, his apartment was filled with the sweet, warm smell of home-baked goods. Joaquín said he spent two hours making traditional Nicaraguan cookies called rosquillas and hojaldras, one savory and the other sweet. We talked over coffee and the cornmeal cookies. Half of his living room floor was covered with piles of clothes and shoes, and one tall, empty box. There were shirts, pants and sneakers for each of his three children, who remain in Nicaragua. Most of the clothes belonged to Joaquín: a crisp pair of tan Lee jeans, rarely worn; several pairs of boots; a box of sombreros.

Joaquín said he plans to send all of it to relatives in Nicaragua in February. It pains him to imagine being trotted onto a deportation flight and leaving everything he owns here to get tossed in a landfill somewhere.

Another day, I spoke by phone with an immigrant named Luz, 26. Like Joaquín, she said she rarely leaves her apartment anymore. The week Trump was inaugurated, she stopped going to her job at a nearby cheese factory, afraid of workplace raids. She now stays home with their 1-year-old son. A woman she knows picks up the family’s groceries so they don’t have to risk being out on the street.

Like many of her friends and relatives, Luz came to the U.S. as an asylum-seeker almost three years ago. She missed an immigration court hearing while pregnant with her son and now worries she has “no legal status here.”

“Those of us who work milking cows, we can’t afford to hire a lawyer,” she said. “We don’t even know what’s happening with our cases.”

After Trump’s election, she began packing some of the things she’d accumulated in her time in Wisconsin, including some used children’s clothes she’d received from Meza, the community health worker. She packed most everything in her kitchen: most of her pots and pans, some plates and cups, knives, an iron and “even chocolates,” she said, almost laughing. “It is a big box.”

Luz said she wants all of her household items to be in Nicaragua when she returns with her family. They hope to leave in March. “I don’t want to live in hiding like this,” she said.

Family separation redux

Isabel’s son cried as she filled her box. In went the shiny red car, big enough for the 14-month-old to sit in and drive. It had been a gift from his godfather on his first birthday. She added other, smaller cars and planes and stuffed animals. A stroller. A framed photo from the birthday party, the chubby-cheeked boy surrounded by balloons.

The 26-year-old mother knew her son was too young to understand. But she hoped he would if the dreaded time came when they had to return to Nicaragua.

And to make sure she wouldn’t be separated from him, she applied for his passport early last fall, when she became convinced that Trump would win the election. She could see his lawn signs all around her in the rural community in the middle of the state where she lives. Her husband, who works on a dairy farm, told her he’d begun feeling uncomfortable with the way people glared at him at Walmart. Sometimes, they shouted things he didn’t understand, but in a tone that was unmistakably hostile.

Their son was born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents — exactly the kind of child Trump says does not deserve citizenship here. Isabel got his passport both to secure his rights as an American citizen and to secure her rights to him. She wants to make sure there is no mistaking who the boy belongs to if she gets sent away.

We met Isabel about a week after she’d shipped off the box with her son’s red toy car to her mother’s home in southern Nicaragua. It was the morning of Trump’s inauguration, and Isabel welcomed us into her apartment, her eyes still red and bleary from an overnight shift at a nearby cheese-processing factory.

She said they were ready to go “if things get ugly” and the people around her start getting picked up and sent back. But there was another box, still flat and unpacked, propped up against a wall in the living room. That one, she explained, belonged to a neighbor with the same game plan.

I ask her what happens if they don’t get deported, but their most precious belongings are gone. Won’t they miss those things? “Yes,” she said. But it would be even worse to go back to Nicaragua and have nothing.

Additional design and development by Zisiga Mukulu.

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Boxed up: a portrait of an immigrant community living under threat of deportation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The Gender Health Clinic at Children’s Wisconsin hospital in Milwaukee canceled a transgender teenager’s appointment — the first reported case of a Wisconsin hospital pausing gender-affirming care after President Donald Trump signed an executive order blocking funding for hospitals that provide such treatment.

UPDATE (9:47 a.m. Feb. 7, 2025): On Friday, after Wisconsin Watch published this story, the teen’s parent received a call from Children’s informing her that the appointment would be rescheduled for Friday afternoon.

A group of families and doctors have sued the Trump administration in federal court over that order and another, saying they are discriminatory and the health care order unlawfully withholds funds.

Children’s Wisconsin did not respond to multiple emails and calls, including three pages sent to the spokesperson on duty. Rep. Ryan Clancy, D-Milwaukee, said he contacted Children’s on behalf of a constituent Wednesday and has also not received any response, which he characterized as unusual.

Clinics in several states across the country have reportedly suspended care for transgender youth in response to the order, which sought to end gender-affirming care for patients under 19 years old at any facility receiving federal funding.

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 14 other attorneys general denounced Trump’s order as “wrong on the science and the law.” In a joint statement, they noted that a recent court order affirmed the Trump administration cannot halt funding through administrative memos or executive orders. 

“This means that federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care continues to be available, irrespective of President Trump’s recent Executive Order,” the statement said. “We will challenge any unlawful effort by the Trump Administration to restrict access to it (gender-affirming care) in our jurisdictions.”

But the Milwaukee clinic — one of only two dedicated pediatric gender clinics in Wisconsin, along with one at UW Health in Madison — had already canceled an appointment, Wisconsin Watch has learned.

On New Year’s Eve, Milwaukee-area mom Sarah Moskonas received a long-awaited message: The clinic had approved her 13-year-old daughter for hormone therapy.

The family felt ecstatic. The approval was almost a decade in the making. Her daughter has seen a therapist specializing in gender identity since she was five or six and has been a patient in Children’s gender clinic for four-and-a-half years. She has been on puberty blockers for about three years. Starting hormone therapy was the culmination of numerous conversations, therapy sessions, doctor’s appointments and blood tests on the lifelong journey of helping Moskonas’ daughter live as her true self. 

“She’s very aware of what her therapy looks like and what the implications could be long term and what are the upsides and what are the possible drawbacks,” Moskonas said.

After receiving approval from the clinic to move forward, they scheduled a “consent appointment” for Feb. 3, when both parents would provide informed consent on behalf of their daughter to take the next step in treatment.

But on Jan. 28, Trump issued the executive order, one of several that have targeted transgender people with demeaning, inaccurate language.

Moskonas said she received a call Jan. 31 from her daughter’s clinician informing her that Children’s Wisconsin could not provide her daughter with hormone therapy. The discussion turned to whether it was because of Trump’s order.

“Essentially … the answer was yes, this was because of the executive order,” she said.

Moskonas provided electronic health care records showing the appointment was scheduled before Trump’s inauguration and canceled after the executive order.

New York Attorney General Letitia James warned hospitals that ceasing treatment for transgender youth would violate the state’s anti-discrimination law. 

Moskonas wants Kaul to take a similar stand and provide clear direction for Wisconsin hospitals.

The state Department of Justice referred Wisconsin Watch to Kaul’s joint statement and did not respond to a follow-up request.

Sarah Coyne, an attorney specializing in health care regulation at Quarles in Madison, said that hospitals are likely pausing care “as a risk management strategy” and it’s “not clear how all of this will play out in the long run.”

Craig Konnoth, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said that federal court rulings applying to Wisconsin have held that transgender discrimination is a prohibited form of sex discrimination and that it is illegal to turn away transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act.

After Children’s gender clinic canceled the appointment, Moskonas contacted elected officials, including Clancy. She called clinics in Madison and Chicago to see if they would provide care.

A spokesperson for UW Health’s clinic told Wisconsin Watch it was evaluating the order.

As Wisconsin Watch has previously documented, gender-affirming care like the kind Moskonas’ daughter has received is considered the only evidence-based care for children and adults with gender dysphoria, and it is endorsed by every major medical association in the country. Research has consistently shown that it improves mental health outcomes for trans youth.

Sarah said her daughter “knows who she is better than most adults I know.” Gender-affirming care has allowed her to live authentically as herself and flourish emotionally.

“My wife and I have assured her that we are not giving up,” Sarah said. “We are not accepting no for an answer.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Children’s Wisconsin hospital reinstates gender-affirming care for trans teen after canceling in wake of Trump’s executive order is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

A Wisconsin couple is suing Walgreens and a pharmacy benefits management company, alleging that their son died because he couldn’t afford a sudden $500 spike in his asthma medication.

Shanon and William Schmidtknecht of Poynette filed their lawsuit in federal court in Milwaukee on Jan. 21, a year to the day that their son Cole died at age 22.

According to the lawsuit, Cole Schmidtknecht suffered from asthma all his life. He managed it with daily inhaler doses of the medication Advair Diskus and its generic equivalents.

He stopped at a Walgreens pharmacy in Appleton on Jan. 10, 2024, to refill his prescription and was told the cost had jumped from $66 to $539 out-of-pocket. Unable to afford the new cost, he left the pharmacy without the medication. He tried to manage his condition with his rescue inhaler but suffered a fatal asthma attack days later, according to the lawsuit.

The Schmidtknechts allege that pharmacy benefits management company OptumRX violated Wisconsin law by raising the cost of the medication without a valid medical reason and failing to provide 30 days’ advance notice of drug price increases.

