The UWM Neighborhood is located in one of the City of Milwaukee’s best residential areas. When compared to other urban university neighborhoods across the nation, the UWM Neighborhood, and the greater Milwaukee area, contain the attributes of a great university town.

In recent years increased resident and commuter demand for on-street parking, near campus housing, and student-oriented services have affected the neighborhood surrounding the campus, with concerns arising on how to maintain and improve the area’s quality of life. These concerns have intensified efforts to improve the physical/social "town-gown" relationship and find appropriate strategies to resolve campus-neighborhood conflicts.

Area resident’s concerns included: parking demands on neighborhood streets; increasing traffic and safety risks; development pressure to increase housing density (occupancies, units per building, and units per block); increasing absentee property ownership with a corresponding increase in unsightly or poor property maintenance and building code violations; and a perceived decline in neighborhood livability closely tied to quality-of-life issues, such as nuisance crimes (e.g., noise, public drunkenness, litter, etc.). Altogether, these issues, real or perceived, can create a sense of neighborhood decline that over time may become self-reinforcing.