GIS Education & Resources

The Milwaukee Property File

(MPROP)

The Milwaukee Property File (MPROP) is a computer file of land and building data for each of the approximately 160,000 properties in the city. These data, originated and updated by the Office of the Tax Commissioner at the City of Milwaukee, are a rich source of housing and land-related data (land use, type of building, year built, assessed value, name and address of owner, number of dwelling units, date of last conveyance, etc.) that is a valuable resource of authentic local government data for many academic and service-related pursuits on campus. In addition, there is an MPROP file for each year since 1975, thus providing a resource for studying the changes in land and buildings in Milwaukee over a period of more than twenty years. With the acquisition of the MPROP files, the University also obtained copies of the digital quarter section(property tax) maps of the city which can be integrated with the MPROP property characteristic data for spatial analysis in a geographic information system (GIS).

The availability of authentic property-related data from the City of Milwaukee has been widely appreciated by students, faculty, and staff across the campus. Now, the entire campus community has access to historical property characteristic data and digital maps for all of the land parcels and over 200,000 buildings in the city. This access allows almost unlimited research capabilities for projects which require longitudinal analyses of housing, land use, land valuation, economic development, and related socio-economic issues related to buildings and land in the city. It also improves the dissemination of public records to neighborhood organizations for use in neighborhood planning and research.

Funding for the development of MPROP at UWM was provided by the University's Urban Research Center in 1994. Continued technical support is provided by the University's Information and Media Technologies (I&MT) Client Services office.

For additional information about accessing MPROP data,

enter man mpropat the Alpha prompt on the University network or contact  contact agsl@uwm.edu at the AGS Collection of the Library.

Additional Technical documentation on MPROP is available at http://webgis.uwm.edu/mproppal.