Pharmacy benefits managers act as intermediaries between health insurance companies, prescription drug companies and pharmacies. Optum Rx services prescription claims for more than 66 million people across the United States, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that the Walgreens pharmacy staffers failed to offer Cole any workarounds to obtain his usual medication. They told him there were no cheaper alternatives or generic medications available, they didn’t contact OptumRx to request an exception on Cole’s behalf, and they didn’t ask Cole’s doctor to request an exception for him, his parents contend.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.

“The conduct of both OptumRx and Walgreens was deplorable,” one of the family’s attorneys, Michael Trunk, said in a statement. “The evidence in this case will show that both OptumRx and Walgreens put profits first, and are directly responsible for Cole’s death.”

OptumRx spokespeople didn’t immediately reply to Wednesday messages seeking comment. In a statement last April extending sympathy to the family, the company said that a review of Cole’s claims showed that on the day he visited the pharmacy, he did buy a different asthma medication, generic Albuterol, for a $5 co-pay on Jan. 10 — a medication that it says he also obtained in October 2023. His case was handled “consistent with industry practice and the patient’s insurance plan design,” the company said.

Trunk, though, said Wednesday that the $5 generic prescription Cole filled was for his rescue inhaler, not the Advair Diskus inhaler that he took daily. He said Cole was not able to fill his Advair Diskus prescription because it had suddenly become too expensive.

Walgreens officials didn’t immediately respond to a Wednesday email seeking comment on the lawsuit.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Wisconsin couple sues Walgreens and Optum Rx, saying son died after $500 price rise for asthma meds is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Farah, an Afghan refugee, moved to Appleton in January 2022 after fleeing unrest in her home country. 

She had never experienced winter before and arrived in Wisconsin during what’s traditionally the coldest month of the year.

“I was crying,” Farah recalled. “I told my husband, ‘No, I don’t want to stay here. It’s so cold. I really cannot.’” 

But she and her husband both found jobs soon after and eventually chose to make the Badger state their home, even if she still hasn’t gotten used to frigid Wisconsin winters.

“The people are very friendly,” Farah said of Wisconsin residents. “Most of the time, when I talk to people, they say, ‘Haven’t you faced any racist things or any negative comments from the people?’ I say, ‘No, I really haven’t.’”

She’s one of many Afghan refugees who are making a home in Wisconsin after fleeing Afghanistan when the Taliban returned to power. According to the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, more than 800 Afghan refugees resettled in Wisconsin in 2022. Of those, 181 resettled in the Fox Valley.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office in 2025, he suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. That has left a number of Afghans who worked alongside the U.S. government and military for years in limbo, NPR reported. Beginning in 2021, thousands of Afghan refugees in similar situations were sent to Fort McCoy in Sparta, and some eventually settled in the state through that program.

WPR is withholding Farah’s last name out of concern that her family in Afghanistan could be targeted by the Taliban due to her role in helping advance American interests in Afghanistan before the 2021 U.S. withdrawal.

Farah is now a group program specialist for World Relief Wisconsin. She has helped Afghan refugees in the Fox Cities tell their stories and connect with neighbors. One way is through a recent oral history exhibit in the region. 

World Relief partnered with the History Museum at the Castle in Appleton to design the “Our Afghan Neighbors” exhibit. 

The exhibit, designed as mobile pop-up banners, features portraits and stories of Afghans who immigrated to the U.S. seeking education, freedom and democracy. Farah conducted interviews with refugees highlighting the diversity within the Afghan community, but also their shared values and aspirations.

“These people who are coming, all of them hate war and violence — they just escaped from that,” Farah said. “They just want peace. They value education. They want to improve their life here. They want to support their kids. They want their kids to be happy here.”

Farah and her husband have a son. But especially for Afghan refugees with daughters, Farah says moving to the U.S. provides better opportunities.

“In Afghanistan now, the girls cannot go to school after their sixth grade, so they will be at home, and it is the worst thing that can happen to a family,” she said. “The people who have daughters, they know that they have a future here.”

Dustin Mack, chief curator for the History Museum at the Castle, said the community’s response to the exhibit has been “overwhelmingly positive.” He said the exhibit was designed to be able to be moved between different places like schools, universities, churches and businesses.

In fact, the exhibit is already booked through most of the spring, he said.

“Anybody can reach out to the History Museum and book the exhibit and bring it to their facility to help continue to share this story and get to know our new Afghan neighbors,” Mack said. “It’s been great to see so many people interested and willing to continue to share this story.”

Life in Afghanistan

Not only did Farah help make the exhibit a reality, but her story is featured in the exhibit. 

Farah grew up in western Afghanistan in the Herat Province, one of 34 provinces in the country. She loved going to school.

“I have very good memories of my parents supporting me going to school, then university,” she said.

When she went to college, she studied education and English literature. After finishing her university studies, Farah began working for the Lincoln Learning Center in Afghanistan in 2014 as part of a United States-funded project.

“I was teaching English as a second language for university and school students,” Farah said. “We were advising the students who wanted to come to the United States to continue their education, and we did a lot of cultural programs. I did a lot of information programs for women’s rights or girls’ right to education.”

The partnership with the U.S. government, Farah said, helped thousands of Afghans come to the United States for their master’s or doctorate degrees before they returned to Afghanistan to teach in universities. Farah’s husband also worked with the U.S. government as a university lecturer. 

Their work for the American government made them both eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa, which allowed anyone who worked for the government for more than two years eligible to leave Afghanistan when they felt at risk, Farah said.

As the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan declined throughout 2020 and into 2021, the Taliban was seizing more and more land.

When the Taliban came into Herat in the summer of 2021, Farah remembers being told by her employer that she was no longer safe and she needed to go to the capital city of Kabul with her husband and then-two-year-old son.

Farah, her husband and their son lived out of a hotel in Kabul for about a month, Farah said. After the Taliban had taken control of the Afghan government, she described it as a time of immense fear.

Farah said Afghanistan had experienced social reforms before the Taliban returned to power that gave women more freedom to get an education and advance. 

That all went away when the Taliban returned to power, Farah says.

“Everything changed,” she said. “Women didn’t want to stay in that country and experience the same things that they had like 20 years ago. That was the reason everyone just wanted to get out of Afghanistan and not see those scary scenes from their childhood.”

One day at the hotel, Farah said she received a call from her father-in-law who asked, “Where did you put your documents?”

He explained that people were searching homes to learn who was working with the U.S. government. She told him her documents were in her bedroom.

“They burned all the documents that we had, like certificates and a lot of things that we had with the U.S. government,” Farah said.

Coming to America

After living in a hotel for about a month, Farah, her husband and their son decided to leave Afghanistan. Her employer helped them get a visa to enter Pakistan. Farah says it was fairly common for people in Afghanistan to go to Pakistan for medical reasons.

“Whenever you met a person from the government, like the Taliban, they’d ask you why you are going to the airport. Who did you work with? A lot of questions,” she said. “If they knew you worked with another government, especially the U.S., they would kill you, or they wouldn’t let you go out of Afghanistan.”

Farah and her family were able to get out of the country, traveling first to Pakistan and then to Qatar before coming to the United States.

After arriving in Wisconsin, Farah not only had to adjust to the cold winters, but also to other cultural differences. She said it was difficult to find halal foods that she and her family would eat back in Afghanistan.

But she said she had a lot of support in adjusting to life in the Fox Valley.

“We were resettled by World Relief. They gave us a good neighbor team, who helped us with transportation, and they even took us to further areas like Oshkosh or Milwaukee to get halal food and all of that,” Farah said. “They were a very huge help for us to find the things that we needed.”

Now, Farah is working to help other refugees adjust in her role as a group program specialist with World Relief Wisconsin. The organization’s financial future may be uncertain after threats to federal funding by the Trump administration in January 2025.

“The cost of living is lower than in some other states, so we are seeing other Afghans coming,” Farah said. “We have an Afghan family who opened a store here, so we don’t need to go to Oshkosh or Milwaukee. It’s going well, and we are still learning about life here.”

This story was originally published on wisconsinlife.org.

‘Our Afghan Neighbors’ exhibit explores life for Fox Valley refugees is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Nancy Roppe, 64, has advice for anyone speaking at a Portage County Board meeting: Write your statement down, rehearse it ahead of time and keep it under three minutes.

As she leaves home for each board meeting, her husband Joe offers his own advice to his wife: “Don’t get tased.”

Roppe, a self-described “five foot nothing, crippled little old lady,” fiercely opposes selling Portage County’s public nursing home to a private bidder. She’s spent years causing “good trouble” in voicing that opinion to elected board members. Deputies have escorted her out of meetings “more than once,” she said.

Board members say the county can no longer afford to operate the nursing home. They see Roppe differently, describing her as caustic, extremely loud and unproductive. But it’s hard to deny the impact she and other organizers have achieved. The nursing home remains in county hands — for now.  

During years of debate over the Portage County Health Care Center’s fate, organizers successfully landed two referendums on the ballot to increase its funding, both of which voters approved. And after Roppe and her colleagues in 2024 highlighted the poor reputation of one  potential buyer, the board chose not to accept its offer.

