What's in the Almanac
Milwaukee's public data, looked up and explained. Every number says where it came from.
Your address
You'll see which neighborhood you're in, your alder and aldermanic district, your voting ward, and your polling place, with notes on its accessible entrance and parking.
Your neighborhood
People in poverty · Riverwest12.8%± 2.1 pointsCity of Milwaukee22.8%clearly lower than the city
For the 27 neighborhoods Data You Can Use profiles, a printable page shows poverty, income, renters, vacant homes, rent burden, car ownership and schooling, each next to the citywide figure, with a plain label: clearly higher, clearly lower, or about the same. Every other City neighborhood has one built from census tracts, labeled as approximate.
Ask in plain English
How many robberies in Harambee this year?
Ask answers with a card that shows the number, its source, and its fine print.
Search
Look up other places, topics or numbers.
Every dataset has a plain-English page: what it measures, which years and places it covers, what to be careful about, and questions worth asking.
How you know
See the sources for every number.
The AI reads your question and picks the right tool. Code does the math. The AI never writes a number.
What you can ask
- Crime counts back to 2005, mapped and counted inside the City's own neighborhood boundaries
- Fire Department calls and response times since 2015
- How long City cases take, like 311 requests and permits, and how long vacant buildings have sat on the City's list
- Who lives in a ZIP code, and health, food and hospital-visit figures by ZIP code
- Which neighborhoods have the most of something, and whether two things go together, like renting and lack of home internet
- Voter turnout, police stops from 2019 to 2024, and how property values have changed since 2005
Survey figures come with their margin of error. Ask won't tell you anything about a specific property, owner or person; in City files that name people, it hides any group smaller than 10.
Ask a question → Free with sign-in, up to 30 questions a day.
For reporters
You're on deadline and need a number you can stand behind. Ask gives you the figure with its source, its time period and its caveats on one card. Export it as a spreadsheet, plain text or an image, with the source notes already attached, or send a share link that anyone can open without signing in.
Every dataset page lists story angles to start from, and the caveats tell you what the data can and can't support before you write the sentence. Search also reads inside about 180 Data You Can Use reports, so you can find the passage that backs up a figure.
For nonprofits
Grant applications want local numbers with a credible source. A neighborhood fact sheet gives you the headline figures next to the city's, with margins of error, and prints on one page. For something narrower, like Harambee's poverty numbers by age, open the neighborhood spreadsheet, pick the year and the table, and quote each estimate with its range and the Census table it came from.
Ask can compare neighborhoods for you (“Which neighborhoods have the highest rent burden?”), and entry 1 tells you which neighborhood, district and ward a site sits in.
Good to know
- Search and fact sheets are open to everyone. Ask is free with a sign-in, up to 30 questions a day.
- The catalog refreshes every Monday, and 21 City datasets update daily.
- Survey numbers are estimates, so read the range along with the number.
- Cream City Almanac is unofficial and isn't affiliated with Data You Can Use or the City of Milwaukee. Questions about the data itself go to Data You Can Use at hub@datayoucanuse.org.
Start with entry 1: your address ↑ Start here: three real questions, step by step →