Several grassroots campaigns across Wisconsin aim to halt the privatization of county-owned nursing homes, which tend to be better staffed, have higher quality of care and draw fewer complaints than facilities owned by for-profits and nonprofits, as WPR and Wisconsin Watch previously reported.

Portage County, whose nursing home holds a perfect 5-star federal rating, was one of at least five Wisconsin counties last year that considered selling, started the sales process or sold their county-owned nursing homes citing budgetary concerns. 

Proponents of keeping nursing homes in county hands have created social media pages, yard signs, T-shirts, and petitions and led protests — all dedicated to slowing and stopping sales. 

A for-profit company decided against buying Lincoln County’s nursing home after an organizer and board member sued the county over the sale. Organizing in Sauk County has drawn federal regulators’ attention. Public nursing home supporters in St. Croix County packed a meeting where board members ultimately voted against selling.

But some of those victories may prove short-lived. Sauk County’s board approved a buyer last year, Lincoln County is looking for new buyers, and the Portage County Board voted in December to again consider a sale.

“If I can throw a monkey wrench in what they’re trying to do, I’m going to exhaust every possible avenue to do that,” Roppe said in an interview.

But after years of fighting the sale, she might be running out of options. 

Sister’s memory fuels advocacy

Roppe’s older sister Carol could make friends with complete strangers.

“That was one of her best things,” Roppe recalled. “She just knew everybody.”

Carol, a longtime nurse, was 57 years old when she began needing care following a kidney cancer diagnosis. She lived at home between treatments — until the day she fell. The cancer had deteriorated her spine, which the small slip fractured. With no way for her family to give her proper care at home, she moved into the Portage County Health Care Center. 

Roppe visited her every day until Carol died in 2015.

When the Portage County Board started discussing selling the nursing home, Roppe started to speak up at its meetings, tapping her comfort with public speaking.

“I got a big mouth and I use it,” she said.

In 2018 Roppe and other organizers campaigned for people to vote in favor of a ballot referendum to raise taxes to keep the nursing home in county hands.  

Voters approved it with 61% of the vote. 

But Portage County board members worry about more than just operating costs. The center was built in 1931 and hasn’t been significantly updated in 30 years. The building needs major renovations, board members and advocates acknowledge.

A 2022 referendum asked voters whether they would take on higher taxes to build a new facility. That passed, too, earning 59% of the vote. 

But county leaders haven’t moved forward with construction. They say the county can’t afford it, even with the voter-approved levy, due to rising construction costs. The board rejected advocates’ calls for yet another referendum. 

“Is this a business that Portage County should be in?” That’s what Portage County Board Chair Ray Reser asks. He says the county board is focused on keeping the nursing home beds in Portage County, even if the county no longer owns them. The groundswell of support for the nursing home doesn’t surprise him.

“It’s a really beloved institution in the county,” Reser said, while adding that it’s not the facility it once was. 

When Carol moved into the nursing home, Roppe knew it didn’t have the newest amenities or the nicest building. But it had the best care, which the federal government still rates “much above average.” 

Portage County’s only other nursing home is for-profit and rated “below average.”

Roppe now spends some entire days organizing to protect the nursing home, even though a decade has passed since her sister lived there.

Before major board votes, the Roppes post the meeting agenda and other details to their “Save the Portage County Health Care Center” Facebook group.” Nancy prints and delivers agendas to advocates without social media and crafts her own public statement. Joe sets up a livestream of the meetings for those wanting to watch at home, and Nancy arrives in-person at least 15 minutes early. 

Nancy follows each meeting by typing up a colorful summary to share with those who couldn’t watch. “The Grinch is alive and well in Portage County,” she wrote in December after the board voted to solicit buyers. 

“I enjoy the fight,” she said. “I wish I didn’t have to fight, but I’ll take the fight on.”

St. Croix County organizers see victory

Nearly 200 miles west of Portage County, the St. Croix Health Care Campus is no longer the subject of a privatization debate.

A discussion about selling prompted opponents to flood a St. Croix County board meeting last August. 

“There were more than 100 rather annoyed old people there,” said 70-year-old Celeste Koeberl, who attended.

The board ultimately voted to keep the highly rated nursing home public, determining its revenue would likely grow, aided by higher state reimbursements and a federal grant to open a dementia wing.

Board Chair Bob Long said his colleagues never seriously considered a sale. But Koeberl credits local organizers with a victory. 

“I think that that’s an encouraging thing, that when we show up, when we speak up, we can make a positive difference, and we should remember that,” Koeberl said.

She doesn’t know anyone at the nursing home but joined neighbors in opposing the sale after learning about the possibility last summer — seeing the center as providing quality care that the county can’t afford to lose.

“Everybody has experience with an older person in their family who needs help, and everybody who faces that learns the dearth of resources,” Koeberl said.

In Portage County, nursing home advocates face challenges in maintaining the energy that propelled them early in their fight. They regularly filled county board meetings years ago, Nancy Roppe said, but now just six to eight attend each meeting, with additional folks at particularly important ones. Some core group members have died in recent years.

“People are going to get older and sicker and are just not going to be able to physically do it anymore,” Roppe said. 

At a December board meeting, nine people testified against selling, with two speaking in favor. Still, the board voted 17-8 to move a step closer by approving a potential sale.

Roppe likes to remind her colleagues that they have a winning record so far, despite the challenges.

“You cannot now get all depressed,” she said. “The fight continues.”

Advocates take case to state officials

Portage County’s nursing home debate has swirled for the majority of Grace Skibicki’s 14 years living there. She can’t recall any board members seeking her opinion.

“What’s their beef with us?” Skibicki asked. “Is it because we’re old and we don’t count?”

She moved into the nursing home following a stroke in 2011. Without an easy way to join meetings from the nursing home, she relies on friends for updates.

Skibicki worries public pressure won’t be enough to persuade the board to tap the brakes on a sale. Board members won’t be up for reelection until 2026.

But selling the facility would also require state approval.

That’s why the Roppes and more than a dozen public nursing home advocates from Sauk, Portage, Lincoln, Marathon and Walworth counties met with state officials in January in Madison — a two-hour trip from Stevens Point in Portage County. 

It was the organizers’ first meeting after years of advocating in individual counties.

“We were working more in our own little backyard, where now we’re branching out to say, ‘Hey, we need help from the state,’” Nancy Roppe said.

The organizers rehearsed questions in a hotel conference room before meeting with officials at the Department of Health Services and the Office of the Secretary of State.

The state can block individual sales based on a buyer’s financial instability or poor past performance. But the state can’t force a county to keep its facilities.

No matter what happens in Portage County, Roppe considers all of her effort worth it. Delaying the sale this long matters for residents who have relied on the nursing home in recent years.

Last year she received a reminder of that impact in the mail: a card from a former neighbor whose late husband Paul spent his final years at the Portage County Health Care Center. If not for the facility, she could not imagine where he would have ended up, the neighbor wrote.

“If we did nothing else, there was a place where Paul got the best possible care in his last days,” Roppe said.  

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin residents organize in fight to keep county nursing homes public is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Five years ago, Mike Crowley lacked the courage to serve as a living kidney donor for family — let alone for an absolute stranger, he said.

But on Jan. 8, Crowley — a Waukesha County supervisor and CEO of the National Kidney Foundation of Wisconsin — had surgery to do just that, a decision he now sees as decades in the making.

That’s due to his personal and professional experiences. Twenty-six years ago, his then-2-year-old son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, often called juvenile diabetes, a condition in which the pancreas makes little or no insulin. If left untreated, it can cause a range of complications, including damage to the kidneys or other organs. 

While his son’s case was found early and he continues to receive treatment, many people with diabetes don’t see such outcomes. People with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes make up over a quarter of those waiting for an organ transplant in Wisconsin. People needing a kidney account for nearly 80% of those on the transplant list.

When Crowley took the helm of the National Kidney Foundation of Wisconsin, he gradually learned much more about kidney disease, including connections to diabetes. And last March, he visited three dialysis clinics in Wisconsin to distribute care bags to patients.

“I cried when I got back to my truck after doing the delivery at each one because what I saw was hopelessness,” Crowley said. “They need a kidney, they’re most likely not going to get a kidney transplant in their lifetime.”

Last year 43 people in Wisconsin died while waiting for a kidney transplant. Another 65 became too sick to receive a transplant.

Crowley wanted to be a part of the solution. He knew he was healthy enough to do so. On his 60th birthday last August, he rode his bicycle 102 miles from Wisconsin to Iowa in less than eight hours as part of a fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. When he crossed the finish line, he looked at the Mississippi River and wept as he reflected on how amazing he felt after the grueling ride. If he could pass the strict medical, social, mental health and financial assessments, “why wouldn’t I be a kidney donor?”

Two days later, he logged onto a UW Health portal and began the process. After four months of extensive testing, he was approved to be an altruistic kidney donor, meaning he would donate to a stranger on the transplant list. 

“You don’t need to be a match to anybody in your immediate family or a friend,” he said, calling the decision “the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“Obviously, having kids, getting married, buying a house, those are all, you know, great experiences,” he said. “But this takes the cake.”

Phil Witkiewicz was placed on the transplant list a decade after being diagnosed with a rare liver disease. He had long managed the symptoms with liver stents, but he became nearly bedridden when they stopped working. That flipped his family’s life upside down, his wife Emily said.

Witkiewicz was just 43 when added to the transplant list last July. 

Most people needing an organ transplant in Wisconsin are 50 or older, although those waiting for pancreatic transplants or dual pancreas and kidney transplants are usually younger.

Witkiewicz was called in twice for a potential transplant, only to find that the donated liver wasn’t viable.

But through those disappointments, Witkiewicz and his wife Emily held out hope that one of their friends could donate. The friend passed a battery of blood tests, MRIs and dental screenings only to discover his liver was 3% too small to donate. 

“That was like the ultimate blow,” Emily said.

Last December, almost five months after being put on the transplant list, Phil finally received a liver from someone who had died, flipping life back to a new normal. Witkiewicz still undergoes routine blood testing and takes numerous medications to prevent infections and keep his body from rejecting the organ, but he’s just happy to be alive.

Emily said she recognizes the duality of her husband’s relief: What was the best day of his life was the end of someone else’s. Emily is registered to be an organ donor, as is her 16-year-old son. Wisconsin residents can register when getting their driver’s license or through the Wisconsin Donor Registry.

“Seeing what it did for my husband, and knowing somebody’s sick in bed waiting for an organ and my tragedy could turn into somebody’s best day,” she said, “that would be worth it.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

DataWatch: Many die awaiting kidney transplants in Wisconsin, so this man donated his is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Young Black men in cities across America died of drug overdoses at high rates in the 1980s and 1990s. During the recent fentanyl crisis, older Black men in many cities have been dying at unusually high rates.

They’re all from the same generation.

An investigation of millions of death records — in a partnership between The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner, Big Local News and nine other newsrooms across the country — reveals the extent to which drug overdose deaths have affected one group of Black men in dozens of cities across America at nearly every stage of their adult lives.

In recent years, the opioid epidemic has brought dangerous drugs to every corner of the country, and overdoses have risen among younger, whiter and more rural populations.

That huge tide now appears to be ebbing — but not for this group of Black men. In the 10 cities examined in this partnership, including Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, Newark, Washington, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Black men ages 54 to 73 have been dying from overdoses at more than four times the rate of men of other races.

“They were resilient enough to live through a bunch of other epidemics — HIV, crack, COVID, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis — only to be killed by fentanyl,” said Tracie M. Gardner, the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network and a former New York state health official.

In all, the analysis identified dozens of cities, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, where a generation of Black men were at higher risk of overdose deaths throughout their lives. In many of those places, cities have done little to distribute resources to this population.

The details vary from city to city.

• In Chicago, there is no focused effort in nearly $1.3 billion of state opioid settlement money to help older Black men, despite a heavy death toll for this group, The Chicago Sun-Times found.
• In Pittsburgh, Black men in jail with opioid use disorders have been less likely to receive medications to combat their addictions than white men, a PublicSource investigation has found, though local officials are working to close the gap.
• In San Francisco, many of the men vulnerable to overdoses use both opioids and cocaine, a combination that may make treating their addictions more complex, according to an analysis of mortality data by The San Francisco Standard.
• In Newark, NJ.com/The Star-Ledger also found that overdose victims were using both opioids and cocaine.
• In Baltimore, hundreds of men have been dying in senior housing, The Baltimore Banner found.
• In Philadelphia, older Black men were actually less likely to die than their white peers — until recently. By 2018, their death rate had shot up, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer analysis.
• In Washington, local regulations and insurers have prevented doctors from giving longtime opioid users effective doses of drugs meant to curb their cravings, reporters for The 51st found.
• In Indianapolis, Black men said they were reluctant to use public health solutions like syringe exchanges or fentanyl test strips because of a fear of harassment by police, Mirror Indy found.
• In Milwaukee, around half of older Black men lost to drugs spent time in state prison. Wisconsin is trying to increase access to a Department of Corrections treatment program, which has a waitlist of 11,700, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch found.
• In Boston, where this generational disparity is a more recent phenomenon, older Black men feel less welcome in treatment programs, the Boston Globe found.

‘Dying for decades’

Black men of this generation, born from 1951 to 1970, came of age at a time of wide economic disparities between Black and white people in their cities. Some of them served in Vietnam, where they were first exposed to heroin. In cities where heroin was available, others started using the drug closer to home in the 1970s and ’80s, and became addicted.

Many have continued to use drugs on and off for decades. Though some managed their addictions safely, the risk of overdose was always there.

Mark Robinson, 66, grew up in Washington and now runs a syringe exchange program in the city. He estimates he knows 50 people who have died over the years from overdoses, including one of his best friends.

“Black men didn’t just start dying,” he said. “We’ve been dying for decades as a direct result of opioid use disorder.”

The cities with this pattern of drug deaths tend to be places with large Black populations, intense residential segregation and heroin markets that were active in the 1970s, when the oldest of these men were young and first became exposed to illicit drugs, according to Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

“Heroin has become an endemic problem,” he said. “It never went away.”

In addition to the risk of overdose, men of this generation lived through convulsions in public health and criminal justice. In the 1980s, some became exposed to HIV through drug injections. In the 1990s, more aggressive sentences for drug crimes meant many of them spent time in jails or prisons.

Several public health researchers said widespread incarceration may have reduced these men’s chances of staying clean. “You’re basically disarming them from having a good life,” said Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of public health at the University of Southern California, who has studied injection drug users for decades. “They lose girlfriends, they lose houses, they lose connections to their children.”

They have lived through the social upheavals of COVID, a period of isolation that coincided with an increase in the overdose rate for nearly all groups.

They also stand to benefit from the recent embrace of more medical approaches to drug addiction. Drugs that can reverse an overdose are widely distributed in many cities now. And more doctors are willing to prescribe medications that can curb drug cravings for people who want to quit.

But in many of the cities where older Black men are dying at high rates, those innovations may not be reaching this group.

Decades of drug use, criminal risk and stigma have made some reluctant to discuss their addictions. The Philadelphia council member Kendra Brooks said she recently learned about nine overdoses among older Black residents in her neighborhood. The overdoses had happened quietly, in private homes.

“In this generation, you don’t get high in public,” Brooks said. “It’s something very private and personal. Amongst folks that I know, it’s like a secret disease.”

Older Black drug users have been less likely than white ones to receive prescription medicines that are now the gold standard for addiction treatment.

Medicare, the public program that insures older Americans, tends to cover fewer addiction services than insurance for younger people.

And, more generally, many outreach programs are aimed at younger populations.

“If you go to a harm reduction program, it’s not typically set up with older folks in mind,” said Brendan Saloner, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, who studies access to health care among people who use drugs. “They’re not in any way unwelcome, but they’re not generally the target.”

In Chicago, Fanya Burford-Berry, who directs the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force, pleaded with state officials to devote more resources to the city’s older Black drug users at a recent meeting.

“It seems like there’s a blind spot when it comes to prioritizing Black men, older Black men and drug usage,” she said.

‘Not any real heroin’

This generation’s experience also highlights how much more dangerous the drug supply has become. Despite better treatment and more resources to combat addiction, the overdose death rate among older Black men in these cities has risen in recent years, as heroin has been replaced by the more potent fentanyl.

“There is not any real heroin being sold in the streets, period,” said Joe Henery, 77. Henery, who lives in Washington, used heroin for 30 years before getting clean. He said his friends who are still alive were “fortunate enough to survive the epidemics of all sorts,” but he worries about the risk of overdose for those who are still using. What was once heroin in Washington is now almost all either replaced by or mixed with fentanyl.

Fentanyl is easier for cartels to manufacture in labs and smuggle into the country. But the high doesn’t last as long as heroin’s, which often means drug users take more doses a day to avoid withdrawal symptoms. And its variable strength makes it more likely for even experienced users to take a fatal dose accidentally.

Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, said the pattern of deaths in Baltimore reported by The Times and The Banner has caused her to seek new research on why these men are dying and how to prevent it.

Volkow acknowledged that their drug addiction has long placed them at risk, but she said that fentanyl has greatly intensified that risk.

“If you were, in the past, using heroin, your chances of dying were much, much lower than your chances of dying now,” she said. “The key element now is the dangerousness of the drugs.”

Reporting was contributed by Cheryl Phillips, Eric Sagara, Sarah Cohen and Justin Mayo of Big Local News; Frank Main, Elvia Malagón and Erica Thompson of The Chicago Sun-Times; Aubrey Whelan and Joe Yerardi of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Venuri Siriwardane and Jamie Wiggan of PublicSource; Abigail Higgins and Colleen Grablick of The 51st; Ryan Little of The Baltimore Banner; David Sjostedt, Noah Baustin and George Kelly of The San Francisco Standard; Steve Strunsky and Riley Yates of NJ.com/The Star-Ledger; Darian Benson and Mary Claire Molloy of Mirror Indy; Edgar Mendez and Devin Blake of Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch; and Chris Serres and Yoohyun Jung of the Boston Globe.

About this project

The data and methodology behind this project can be downloaded from the Stanford Digital Repository. This article was published in partnership with The Baltimore Banner, Stanford’s Big Local News and other local news outlets: The Chicago Sun-Times; The Philadelphia Inquirer; PublicSource; The 51st; The San Francisco Standard; NJ.com/The Star-Ledger; Mirror Indy; Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch; and the Boston Globe.

How drug overdose deaths have plagued one generation of Black men for decades is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In many ways, Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar’s life story involved redemption. A victim of abuse who was exposed to alcohol and drugs while growing up on Milwaukee’s North Side, he made dangerous choices as a teenager. By age 19, he landed in prison after shooting and killing a man during a 1988 drug house robbery. 

But he worked on himself while incarcerated, his wife Desilynn Smith recalled. After he walked out of prison for good, he found a calling as a peace activist. He became a violence interrupter for Milwaukee’s 414 Life program, aiming to prevent gun violence through de-escalation and intervention. 

Abd-Al-Jabbar may have looked healed on the outside, but he never moved past the trauma that shaped much of his life, Smith said. He wouldn’t ask for help.

That’s why Smith still grieves. Her husband died in February 2021 after ingesting a drug mixture that included fentanyl and cocaine. He was 51.

Smith now wears his fingerprint on a charm bracelet as a physical reminder of the man she knew and loved for most of her life.

“He never learned how to cope with things in a healthy way,” said Smith, executive director of Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., an organization that provides mental health and substance use services on Milwaukee’s North Side. “In our communities addiction is frowned upon, so people don’t get the help they need.”

Abd-Al-Jabbar is part of a generation of Milwaukee’s older Black men who are disproportionately dying from drug poisonings and overdoses, even as the opioid epidemic slows for others.

Milwaukee County is among dozens of U.S. counties where drugs are disproportionately killing a generation of Black men, born between 1951 and 1970, an analysis by The Baltimore Banner, The New York Times and Stanford University’s Big Local News found. Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch are collaborating with them and eight other newsrooms to examine this pattern.

Times and Banner reporters initially identified the pattern in Baltimore. They later found the same effect in dozens of counties nationwide.

In Milwaukee, Black men of the generation accounted for 12.5% of all drug deaths between 2018 and 2022. That’s despite making up just 2.3% of the total population. 

The county’s older Black men were lost to drugs at rates 14.2 times higher than all people nationally and 5.5 times higher than all other Milwaukee County residents. 

Six other Wisconsin counties — Brown, Dane, Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Waukesha — ranked among the top 408 nationally in drug deaths during the years analyzed. But Milwaukee was the only one in Wisconsin where this generation of Black men died at such staggering rates.

Milwaukee trend accelerates

The trend in Milwaukee County has only accelerated since 2022, the last year of the Times and Banner analysis, even as the county’s total drug deaths decline, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found.

Drugs killed 74 of the county’s older Black men in 2024. The group made up 17.3% of all drug deaths  — up from 16.2% in 2023 and 14.1% the previous year, medical examiner data shows.

Abd-Al-Jabbar’s story shares similarities with many of those men. Most used cocaine that was cut with stronger fentanyl — the faster-acting drug has fueled the national opioid epidemic. Most had a history of incarceration. 

They lived in a state that imprisons Black men at one of the country’s highest rates. Wisconsin is also home to some of the country’s widest disparities in education, public health, housing and income. Milwaukee, its biggest city, helps drive those trends. 

Marc Levine, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researcher, concluded in 2020 that “Black Milwaukee is generally worse off today than it was 40 or 50 years ago” when considering dozens of quality of life indicators.

Meanwhile, limited options and lingering stigma prevent a generation of Black men from accessing drug treatment, local experts told Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch.  

“Black men experience higher rates of community violence, are often untreated for mental health issues and experience greater levels of systemic racism than other groups,” said Lia Knox, a Milwaukee mental wellness consultant. “These all elevate their risk of incarceration, addiction and also death.” 

A network of organizations providing comprehensive treatment offers hope, but these resources fall far short of meeting community needs. 

A silent struggle 

Smith and Abd-Al-Jabbar first started dating at 14, and they had a child together at 16. But as their relationship blossomed, Smith said, Abd-Al-Jabbar silently struggled with what she suspects was an undiagnosed mental health illness linked to childhood trauma.

“A lot of the bad behaviors he had were learned behaviors,” Smith said. 

Abd-Al-Jabbar became suicidal as a teen and began robbing drug dealers. 

When he entered prison, Abd-Al-Jabbar read and wrote at a fifth grade level and coped like a 10-year-old, Smith said. By age 21, she said, he’d already spent two years in solitary confinement. But he had the resolve to change. He began to read voraciously and converted to Islam. 

He was released from prison after 11 years, but returned multiple times before leaving for good in 2018. Smith and Abd-Al-Jabbar married, and he started earning praise for preventing bloodshed as a violence interrupter. 

Still, he struggled under the pressures of his new calling. The work added weight to the trauma he carried into and out of prison. His mental health only worsened, Smith said, and he turned back to drugs as a coping mechanism.   

“The main thing he learned in prison was how to survive,” she said. 

Most men lost were formerly incarcerated

At least half of Milwaukee’s older Black men lost to drugs in 2024 served time in state prison, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found by cross-referencing Department of Corrections and medical examiner records. More than a dozen other men on that list interacted with the criminal justice system in some way. Some served time in jail. For others, full records weren’t available.

Most of the men left prison decades or years before they died. But three died within about a year of their release. A 55-year-old North Side man died just 22 days after release. 

National studies have found high rates of substance use disorders among people who are incarcerated but low rates of treatment. Jails and prisons often fail to meet the demands for such services. 

In Wisconsin, DOC officials and prisoners say drugs are routinely entering prisons, putting prisoners and staff at risk and increasing challenges for people facing addiction. 

Thousands wait for treatment in prison

The DOC as of last December enrolled 815 people in substance abuse treatment programs, but its waitlist for such services was far higher: more than 11,700.   

“You don’t really get the treatment you need in prison,” said Randy Mack, a 66-year-old Black man who served time in Wisconsin’s Columbia, Fox Lake, Green Bay and Kettle Moraine correctional institutions.

Leaving prison can be a particularly vulnerable time for relapse, Mack said. Some men manage to stop using drugs while incarcerated. They think they are safe, only to struggle when they leave. 

“You get back out on the streets and you see the same people and fall into the same traps,” Mack said. 

Knox, the wellness consultant, agrees. After being disconnected from their communities, many men, especially older ones, leave prison feeling isolated and unable to ask for help. They turn to drugs. 

“Now with the opioids, they’re overdosing and dying more often,” she said. 

For those who complete drug treatment in prison, the DOC offers a 12-month medicated-assisted treatment program to reduce the chances of drug overdoses. Those who qualify receive a first injection of the drug naltrexone shortly before their release from prison. They continue to receive monthly injections and therapy for a year. 

Access to the program is uneven across the state. Corrections officials have sought to expand it using settlement money from national opioids litigation. In its latest two-year budget request the department set a goal for hiring more vendors to administer the program. 

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers plans to release his full budget proposal next month. His past proposals have sought millions of dollars for treatment and other rehabilitation programs. The Republican-controlled Legislature has rejected or reduced funding in most cases.

Mack said he received some help while in prison, but it wasn’t intense enough to make a breakthrough. Now he’s getting more holistic treatment from Serenity Inns, a North Side recovery program for men. 

Executive Director Kenneth Ginlack said the organization helps men through up to 20 hours of mental health and substance use treatment each week. 

What’s key, Ginlack said, is that most of his staff, including himself, are in recovery. 

“We understand them not just from a recovery standpoint, but we were able to go back to our own experiences and talk to them about that,” he said. “That’s how we build trust in the community.” 

Fentanyl catches cocaine users unaware

Many of the older men dying were longtime users of stimulants, like crack cocaine, Ginlack said, adding they had “no idea that the stimulants are cut with fentanyl.”

They don’t feel the need to use test strips to check for fentanyl or carry Narcan to reverse the effects of opioid poisoning, he said. 

Last year, 84% of older Black men killed by drugs had cocaine in their system, and 61% had fentanyl, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found. More than half ingested both drugs. 

Months after relapsing, Alfred Carter, 61, decided he was ready to kick his cocaine habit. 

When he showed up to a Milwaukee detox center in October, he was shocked to learn he had fentanyl in his system. 

“What made it so bad is that I hear all the stories about people putting fentanyl in cocaine, but I said not my people,” Carter said. “It puts a healthy fear in my life, because at any time I can overdose — not even knowing that I’m taking it.” 

Awareness is slowly increasing, Ginlack said, as more men in his program share stories about losing loved ones.

Milwaukee’s need outpaces resources 

Expanding on its original outpatient treatment center on West Brown Street, Serenity Inns now also runs a residential treatment facility and a transitional living program and opened a drop-in clinic in January.

Still, those don’t come close to meeting demands for its services. 

“We’re the only treatment center in Milwaukee County that takes people without insurance, so a lot of other centers send people our way,” said Ginlack, who said the county typically runs about 200 beds short of meeting demand.

“My biggest fear is someone calls for that bed and the next day they have a fatal overdose because one wasn’t available.”  

‘I don’t want to lose hope’

Carter and Mack each intend to complete their programs soon. It’s Mack’s fourth time in treatment and his second stint at Serenity Inns. This time, he expects to succeed. He wants to move into Serenity Inns’ apartment building — continuing his recovery and working toward becoming a drug counselor. 

“My thinking pattern has changed,” Mack said. “I’m going to use the tools we learned in treatment and avoid high-risk situations.” 

Carter wants to restore his life to what it was before. He spent years as a carpenter before his life unraveled and he ended up in prison. He knows he can’t take that life back if he returns to drugs.

“I have to be able to say no and not get high. It doesn’t do me any good, and it could kill me,” he said. “I have to associate myself with being clean. I don’t want to lose hope.”

As Smith reflects on her partner’s life and death, she recognizes his journey taught her plenty, too.  “I was hit hard with the reality that I was too embarrassed to ask for help for my husband and best friend,” she said. “I shouldn’t have had that fear.”

Need help for yourself or a loved one?

You can find a comprehensive list of substance abuse treatment services by visiting our resource guide: Where to find substance use resources in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is losing a generation of Black men to drug crisis is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The topic of lead poisoning is back in the news in Milwaukee after officials confirmed a case this month at Golda Meir Lower School.

A student at the school was exposed to chipping lead paint in a bathroom in the school’s basement, said Tyler Weber, deputy commissioner of environmental health at the Milwaukee Health Department.

Weber said the Health Department’s investigation continues, but said: “The most apparent lead paint hazards have been controlled.”

The Health Department also plans to conduct testing for lead in the school’s water.

Here are some things you should know about lead poisoning.

1. How serious is lead poisoning?

Lead poisoning can pose a significant risk, especially to young children and pregnant people. According to a Milwaukee Health Department webpage, lead poisoning is “one of the most serious health threats facing young children in Milwaukee.”

Lead exposure and lead poisoning can contribute to learning and behavioral difficulties in children, according to the World Health Organization. Lead is absorbed into the body at a much higher rate for young children, and extremely high exposure to lead can be deadly.

But lead poisoning can sometimes be difficult to detect from symptoms alone.

“It’s not always apparent if your child is lead poisoned,” Weber said. “That’s why it is important to follow our blood screening recommendation … especially if you are a child in the city of Milwaukee.”

2. Importance of blood tests

Blood tests for lead can show whether you and your child are being exposed to dangerous amounts of lead. Both the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and the Milwaukee Health Department recommend blood tests for lead for all children under the age of 5.

The Milwaukee Health Department recommends testing all children at the ages of 12, 18 and 24 months, and then once every year until the age of 5. Testing is recommended for all children, regardless of previous testing frequency and results.

3. Where can I get tested for lead poisoning?

Blood testing for lead poisoning is free for those enrolled in BadgerCare Plus, Wisconsin’s Medicaid program.

Even if you are not eligible for coverage under BadgerCare, your children could be. BadgerCare provides coverage for adults at 100% of the poverty level, but children are covered in families with an income of up to 300% of the poverty level.

(Current income limits for BadgerCare eligibility are available here, and you can find out more about BadgerCare and enrollment here.)

Testing for lead poisoning is covered under most private insurance plans.

4. Free community resources

For those without health insurance, local options for free lead testing are available.

In Milwaukee, the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary and the Coalition on Lead Emergency offer a free monthly lead testing clinic on the second Saturday of every month from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 2461 W. Center St. Every participating child will receive a free stuffed animal, and each participating family will receive a $10 gift card.

A weekly lead awareness program takes place as a part of the sanctuary’s Fantastic Fridays event at Hephatha Church at 1720 W. Locust St. every Friday from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.

5. What can I do to limit lead exposure?

“Lead paint is the primary source of lead poisoning in the city of Milwaukee,” said Caroline Reinwald, a public information officer with the Milwaukee Health Department.

Lead paint was banned for residential use in 1978, but homes built before 1978 can contain lead paint. The paint can chip or create dust, which is dangerous to ingest.

A guide published by the Environmental Protection Agency recommends several steps if you think your home may contain lead-based paint, including regularly cleaning surfaces with warm and soapy water and making sure that you and your children regularly wash hands, pacifiers, bottles and toys.

Contaminated water can also be a cause of lead poisoning. Many buildings in Milwaukee have lead service lines or water mains, and the city is currently conducting a Lead Service Line Replacement Program to change the old pipes. You can check to see if your building has lead pipes here.

Even if a building does not have lead service lines or water mains, some older water fixtures may still contain lead. Milwaukee Water Works recommends running your water pipe for three minutes before drinking or cooking with it and only using the cold water tap to reduce the amount of lead in your water.

“A water filter can also help. Not all filters remove lead, however – look for a point-of-use filter, such as a pitcher or faucet mounted filter, with the NSF/ANSI/CAN 42 and 53 for lead certification. More information is available here.”

Maintaining a full diet with enough iron, calcium and vitamin C can also help limit lead absorption among children. This guide includes food and recipe recommendations that can provide these nutrients.

News414 is a service journalism collaboration between Wisconsin Watch and Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service that addresses the specific issues, interests, perspectives and information needs identified by residents of central city Milwaukee neighborhoods. Learn more at our website or sign up for our texting service here.

Lead poisoning is a serious health threat: Here are 5 things to know is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

One thing we pride ourselves on at Wisconsin Watch is responding to tips from the public about the real problems affecting people’s lives.

That’s how Hallie Claflin’s story about rural homelessness began.

On Oct. 6, Eric Zieroth emailed us with this message: “Local homeless family unable to even use public showers that are maintained by the city government in a community that there’s no help for them in.”

Hallie and photographer Joe Timmerman made the four-hour trek from Madison to Shell Lake to learn more about Eric’s story. As the editor, one thing I emphasized was that telling the story of Eric and his daughter spending last winter in their car as they struggled with health issues, low-wage work and unaffordable housing was only the beginning of a broader story about rural homelessness.

Less than a week after Hallie was the first to report on Wisconsin’s homeless population rising above 5,000 for the first time since 2017 (despite a decline in Milwaukee), national news outlets first reported on an 18% increase in homelessness nationwide. The affordability crisis is hitting home for many in Wisconsin, and though we’ve made strides to improve housing in Milwaukee, rural areas are suffering. Many of these areas are represented by the Republicans who control the Legislature and are in position to steer resources to their communities.

Throughout the upcoming legislative budget session, Hallie will be covering how issues like rural homelessness are addressed, if at all. We’ll continue to put a human face on the problems facing society and hold politicians accountable for finding solutions.

You can help by sending us tips using this form. Or if you have a question about how state government works (or doesn’t work!), you can send it to us here.

Thanks to the dozens of people who have reached out to us in recent months. We can’t necessarily report on every tip, but we do review each one. We’re working on our system to follow up with people who submit tips we’re not well positioned to investigate — to explain why. To prioritize our resources, we focus on stories most likely to resonate with readers and improve lives. 

We appreciate hearing from people who trust us with their story or ideas, even when they don’t immediately result in coverage. 

After looking into rural homelessness, we saw that it checked multiple boxes for a Wisconsin Watch story.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

How a tip helped us understand rural homelessness in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Wisconsin may be known for its cheese, but it’s also home to 10 of the 20 drunkest cities in America, according to a 2024 report from 24/7 Wall St. 2023 data from America’s Health Rankings also showed that Wisconsin had some of the highest levels of heavy, excessive and binge drinking in the United States. A previous DataWatch about Wisconsin health looks at these topics in more depth.

Data from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism provides a deeper look at what Wisconsin residents are drinking and how much. Its latest report, released in May 2024, provided data on consumption of various types of alcohol from 1970 to 2022. 

Among Wisconsin’s legal drinking age population, the consumption of beer decreased by 20% from 2012 to 2022, an analysis of that data shows. The average person 21 or older drank about 29.5 gallons of beer in 2022, which is equivalent to about 316 standard drinks. The NIAAA defines a standard drink as the amount of alcoholic beverage it takes to drink 0.6 fluid ounces of ethanol, the “active ingredient” in alcohol. For beer, this is about 12 fluid ounces.

Over the same time period, Wisconsin drinkers consumed 32% more spirits. NIAAA defines a spirit as an alcoholic drink with about 40% alcohol content. The 2022 average was 4.33 gallons per person, equivalent to around 370 standard drinks. A standard drink of spirits is about 1.5 fluid ounces and for wine is generally five fluid ounces. Wine drinking increased by 4% to an average of 3.42 gallons per person, which is about 88 standard drinks.

While the increase in spirits may seem small, the higher ethanol content means people are consuming significantly more “active” alcohol. In 2022, the average strength of ethanol consumed by a person 21 or over across all alcohol was 9.5%. In 2012, the strength was 7.9%.

While total consumption of alcoholic beverages dropped by about 13% between 2012 and 2022, there was a 4% increase in ethanol consumption. Alcoholic beverage consumption averaged about 37.3 gallons per person in 2022. The average ethanol consumption was about 3.55 gallons – roughly equivalent to 760 standard drinks in a year. That averages out to a little over two drinks each day. According to the NIAAA, the daily recommended limit of alcohol is two drinks for men and one drink for women.

Research from the National Cancer Institute indicates that daily alcohol consumption is linked to increased cancer risks across the human body. The National Institutes of Health also reported that long-term alcohol use can increase risk factors for over 200 diseases. It also writes that “no amount of alcohol is ‘safe’ or beneficial for your health.”

DataWatch: Wisconsin residents of legal drinking age consumed 35+ gallons of alcohol a person in 2022 is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Last winter, Eric Zieroth dressed in as many layers as he could and stayed beneath a down blanket each night. He learned it was the best way to keep warm while living in his car in far northwestern Wisconsin. 

During those cold months, he and his then-20-year-old daughter Christina Hubbell had to wake, start the vehicle and blast the heat a few times a night before shutting it off again. 

For over a year, the pair regularly parked their PT Cruiser — a car older than Hubbell that Zieroth, 47, called “a shoebox on wheels” — in a corner spot at a public boat landing on Long Lake. The lot is less than a mile from the rural city of Shell Lake, with a population of less than 1,400.

Down a dirt road and tucked into the woods, they slept at the secluded launch to stay out of the way in the town where they spent most of their lives. Now, because they are homeless, they have been ostracized for showering, parking and sleeping in public places.

Washburn County has no homeless shelters, and they don’t have family to stay with. Hubbell’s mom and Zieroth divorced in 2022. The following year, when Hubbell was 19, her mom told her to start paying rent or leave. 

Hubbell’s job at a Dollar General in Shell Lake — their only source of income — keeps them from relocating to a shelter in another county. They are on a waitlist for a low-income housing unit. 

Zieroth is awaiting a surgery that will allow him to get back to work. With no way to heal or keep the wound clean, he said he couldn’t get the operation while living in his car. If it weren’t for his daughter, the former mechanic said he might have considered committing a crime and getting booked into jail instead of spending another winter in the vehicle. 

“There’s no way I could do it again,” Zieroth said. “I had to figure out something else this year.”

In rural Wisconsin, homelessness is often hidden behind a veil of individuals and families who are couch surfing and sleeping in their vehicles instead of sleeping on city streets or camping out in parks. Resources are few and far between, shelters are always full, and funding can be a significant challenge at the local, state and federal level.

After falling for years, the state’s estimated homeless population has been rising since 2021. This past year it rose again from 4,861 in 2023 to 5,037. In the “balance” of the state — all 69 counties outside Milwaukee, Racine and Dane — the homeless population increased from 2,938 individuals in 2023 to 3,201 in 2024, according to data Wisconsin Watch obtained from the region’s continuum of care organization, which conducts homeless counts each year.

Despite accounting for over 60% of the state’s homeless population in 2023, these mostly rural counties collectively contain just 23% of the state’s supportive housing units — long-term housing models with on-site supportive services, which experts say is the best way to address chronic homelessness. But providing long-term housing and services on top of shelter is an expensive, labor-intensive task for small, rural providers with limited funding.

According to the Department of Public Instruction’s latest data, 18,455 students experienced homelessness during the 2022-23 school year — a number that has increased each year since 2020. Some 11,000 of these students reside in districts outside of Milwaukee, Madison, Racine and Green Bay.

The annual data collected on homelessness are an undercount, especially in rural areas, said Mary Frances Kenion, vice president of training and technical assistance at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. That means less funding for already disadvantaged smaller communities. 

“Where there’s more concentration of people, that’s always going to drive funding, because we have block grant funding that is directly tied to the census,” Kenion told Wisconsin Watch. 

Despite rural communities having fewer nonprofits than urban ones, shelters and housing assistance programs are leading the way to address the expanse of homelessness in rural Wisconsin. 

“Funding and access to resources is a challenge … but there are some really bright spots in rural communities, because they are doing more with less,” Kenion said. “We’re seeing a ton of innovation and resilience just by virtue of them being positioned to do more with less.” 

But shelter directors and anti-poverty advocates face many hurdles when it comes to funding, resources and support.

Rural shelter providers across the state identified several solutions to the problem: Cutting out county governments as the middleman for state reimbursements, increasing the availability of new rental units, consolidating multiple definitions of homelessness, more consistent and proportional state funding, and assistance with case management are just a few.

Point-in-time counts, federal funding and HUD 

The annual “point-in-time” (PIT) homeless counts are collected by continuum of care organizations across the country on a single night during the last week of January. Wisconsin has four designated organizations with three covering Milwaukee, Dane and Racine counties and one for the other 69 counties. 

The counts are submitted to Congress and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for consideration and funding determinations. They are meant to include those living in temporary shelters, as well as unsheltered people living on the street, but do not include people in other sheltered situations. Those living in cars are often missed. 

“They’re typically either in their car or they’re on somebody’s couch,” said Jenny Fasula, executive director of Wisconsin’s Foundation for Rural Housing. “People on the couches don’t count in your PIT counts because they’re ‘housed.’ People in cars in rural areas — I don’t even know where you’d find them, except maybe a Walmart parking lot.”

Since 2009, HUD — the main federal agency that handles homelessness — has targeted permanent supportive housing programs with long-term, sustainable services like case management for federal funding. The national shift from temporary housing programs reflects a widely adopted “housing first” approach — that the security of a permanent shelter is the first, necessary step before people can address the root causes of their homelessness. 

“Temporary housing programs shifted their gears towards that other type of service so they could continue to operate and get funding to operate,” Wisconsin Policy Forum researcher Donald Cramer told Wisconsin Watch. 

While permanent housing programs effectively lowered Wisconsin’s homeless population in both rural and urban areas before the pandemic, the shift hasn’t been easy for rural shelters that are strapped for cash and resources.

“As a shelter, when you have 50 people, it’s impossible to have the funding to hire case managers that are really involved and able to really assist people,” said Michael Hall, a former Waupaca County shelter worker and director of Impact Wisconsin — a nonprofit providing housing and recovery services in a six-county rural region. 

“We’re small,” said Adam Schnabel, vice president of a homeless shelter in Taylor County, adding that without more staff, the shelter can’t have someone in charge of post-departure case management to make sure people stay in housing.

“We’re trying to find volunteer case managers,” said Kimberly Fitzgerald, interim director of the Rusk County Lighthouse shelter. “People to volunteer their time, to work for free, to do case management. Good luck with that.” 

Restrictions on federal funding and multiple definitions of homelessness are another barrier for rural homeless providers, said Millie Rounsville, CEO of Northwest Wisconsin Community Services Agency. 

The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act defines homelessness specifically for youth as minor children who “lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence.” But HUD defines homelessness in multiple categories: 1) an individual or family who is immediately homeless and without shelter and 2) those at imminent risk of homelessness. Consolidating these definitions is key, according to Rounsville. 

Homeless children and families in the rural region surrounding Superior tend to be doubled up in some kind of housing, Rounsville said. While they often meet the McKinney-Vento definition of homeless, they are considered category two homeless under HUD’s definitions. 

But in order to qualify for HUD-funded Rapid Rehousing programs, individuals must fall under category one.

“The funding needs to be flexible,” Rounsville said. “We can’t assume that every community across the country has the same need.”

To provide permanent supportive housing and receive funding, shelters and nonprofits also have to serve and document chronically homeless populations. According to HUD, that means a member of the household has to have a documented disability. Providers like Rounsville are additionally required to provide third-party verification that someone has been category one homeless for a year or more.

“If you were in a larger city where you have a lot of shelters or street outreach, that third-party verification would be a lot easier than when you’re in a rural community,” Rounsville said.

It’s a housing issue

Rural Wisconsin is lacking affordable, habitable homes.

“When you layer the limited footprint of service providers in a rural community, packed with a housing supply that is already insufficient and continuing to shrink, that creates a perfect storm for rising numbers of people experiencing homelessness,” Kenion said. 

Providers in Rusk County, Taylor County, Bayfield County and Waupaca County said that without low-income options and available rental units, they often can’t get people into permanent housing.

“As fast as units open up, they get filled,” Fitzgerald said. “In Ladysmith specifically, there are next to no rental units. So even if somebody did get approved for the housing program, where are we going to put them?”

Among affordability and shortage issues, rural areas are also home to the state’s aging housing stock. 

“The housing stock is very old,” Fasula said. “So now you have higher energy bills. And the rent may be lower, but your energy bill is twice as much.” 

Her work at the Foundation for Rural Housing provides one-time emergency rental assistance to prevent evictions and homelessness across the state. 

“People stereotype them to think ‘Oh, we have these programs because people don’t know how to manage their money.’ It’s not that,” Fasula said. “These are folks that come in that just have a crisis. … They don’t have anything to fall back on. Any little hiccup is a big impact for them financially.”

The foundation is partially funded by the state’s critical assistance grant program, which is awarded to just one eligible agency in Wisconsin. Fasula said the foundation still relies on many private funding sources.

While working to eventually afford an apartment in Shell Lake, Hubbell is making $13.50 an hour at the Dollar General, but only scheduled to work 20 hours a week. The living wage calculation for one adult in Washburn County is $19.45 an hour working 40 hours a week, according to the MIT living wage calculator.

“Homelessness is a housing issue. It’s a symptom of an economy and policies that aren’t working,” Kenion said. “Yes, housing costs tend to be lower in rural communities, but so do wages.”

State funding 

In the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget, the Republican-controlled Legislature rejected Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ recommendations to spend some $24 million on emergency shelter and housing grants, as well as homeless case management services and rental assistance for unhoused veterans.

The Legislature also nixed $250 million Evers proposed for affordable workforce housing and home rehabilitation grants.

The state funds two main grants for homeless shelters and housing annually. The State Shelter Subsidy Grant (SSSG) receives around $1.6 million per year, and the Housing Assistance Program receives $900,000.

But for small shelters like Taylor House — the only homeless shelter in rural Taylor County — Schnabel says the funding is “pennies.” The facility has a continuous waitlist. 

“We are a lost people up north, here in the rural areas,” Schnabel said. “I feel like there’s so much focus and so many monetary resources provided to Dane and Milwaukee counties.” 

The north central Wisconsin shelter with a 17-person capacity received $10,000 from SSSG this year, Schnabel said. That’s around $588 per person. But four emergency shelters in Milwaukee with a combined capacity of around 392 received $400,000 from the $1.6 million grant total — $1,020 per person.

“It’s not just local individuals we’re serving,” Schnabel said. “We’re serving individuals from Milwaukee County, Dane County, Fox River Valley, Chippewa. They’re coming from all over because those homeless shelters are either at capacity or their waitlist is too long.”

The state’s Recovery Voucher Grant Program awarded $760,000 to grantees in 2024 to provide housing to those experiencing homelessness and struggling with opioid use disorders. Half of these funds went to three providers in Dane, Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. 

Another state resource is the Homeless Case Management Services (HCMS) grant program, which distributes up to 10 $50,000 grants per year to shelters and programs that meet eligibility requirements.

Shelter directors like Fitzgerald said the state’s reliance on grant funding to address homelessness and housing needs isn’t sustainable for small providers. While helpful, these pots of money quickly run out, and many of them don’t cover operating costs or wages. 

“A lot of these funding sources, it’s like a first come first serve basis, so there isn’t money necessarily allocated to cover our expenses,” Fitzgerald said. “When the funding runs out, we’re SOL.” 

The Lighthouse is the only homeless shelter in Rusk County. Many surrounding shelters are also full, and some counties don’t have shelters at all, leaving people with limited options. 

“As fast as we empty out, we fill up. So it’s kind of a revolving door,” Fitzgerald said. “Our first priority is to serve Rusk County residents, but we’re in the business of helping, so I don’t turn people away.” 

Small shelters face county-level hurdles 

Some shelter workers and advocates say in rural Wisconsin, homelessness is addressed only to the extent that their local governments and administrations are willing to acknowledge the issue and get involved.

“A lot of these people go unnoticed, unchecked in the system, and there just aren’t any county services, especially in our community, that are there to help individuals that are struggling,” Hall said. “We, with a lot of duct tape and a shoestring, hold it down.” 

Providers in several rural counties noted that there aren’t any shelters that are owned or operated in any capacity by local governments. In most cases, Washburn County Social Services can only direct homeless residents like Zieroth and Hubbell to the Lakeland Family Resource Center, which provided them with a list of shelters too far out of their reach.

“We don’t have the extra gas or a decent enough vehicle to go too far from Shell Lake,” Zieroth said.

The Ashland Community Shelter is the only shelter in a four-county rural area. The city applied for the federal grant funds that allowed Rounsville’s agency to acquire the shelter, but she noted that if it hadn’t taken that step, there wouldn’t be a shelter in Ashland today. 

“You still need that county government saying, ‘Hey, we have a program, we need funding,’” Cramer said. “If your county is not looking to deal with homelessness, then they’re probably not asking for that funding either.”

Hall and Schnabel said local governments need to be more involved in their work, whether that be providing a county employee to serve as a shelter director, or simply making better use of the few resources they have.

Schnabel added that small shelters often cannot pay their directors a decent wage, resulting in frequent staff turnover. Taylor House has had four directors in the last 18 months, he said. The inconsistency leaves “a bad taste” in the mouth of those reviewing their grant applications.

According to Hall, some counties are much more willing than others to utilize Comprehensive Community Services (CCS) — a state program aimed at addressing substance abuse and mental health needs. The program allows counties to contract employees and case managers at local shelters who provide services such as skills development and peer support. If the notes are done properly, the county can bill those expenses back to the state through BadgerCare. 

But despite those being reimbursable expenses, some county officials either don’t know how or are unwilling to engage in the program, Hall said. 

“The tool is there, it just needs to be utilized,” he said. “Because of their unwillingness to try something, it oftentimes ends up having to tell people ‘no,’ and we’re moving them to another county.”

He added that allowing local shelters that serve those covered under BadgerCare to bill the state directly for these services instead of relying on the county to initiate it “would solve the problem tomorrow.”

Hall also noted that county governments can use their opioid settlement funds to provide housing and shelter to those with eligible needs, yet some have instead spent it on other things. 

Waupaca County, for example, told Wisconsin Watch it has spent nearly $100,000 in opioid settlement funds on awareness campaigns, training, a counselor position and equipment that helps local police quickly identify narcotics in the field.

Grant funding is often allocated to regional “parent” organizations, like a Salvation Army, which then distribute the money to local nonprofits and shelters. But Schnabel said the state must force the hand of counties that “choose not to see homelessness.” 

“By requiring that these funds go through the county to be disbursed to the homeless shelter, it forces the county to have a relationship and have skin in the game with the shelters,” he said. 

Another challenge is that some small communities like Ashland reject homeless shelters, assuming they will bring negative footprints.

“There’s going to be needles, the neighborhood houses are going to be robbed, children are going to be ran over on the highway,” Rounsville said. “There’s all kinds of things that came up when we were doing the change of use for this hotel to become a shelter. It was something that not everybody wanted to see in the community.” 

The small city of Clintonville approved an ordinance last winter enforcing a 60-day limit on local hotel stays in a six-month period, citing drug concerns, disorderly conduct and disturbances. Many homeless individuals in the area are put up in those hotels. 

“We’re trying to figure out, what are we going to do with those 50 people this winter when the police departments come through and say they have to get out,” Hall said. 

Studies estimate that every year, someone experiencing chronic homelessness costs a community $30,000 to $50,000, according to the Interagency Council on Homelessness. Yet for each person who is homeless, permanent supportive housing costs communities $20,000 per year.

“These are our neighbors in any community, and when they are no longer homeless and they are thriving, they reinvest that into the economy, into the community, into the neighborhood,” Kenion said.

While often doing more with less, local nonprofits are still the ones that are built to do this work, Hall said.

“There is no solution. There is no algorithm to get us to an answer,” Schnabel said. “But what we know is that there needs to be a place that they can go to be safe, and have warm, secure housing until they can get back on their feet.”

Shunned by their community

In June, Zieroth and Hubbell pulled their car into a Shell Lake gas station parking lot to sleep, shortly before a police officer was called and arrived to tell them they were trespassing and had to leave. 

In August, the father and daughter stopped at the Shell Lake ATV Campground to use the public showers, when a campground employee entered and demanded that Zieroth get his daughter and leave. The employee called Shell Lake police, who escorted him off the property. 

A resident living next to the boat launch where they stayed eventually took issue with them parking their car at the public lot. In October, Hubbell said the homeowner stormed into the Dollar General while she was working and told her they couldn’t sleep there anymore, threatening to call the police.

And one night after finding a group fishing at the boat launch, the pair decided to drive to another public landing in Burnett County where they parked and slept. Still under their blankets, they woke the next morning to a DNR officer and county sheriff’s deputy approaching, asking about Zieroth’s “drug of choice.” According to Wisconsin Court System records, Zieroth served time in prison for burglary as a 21-year-old, but has never faced drug-related charges.

They were told to leave. 

“They just did not want us in this area. We’re less than a mile from where we grew up, and from where she went to school and graduated,” Zieroth said, pointing to his daughter. “I’ve made my life here … everything points to ‘get out.’”

While still homeless, the pair were fortunate enough to find a temporary place to stay as the weather gets colder — a small room in the unfinished basement of an acquaintance who didn’t want to see them living out of their car. They are joined by their dog Bella, who Zieroth won’t abandon after she woke him the night his camper caught fire in 2022, allowing him to escape and likely saving his life. 

Zieroth and Hubbell have an old bed, a recliner and a bathroom for now. But their most cherished comfort is that the room is heated — something they don’t take for granted after a winter spent in their car. 

With a roof over their heads, Zieroth hopes to finally get the surgery he needs, but he’s unsure of how long they can stay. 

They insist on paying the homeowners $50 a week — all they can afford — for letting them stay in the basement. Zieroth uses his skills as a mechanic to fix things around the property, and Hubbell picks items up for them at the Dollar General whenever she can.

Once healed, he wants to get back to work and acquire a property of his own, but his first priority is his daughter. After getting on her feet, Hubbell hopes to go to cosmetology school in Rice Lake.

“She has her whole life ahead of her and experience has taught me that some real bad beginnings get really good endings, and she deserves a good one,” Zieroth said.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin’s rural homelessness crisis and the fight to do ‘more with less’ is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.